By The Herald Editorial Board
The City of Everett is asking drivers to slow their roll.
Starting with two streets in the city’s north and south neighborhoods, the city will be reducing speed limits for stretches of two streets to 25 mph from 30 mph, following a review by police and traffic engineers as part of its Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic and pedestrian fatalities on all city streets, as reported this week by The Herald’s Will Geschke.
With city council approval, the Vision Zero reviews have called for reduced speeds on Holly Drive in the city’s south between Evergreen Way and 100th Street SE and 16th Street in north Everett between Grand Avenue and E. Marine View Drive.
The review and lower speed limits for both streets are the first in what’s expected to be a longer-term comprehensive review of all streets in Everett, a project supported by a federal grant. The speed management plan will look at 77 arterials and collectors in the city, with possible reductions for some residential streets to 20 mph limits and even 10 mph for streets that prioritize use for pedestrians and cyclists, Corey Hert, the city’s traffic engineer told the council last week.
“This council is pretty united when it comes to acknowledging the need to do something with the speed in our streets,” Council President Don Schwab said at Wednesday’s meeting.
And there is a need, especially related to traffic safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
Everett, between 2015 and 2024, averaged six fatalities each year in vehicle crashes with pedestrians and/or cyclists, with a high of 10 fatalities in 2022; it also averaged 15 crashes annually with serious injuries between vehicles and pedestrians and/or cyclists over that 10-year span, according to data from the state Department of Transportation.
For the same period, Snohomish County saw an average of 12.5 fatalities in vehicle crashes with pedestrians and/or cyclists each year and an average of nearly 50 crashes with serious injuries to pedestrians and cyclists.
The logic in lowering speed limits to improve traffic safety — for everyone on the road — isn’t hard to grasp: Lower speeds increase reaction time for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, and they also reduce the severity of impacts, reducing the likelihood of injury or death, notes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a look at lower speed limits as a strategy for traffic safety.
Among several studies cited by NHTSA, one study found that pedestrian fatality rates ranged from 50 percent odds at 47 mph to just 8 percent at 31 mph.
Even assuming that drivers will fudge on speed limits — typically a 1- to 2-mph reduction for every 5-mph decrease in posted speed limits — even that 1- to 2-mph reduction on average can yield substantial decreases in fatal and injury crashes, the traffic safety agency said.
Those findings were borne out in a study in Seattle by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The study, started in 2016, looked at Seattle’s reduction of the default speed limit for arterial roads to 25 mph from 30 mph and for smaller residential streets to 20 mph from 25.
Using three other cities in Washington state where speed limits weren’t adjusted as a control group, the study found that the roads where speed limits were reduced saw clear reductions in injury crashes, while the cities where no changes were made saw increases in injury crashes. Over the three-year period studied, on arterial roads there was a 20 percent reduction in the odds of an injury crash in downtown Seattle, and an 11 percent decrease outside the city center.
As for drivers’ complaints that lower speed limits will increase driving time, consider that a 5 mph difference won’t significantly increase travel time for the relatively short trips made around town. A trip of five miles at an average of 25 mph is only two minutes longer than one at 30 mph.
Key to the effectiveness of lower speed limits for reductions in injury crashes, as shown by the Seattle study and an earlier one in Boston, were signs noting the speed limit change and a public outreach campaign to increase driver awareness. For every old sign Seattle took down, it put up more than three showing the lower speed limit.
Enforcement — using officer patrols and/or traffic cameras — also will be needed to communicate speed limit changes, as was seen after cameras were installed near Horizon Elementary on Casino Road last year. More than 2,200 warnings for speeding were issued between April 3 and May 3 near the school that year. After the warnings began, speeding violations decreased 70 percent.
It will also depend which streets see reductions in speed limits. Of recent fatal or serious injury pedestrian collisions in Everett since Dec. 30, 2022, three involved some of the city’s busiest thoroughfares:
A pedestrian injured by a vehicle at Evergreen Way and Casino Road on Nov. 7, 2023;
A pedestrian struck and killed by two hit-and-run drivers on Evergreen Way on June 21, 2023; and
A pedestrian killed in a hit-and-run on Evergreen Way on Dec. 30, 2022.
Everett, as of July 2022, reduced the speed on Evergreen Way between Airport Road and Everett Mall Way to 40 mph from 50 mph, and on Everett Mall Way between Evergreen Way and Seventh Avenue SE to 35 mph from 40 mph.
Everett has also made other improvements along Evergreen Way, including improved lighting, sidewalk and a radar speed feedback sign, but it and other high traffic areas will need more study and effort to further limit the incidence of collisions involving vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.
That’s coming as the city prepares to soon release its Vision Zero Everett initiative, which could propose further traffic calming and streetscape improvements and other safety measures.
But the simplest and least costly measure would be drivers easing up on the accelerator on their own.
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