There are (at least) three important bikey meetings Wednesday evening (tonight!), all at the same time. If you have time, swing by one of them and give your input to make bicycling in Seattle better.
City Council Transportation Budget Workshop
A workshop at Garfield Community Center at 23rd and Cherry will give residents the chance to weigh in at a fairly early stage in the development of the city’s transportation budget. The more people can be there to make sure safety safety safety is the city’s top priority, the better the final budget could turn out.
And as NE Seattle Greenways put it on Twitter during a neighborhood meeting last night, not only is an investment in safety the right thing to do, it also makes financial sense:
Meeting details:
Wed., May 7, 6p – 8p
DEPARTMENTS: Transportation/Land Use
LOCATION: Garfield Community Center, 23rd and Cherry, Multipurpose Room (Central District)
After brief presentations of each department’s budget, constituents will have the opportunity to participate in small group discussions with Councilmembers, and to list their priorities for the featured departments. The summaries of those priorities will be reported to those attending the Community Budget Workshops. Each meeting will have three Councilmembers in attendance. Holding the meetings during the Spring will allow Councilmembers to take the information and encourage the Mayor to include it in the budget he proposes to the City Council in September.
First Pronto Cycle Share station meeting
Pronto Cycle Share is coming to Seattle in September, leaders say. So now is the time to figure out where exactly the first 50 stations will be located, and they need your help.
Mayor Ed Murray is scheduled to attend the kickoff community planning meeting tonight at Barboza (10th/Pike) on Capitol Hill.
The session begins at 5 p.m.
If you can’t attend the first workshop, there are several more throughout May, including one at noon Thursday downtown at GGLO (a good way to spend lunch). See details on the other meetings in this post.
Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board
Today is the first Wednesday of the month, and that means it’s the monthly meeting of the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board. SBAB is a volunteer board of residents that advises city departments on issues as they relate to bicycling. Here’s the May agenda:
Comments
5 responses to “Three bike meetings tonight: Bike Share, Seattle transportation budget workshop + Bike Board”
Can anyone clarify what the “taxpayer costs” in Jim Curtin’s statement is referring to? I assume there’s some element of “lost productivity” or other fudge factor in there, because otherwise, the number seems impossibly high. $665 million is ~15% of the city’s budget! We can’t possibly be spending 15% of our budget dealing with traffic collisions, can we?
Don’t these groups know that a lot of us cycling advocates are Sounders fans?
12,000 collisions per year seems like a lot, but the real number is easily twice that, if you include minor, non-injury collisions. Even if the police are called, there is no record of the collision unless someone files a report (rare for minor collisions) or there is an injury.
I just spoke to Jim and here’s what he said:
The $665 million figure is the estimated cost of fatal collisions in Washington State. This figure was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Check out the details here: http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/statecosts/index.html. These costs include medical and emergency responder resources as well as lost wages/work related losses.
There was another question on the blog about the 12,000 collisions per year in Seattle figure. That is accurate and more details can be found in our Annual Traffic Report.
Well, that is depressing
“crash deaths resulted in $41 billion in medical and work loss costs.”/”Over 30,000 people are killed in crashes each year in the United States” ~ 1.4 million/person
665/1.4 = 475 in Washington alone. More than one every single day.
That is the entire state, not just Seattle, but still…
We seem to have weird priorities, its the $665 million that gets mentioned, not 475 dead people.
On the bright side, the CDC numbers put bicyclists in the lowest cost group. Of course they are probably the lowest population group as well. The cost per person (in the group) or per mile might be more enlightening.