Biking to preschool this morning, as my daughter and I biked across the University Bridge like we do every morning, we saw some Seattle Police boats fishing in the calm waters of Lake Union below us. But they weren’t searching for fish, they were searching for a human being, the victim of a horrific act of violence hundreds of feet above the water.

The exact details are not all clear yet, but several people reported via Twitter that they saw a stalled vehicle on the bridge on the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge before two cars collided. The impact was so powerful that the vehicles rolled over. One person was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. But the occupant of the other car was missing. The Harbor Patrol found their body hours later. The impact had apparently thrown them over the side of the towering freeway bridge and down hundreds of feet to the lake below.

Our deepest condolences go to this person’s friends and family.

I didn’t tell my daughter what the boats were doing in the water this morning, but I knew because I had seen the news reports before we left the home. My feed was full of news about the traffic backup. I-5 was closed southbound, and the traffic backup was going to be big. Here this person experienced unimaginable violence, and the news was mostly about a traffic jam. How can our society be so callous about human tragedy?

This morning’s fatality was exceptionally dramatic, but it is otherwise horribly common. 538 people died in Washington State traffic collisions in 2019. Of those, 327 were drivers or passengers in cars. Why do people who drive accept the level of danger they face every day traveling our highways and city streets? Where is the grassroots organization of car drivers demanding safer roadways? These deaths are preventable. This doesn’t happen everywhere, and there are known solutions that make roadways safer. Why is there no organization of drivers demanding that our public agencies implement solutions that could save lives? (more…)