On New Year’s Eve, SDOT posted a short video highlighting several projects it completed in 2025, distilling a longer summary shared in a blog post earlier in December. The blog post gives roughly equal space to each of its major initiatives, highlighting SDOT’s “Hot Bike Summer” of street improvements, various bridge maintenance projects, ongoing transit improvements, implementation of the Seattle Transportation Plan, community outreach efforts, and traffic incident response.
The 2.5-minute video spends little time showing transit improvement projects, but the opening highlight in SDOT’s video is the Beacon Ave S & 15th Ave S Safety Project. Only a few months after SDOT completed this project, a cyclist named Alley attempted to cross the freshly reworked Beacon Ave S at Stevens Street. Tragically, Alley was struck and killed by a driver who fled the scene.
If you want to see the reworked intersection for yourself, Google Street View shows a tall vehicle’s perspective and local street safety advocate Jason Rock shared photos of the pedestrian and low vehicle perspectives on Bluesky. This incident occurred just under two years after Seattle’s last known fatal cyclist-vehicle incident in 2023, and starkly highlights the long way SDOT has to go in ensuring safety for all users is prioritized throughout its projects. How can a “safety” project have resulted in the first cyclist death in nearly two years?
SDOT should be deeply considering this incident and how it should have been prevented. In the meantime, incidents like this (and many other vehicle-pedestrian collisions) should result in a true emergency response: rapid installation of temporary but proven traffic-calming tools such as speed humps, signs, and refuge islands, to slow down traffic while the intersection is investigated.
With a new Mayor and new SDOT leadership, hopefully the highlights reel for 2026 will show less car-oriented SDOT, with more red paint on Denny and safer streets for all.
I would love to see data on the safety effectiveness of no-beg asphalt flashing lights vs standard 4-way stop lights.
I don’t trust vehicles to stop for flashers. The apparent “rule” that cars can resume passing without stopping when a pedestrian is in the other half of the street while the flasher is still going — basically the standard cross-walk protocol — makes them dangerous to the pedestrian. Drivers run” them regularly. Real stop lights would be better.
I frequently will pause mid crossing when the nearside driver is fully stopped until the opposite direction driver is also stopped. Especially if I’m with my kid, I am not stepping in front of a moving vehicle. Even one that’s slowing down.
I always look to see whether the car is slowing down enough to be able to stop before I put a foot in the street. So far cars have always stopped at flashing beacons. Or maybe one that was close to the intersection didn’t, but the one right behind it did. I’ve actually been surprised at how many cars stop for me.
Agreed, I would love to see effectiveness data for all of these interventions. Flashing lights, stop signs, speed humps, curb bulbs, etc. I’m fairly skeptical that speed humps improve bike and pedestrian safety since I frequently witness cars swerving around them. Speeding humps do seem to reduce excessive speeding, but speeding is only one factor in safety.
USDOT has a page “proven safety countermeasures” with links to studies demonstrating the efficacy of a variety of interventions: https://highways.dot.gov/safety/proven-safety-countermeasures
Yeah it does amaze me how SDOT puts multiple speed bumps or cushions on local streets where they could instead just add stop signs and crosswalks at intersections that are just 30 or 40 feet away.
Having so many local intersections with no stop control (and no traffic circle) is not safe. Most cities in the US always have stop signs at intersections for one or both local streets (where signals make no sense). Adding 2 or 3 little speed humps on both sides instead of basic stop signs seems like a less effective and more costly local traffic control strategy. Then, if there’s still an issue, SDOT can add the speed humps later.
Why do we make stopping for other cars “mandatory” with the standard traffic light, but make stopping for a pedestrian or bicycle feel very optional with just a blinky yellow, which is often ignored, and in my experience, never ticketed.
I’m not sure it’s even illegal to blow through any of these lesser crosswalk measures like blinking yellows or HAWK lights.
Pierce County is starting to get it. On Pac Ave (Route 7) which is one of the most dangerous roads in the county, if not the state, they recently put 11 true red lights at pedestrian crossings, after a driver blew through a crosswalk (with broken yellow blinky) and killed a kid.
Why does death and lawsuits need to occur to get governments to install safe and useful infrastructure?
Rather than look to almost exclusively pavement and signage strategies, I wish SDOT would focus more on street lighting and nighttime visibility. A pedestrian or bicyclist is much more likely to be hit in the dark (relative to the volume of traffic on the street). The Beacon Avenue accident mentioned in the post was reported to be at midnight.
https://komonews.com/news/local/hit-and-run-that-killed-beacon-hill-bicyclist-seattle-police-looking-for-white-toyota-camry-gold-emblems-december-14-2025-beacon-ave-s-and-s-stevens-st-38-year-old-man-dead
I’m not sure how much jurisdiction SDOT has with street lighting, but if they don’t then Council needs to look to change it somehow.
Meanwhile, nighttime reflectivity is something that every pedestrian or bicyclist should be acutely aware of. The increased popularity of LED streetlights and headlights creates temporary blind spots because they are so bright relative to other spots in a driver’s field of vision. I’m not blaming a victim with this particular comment; I’m just expressing the need to be cautious.
My condolences to the family and friends of the victim.
I don’t think that Stevens St. is the most dangerous location in the new “safety” project. The scariest location is one block north of the accident site at the triangle intersection of Beacon, 17th Ave S. and S. Forest St. A vehicle travelling northbound on Beacon that wants to turn onto 17th Ave S. will have to cross the bike lanes without being able to see if there is a cyclist in the lane due to parked cars. As a driver, I am extra careful at that intersection because I’m familiar with the territory, but a driver who isn’t familiar with the neighborhood and the dangerous road design could easily collide with a cyclist at that poorly designed location. It needs to get fixed.
Thanks for picking up on the point of this post. I think SDOT has made some real strides in prioritizing safety in a lot of its projects, but these corridor-long projects often appear lack real consideration of intermediate intersections. Did they run out of time to fully consider the conflicts in these intersections? Did they think they’d achieve “enough safety” with enhancements at specific sections? It’s simple unacceptable.
The best fix I can envision for the Forest St. trap is to remove some parking spots near the intersection. Cyclists can’t see a car that is going to make the turn onto 17th until the last second. I know from experience that cyclists pay more attention to motorists than vice-versa. The triangle intersection doesn’t give a cyclist a clear view of the traffic that may be cutting through the bike lane until the last second.
There are a lot of potential solutions. The hard part is convincing politicians that standing up against vocal proponents of unlimited curbside car storage won’t cost them re-election.
The fix for Forest and 17th at Beacon is obvious: close car access to Beacon here and revert 17th to a residential street past McClellan. Drivers can still loop through and access Beacon at McClellan or Stevens. I see no reason to maintain the intersection at Beacon. It’s entirely duplicative and serves no purpose.
That intersection was indeed a problem, and they’ve already fixed that it by putting a curb in place to block off those parking spots. I make that turn regularly in my car and it’s honestly fine now.
“Take the lane!”
The horribly skinny bike lane separated from the road are a bad idea, as is the lack of two lanes on both sides.
Unfortunately, the infiltration into the bike community of these horrible ideas that ultimately fail has gone on too long. It has failed and needs to be abandoned.
It is time for new insight and new ideas!
Adding more of the failed ideas onto the already failed ideas will not help safety, accessibility or usability.
Take the lane and command your presence! Coöperative cycling!
Fight against these awful ideas. Completely revamp the transportation departments and throw out these new activists that haven’t a clue.
Take the lane for safety, usability, and accessibility!
Since this accident was at midnight (with light to no traffic) and there’s a 50-50 chance that the driver was impaired (like drunk), are there things that could be done differently to better prevent collisions?
For example, are the new improvements done with reflective paint? Lots of our local street striping isn’t reflective and that makes demarcations much less visible at night. I’m not sure if SDOT recently used reflective paint where the fatality occurred or not.
There’s also a visibility of cyclists that could be an issue. Lately I’ve seen concerned cyclists at night with both helmet lights and headlights. I’m not sure about tail lights. But relying solely on street lighting is risky for any cyclist out at night. I’ve even heard of bicycle-promoting cities actually confiscating bikes if the owners don’t have a working headlight and taillight white riding at night.
Bicycle infrastructure should be built to accommodate people of all ages. Taking the lane is not the answer unless you’re a confident, very physically fit adult. Large swaths of the population will simply not ride unless there are bike lanes or the streets are heavily traffic-calmed.
John Forester’s concept of vehicular cycling is not the way forward. I’m a confident cyclist and often take the lane, but very few people I know are willing to do the same.
Indeed. I think there is a grain of truth in the OP’s post, however: the unprotected bike lanes that used to pass for bike infrastructure really are insidiously dangerous. They allow drivers to ignore bikes without forcing them to slow down or stop when turning into the bike lane. This is the only situation in which I have hit a car.
Still, we have better ways to deal with these unprotected bike lane issues than vehicular cycling—which was a failure in terms of accessibility and safety—for instance, SDOT does not seem to install unprotected bike lanes anymore, and the newer combo of either protected bike lanes or calmed streets with modal filters (some neighborhood greenways and healthy streets) do not have nearly as many safety pitfalls.