A number of folks in the media have honed in on the Seattle Department of Transportation’s latest pedestrian-safety project, which includes the distribution of colorful umbrellas to patrons of downtown businesses—the aim of which, according to SDOT, is to make pedestrians more visible to drivers in crosswalks on dark, rainy winter days.
Their concerns are overblown and based on a misunderstanding of what the program is about. Culprit No. 1: Crosscut’s Knute Berger, whose argument boils down, basically, to “snowplows are better than umbrellas.” (Ahem, better than an “umbrella boondoggle.”)
Here’s the crux of Berger’s argument:
There’s always cause to nitpick government spending, but is now really the time for Seattle’s Department of Transportation to spend nearly $50,000 on an ad campaign for pedestrian safety, a campaign that includes handing out brightly colored umbrellas to holiday shoppers? Couldn’t that money be saved? Or how about clearing a few more streets next time it snows? [...]
Sand, salt, snowplows, preparedness: much more important than an umbrella campaign.
I’ll take each of Berger’s two points in turn. First, the $47,000 SDOT is spending is largely for an ad campaign, not “an umbrella campaign”—indeed, less than 10 percent of the money, or about $5,000, will pay to buy umbrellas. The rest, according to SDOT spokesman Rick Sheridan, will pay for pedestrian-safety campaign events; ads on buses, posters, stickers, and displays for merchants; and a survey to see how well the program is working.
Second, it’s easy to play Monday-morning budget writer. (Hey. I know. Let’s close dog parks a couple of days a week . That’d be a great way to come up with money for more snow plows.) But how much snow response would that $47,000 actually buy the city? According to SDOT’s street maintenance division, about eight hours—a year. It’s pretty hard to imagine the drivers who throw an epic tantrum every time it snows being satisfied with such a minuscule addition to the city’s snow-plowing capabilities.
Leaving aside the more bizarre elements of Berger’s argument—people could walk away with the umbrellas, and by the way, did you know they could be used as weapons?—there’s another legitimate outstanding question that Berger fails to address except in passing (“Good people make mistakes” and hit pedestrians): Do pedestrian-safety campaigns address an actual, or imagined, problem?
According to SDOT’s research, the problem is very real. SDOT data show that driver-pedestrian collisions increase substantially during the dark winter months—from a low 86 in August to a high of 194 in November (and 184 in January). That’s true even (in fact, predominantly) at intersections that already have traffic signals, signs, crosswalks, and streetlights, indicating the problem is driver behavior, not street engineering. As someone who gets around town exclusively by foot, bike, and transit, I see no problem with a minuscule (0.015 percent of SDOT’s total budget) expenditure on making things a little safer for those of us in the crosswalk.
