Topic A at last Thursday's Uptown Alliance meeting was the perilousness of pedestrian crossings at some of the neighborhood's busiest intersections.
Participants in that discussion may be heartened to hear that Seattle City Council-member and Transportation Committee chair Richard Conlin just met with Ballard community members to discuss the subject, in light of a recent, serious accident at 15th Ave. N.W. and N.W. 87th St.
The accident victim, a 12-year-old boy, is currently in a coma. He had been attempting to cross 15th at a spot where, until lately, an overhead banner had alerted motorists to the presence of a crosswalk. Seattle Department of Transportation had removed the banner, effectively decommissioning the crosswalk, because it was in a location deemed too hazardous for a crosswalk. Well, it is now.
What Conlin and the Ballard community do about the 15th-and-87th intersection remains to be seen. According to a City Council press release, "some residents in the community are requesting a pedestrian-triggered signal be installed at that location." Might work.
But apart from identifiably hazardous zones around town (streets start getting twisty around 15th and 87th, visibility is dicey and motorists are still hopped up from the rollercoaster that is Holman Road), discussion at the Uptown Alliance get-together kept coming back to hazardous drivers.
When featured guest Dennis Wilken remarked that his Queen Anne News columns about motorists vs. pedestrians in the neighborhood had sparked more feedback than any others, almost everybody had a story to tell.
About drivers Humming through intersections with cellphones pressed to their ears. About motorists who, impatient with the driver in front of them who had stopped for a pedestrian in the crosswalk, swung out around the stopped car and vooped on through the intersection, just missing the ambulatory citizen.
There were also stories about menaced pedestrians who chased after the miscreant motorists and thumped their smoked-glass windows. One lady said that whenever she witnesses errant driving and sees that the driver has pulled over to park, she marches right up and lets the party know what he or she did wrong.
Some people probably respond, "Omigod, did I do that?" and resolve to lead a better life.
Others, I suspect, are so congenitally stupid, sociopathic or swollen with self-importance that they couldn't care less.
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