SDOT’s Year in Review reveals room for improvement

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.