Lower speeds in your neighborhood can be a matter of life and death.
If you’re walking or biking in a crosswalk and hit by a car going 30 miles an hour, your chance of dying is 40 percent, according to a story in the Seattle Bike Blog. When the speed of that car drops to 20 miles an hour, your chance of dying drops to 5 percent.
But lowering a neighborhood speed limit isn’t easy. A city or county needs to pay for an engineering report, just like they do to raise a speed limit. Crunching the numbers and paying experts makes sense when raising the limit, because you have to check to see whether a road can safely handle higher speeds.
But requiring an expensive report for lowering neighborhood speed limits simply makes no sense.
That’s why Rep. Cindy Ryu sponsored the Neighborhood Safe Streets Act (House Bill 1045), which Gov. Jay Inslee recently signed into law.
The act eliminates the requirement that cities or counties pay for an engineering report to lower speed limits. This reform should save money and lives, and make neighborhoods safer for kids walking to school and families out walking the dog.