Mayor Wilson orders major overhaul to deliver more street safety improvements more quickly, including on busy high-injury roadways
Mayor Katie Wilson signs five executive orders. Photo from SDOT.In one of the biggest overhauls of Seattle's approach to making streets safer, Mayor Katie Wilson signed five executive orders (PDF) to speed up delivery of safety fixes and expand the city's safe streets strategies.
The mayor announced and signed the orders in front of Cleveland High School flanked by Councilmembers Eddie Lin and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, staff from SDOT, Seattle Police and Seattle Fire, Cleveland High coach Aaron Roche, and community safe streets advocates. Transportation Committee Chair Rob Saka, who introduced the starts of his own Vision Zero legislation Thursday, was not in attendance.
We've made important progress, but everyserious injuryor death on our streets is one too many," Mayor Wilson said in a statement.We know what makes our streets safer.This Executive Order is about turning our commitment into action - getting proven safety improvements on the ground and bringing the full City together to prevent serious injuries and deaths." Her line We know what makes our streets safer" is spot on because Seattle has the plans, the professionals and the voter-approved funding to do a lot of effective work, and now we need to actually do it.
The orders are wide-ranging with a mix of immediate actions as well as changes to how project delivery functions. A list of projects got bumped up in the schedule, including a protected bike lane on SW Wildwood Place where Maridee BonaDea was killed in June and a safety redesign of 12th Ave between King Street and Yesler Way where Christian Salyer was killed, also in June. The Wildwood change is due for construction the end of the year, and the larger 12th Ave project is due in the middle of 2027. The mayor has also directed SDOT to speed up delivery of traffic calming on high-speed arterial corridors, including Martin Luther King Jr. Way S., Swift Ave S., 15th Ave NE., 1st Ave S., and Dexter Ave N." and safety upgrades at 19 identified high-collision locations, including locations on Aurora Ave N., Rainier Ave S., and 5th Ave."
Achieving the orders hinge on changing the way SDOT delivers safety projects, including identifying ways to deliver smaller sets of changes sooner. This is especially important for big projects on major high-injury streets where dangerous conditions remain in place throughout the often drawn-out and easily-delayed process for developing a major high-budget rebuild. The mayor specifically calls out Aurora Ave N, Rainier Ave S, S Jackson St, 4th Ave S, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. in her order.
While longer-term work is in process, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is directed to add a new, early delivery phase to corridor projects on the High Injury Network focused on implementing coordinated safety improvements early," the executive order states. These changes can impact lane configuration, turning, and parking on Seattle arterials, but SDOT should prioritize safety-first solutions tailored to the type and severity of crashes on the corridor."
If effective, this change has the potential to be the most impactful step toward Vision Zero the city has made beyond voter-approved funding measures like the 2015 Move Seattle Levy and the 2024 Seattle Transportation Levy. The size, complexity and traffic volumes of these major roadways often lead the city to punt on making changes until some uncertain date in the future when lots of money for a complete rebuild becomes available. Meanwhile, people keep getting injured or killed on these streets at a disproportionate rate, tragedies that will not stop without action. SDOT has very skilled professionals on staff who can design relatively low-budget changes that can improve safety in the near-term while larger rebuilds are in development. This strategy may be especially important under Trump since the current Republican administration has made it clear that their policy is to restrict fair access to federal assistance to places that did not vote for him.
For example, SDOT did make some relatively low-budget and quickly-delivered changes to a section of Rainier Ave S in 2015, and the safety benefits were huge. There are as many as 90 people happily and healthfully walking around today who would have been seriously injured in a traffic collision on the short segment of Rainier Ave where the city conducted a pilot safety project in 2015. As many as 10 people would have been killed. We know this based on the average body count on this street in the ten years before the safety changes were installed. Without making changes, that annual body count would have continued through to today. When SDOT has the political support and clear direction to take action to make streets safer, they are effective and they save lives. Even with a restrained budget and timeline, they have proven that they can deliver big results even if the resulting project isn't perfect due to those constraints. They can do a lot to improve safe roadway operations just by repainting lines, installing reflective posts and adjusting existing traffic signals and signage.
Reducing the scope and budget of projects can also help the city deliver more improvements using city crews rather than contractors, which dramatically reduces costs and delays. Working this issue from another angle, a different order adds a lobbying point to the city's legislative agenda seeking a change to state law that would reduce inefficiencies created by privatization of civic works projects including increasing project dollar value limits on what City crews can self-deliver." The bidding process itself takes a long time, and while this might make sense for large capital projects and require specialization or crews larger than SDOT's own workforce, it is ridiculous and harmful to the public to delay or truncate a safety project that SDOT crews could easily deliver on their own simply because the budget went over an arbitrary state-mandated limit.
Mayor Wilson's order also calls on SDOT to expedite the community engagement process, saying that these criteria should take into consideration project type, condition assessments, and other historical and empirical data." It is difficult to balance the very real need for community outreach when making significant changes with the need to get these projects completed in a timely manor. There should be certain kinds of safety fixes that are just part of SDOT's regular work and don't need any outreach because they are tried and true. Once people's street uses are significantly impacted, like removing on-street parking or introducing a significantly different traffic pattern, then people need to be informed and given a chance to provide meaningful feedback. However, this cannot be allowed to drag out forever. The process needs hard deadlines as well as clear scope on what is up for debate and what it not (for example, safety).
The orders also direct SDOT to daylight intersections as a regular part of all significant road work in addition to delivering 20 targeted daylighting projects by the middle of 2027. Intersection daylighting means blocking parked cars from parking illegally close to a crosswalk, ensuring that everyone is able to see each other. This problem keeps getting worse as the average car gets bigger more obtrusive.
The mayor also ordered additional traffic safety speed cameras (before you ask, these are not like Flock cameras) and directs that the revenue generated from them goes into delivering safe streets improvements. Speed cameras not only change people's behavior, but people paying their tickets will hopefully feel at least little better knowing that at least their money is going into safe streets work and not just into the general coffers. Charging speeders to help fund permanent street safety fixes is kind of a beautiful system.
One of the more understated orders that could prove to be a sleeper hit is an order to identify corridors where signal timing can support reduced vehicular operating speeds, comfortable pedestrian walking speeds, pedestrian head-start signals, and overall safer operations." Signal timing is an invisible but very important factor in how a street feels and operates. The city has a history of trying to use signal timing as a way to speed up traffic, but such efforts can have a significantly negative impact on all other road users. Extremely long waits for a walk signal can greatly diminish the walkability of a neighborhood while also encouraging people to just run for it rather than wait. Worse, programming signals to require someone to push a button in order to get a walk signal, even if only at night, is extremely punishing to anyone who arrives during what should be their phase but are forced to wait an entire signal cycle just because they didn't push the button in time. Drivers save a couple seconds at the cost of minutes to the person walking, which is not fair and encourages people to just cross against the signal. An oversized percentage of pedestrian deaths and injuries happen at night, which is exactly when people need safe signals the most.
The mayor also ordered an expansion of the school streets program with the goal of reaching 40% of eligible public schools. The school streets program is not entirely within SDOT's control because it is reliant on school communities to develop the plans. But SDOT staff can help spread the word and provide resources. School streets can turn polluted and dangerous streets directly adjacent to schools into car-free outdoor spaces for students. Parents typically drop off kids directly in front of school, but this often creates dangerous conditions in exactly the place where we need our streets to be the safest: In front of school. These streets can also be designed to help prevent parents from blocking school buses (an ongoing problem at my kid's school).
The orders also task SDOT with developing a new Vision Zero Action Plan that includes additional safety strategies as well as providing additional public data about safe streets efforts through a new dashboard.
Another order calls on the Department of Financial Services to develop a plan for managing the city's vehicle fleet to retrofit vehicles with safety elements as needed while also prioritizing safe and right-sized vehicles in future procurement. The mayor also ordered a report on the opportunities and impacts of requiring all City-contracted vendors' and sub-vendors' large vehicles (Class 6 and above) to be equipped with the following, where feasible and applicable: convex mirrors, cross-over mirrors, blind-spot awareness decals, side guards, vulnerable road user detection, automatic emergency braking, and Intelligent Speed Assistance." So it stops short of instituting a mandatory truck side guard policy for city contractors, but it should set the city up to create such a policy based on the report's findings.
Finally, an order identifies limitations where state legislative changes are needed and adds relevant changes to the city's lobbying agenda for the next legislative session in early 2027. These include previous priorities like supporting a .05% BAC level for DUI charges while also adding some very interesting new ones such as a change to extend legal immunity to state and local jurisdictions when street improvements are made subsequent to a fatal or serious injury crash." Making a roadway change should not be effectively an admission of guilt that the city's road was liable for injuries in a civil case. We want SDOT to be able to respond quickly following a serious collision to make operational changes to prevent a repeat incident without needing to run it all by a nervous lawyer whose job is to defend the city from civil claims. I would oppose a law to reduce the city's liability for the conditions at the time of the incident, but the city making street changes after the fact is often what victims and their families want to happen.
The mayor also added support for a state law allowing local jurisdictions to implement No Right on Red" citywide. Current law requires a sign to be installed at every single location where turns are banned, and there are a lot of intersections. The city has been installing them whenever they do signal work, but it is going to take a long time and creates an inconsistent patchwork of restrictions in the meantime.
Finally, an interdepartmental team led by SDOT with representatives from Police, Fire, City Light, Public Utilities, the City Attorney, the Budget Office and the Mayor's Office will meet monthly to report to the mayor on Vision Zero progress.
All together, these orders add up to a significant elevation of safe streets work within the daily function of the city, which is huge. Making progress on reducing deaths and injuries on our streets is not a politically divisive issue in Seattle politics these days. Councilmember Saka's legislation is less baked than the mayor's comprehensive executive order list, but this could turn into an interesting moment of collaboration between the mayor and members of the Council who disagree about other issues. There is a lot the mayor can do through executive orders, but some changes will surely require legislation and budgeting as well to deliver the big results on traffic safety that the people of Seattle deserve.