The above map is a snapshot from cityprotect.com for the past three days, Feb 5 to Feb 7, showing five car thefts in the Renton Highlands Sunset neighborhood. If this rate of theft somehow continued in this neighborhood, 608 cars would be stolen from this small area in a year; about one car theft for every two homes.
The plan was to reduce highway deaths to zero by 2030. Instead, we’re on path to triple the number of fatalities, producing EIGHT THOUSAND avoidable deaths of Washingtonians by 2030. BIPOC residents will be hit the hardest.
In 2018 our state lawmakers asked our Washington Transportation Highway Commission to create an ambitious plan to further improve road and highway safety. The Commission’s resulting comprehensive 296-page plan boldly set a stretch goal of eliminating ALL fatalities by 2030. They made progress at first. But then the legislature passed the non-pursuit law, RCW 10.116.060, that put us on path to instead nearly TRIPLE fatalities by 2030. If nothing changes, eight thousand Washingtonians are projected to be killed in car crashes by this ill-conceived law by the year 2030. Tens of thousands more will needlessly suffer head injuries, lose limbs, or sustain other life-altering maimings.
Photo courtesy of Federal Highway Commission
When the city or state completes a new major road or highway, the road’s final maximum speed limit will typically not be known until you have your say. Engineers have a speed in mind during design and construction, but they will want your assessment before they can finalize and post the maximum speed limit. No need to go online or fill out a survey– you merely drive on the road to cast your vote.
Washington fatal accident rates have been spiking since enforcement rolled back. Chart created by using state and federal official accident data from 2020, 2021, and 2022 to update a chart from”Target Zero, Washington State Strategic Highway Safety Plan 2019.” Details in article.
When Washington State legislators implemented RCW 10.116.060 regarding police pursuit in 2021, they doomed hundreds of Washington motorists to early deaths in 2022. In two brief years, our enviable record of being one of the safest states for motorists has flip-flopped to where we are on track to be the worst. Twenty years of safety gains in such areas as drunk driving standards, airbags, car seats, and billions in safer highway design have been been negated with one poorly thought-out new law that lets traffic offenders flee the police with impunity. The trend is getting worse fast, as reckless car thieves and drunk drivers are quickly figuring out there is no real consequence for simply stepping on the accelerator and going ten MPH over the speed limit to avoid a traffic stop. In a few short years we’ll all be regularly losing friends and loved ones to traffic accidents, the way some of us remember from our youth. Even worse, for every death there are three to four serious maimings that will affect someone’s quality of life forever.
In my previous three entries I covered the catastrophic additional loss of life on Washington’s roads and highways since the pandemic reduced traffic enforcement, and then just when things were getting better a new Police non-pursuit law curtailed traffic enforcement of our state’s deadliest drivers.
Renton police photo. (Info about this accident available in Renton Patch. Link below.)
As someone in Washington State with both a lifetime career as a transportation safety engineer (33 years), and a city councilmember (28 years), I see the importance of this analysis for the safety of motorists and pedestrians in our state. I have not seen this analysis done by anyone else. Please share this post widely, including with media. For questions I can be reached at 425-271-6913 (please leave a detailed message).
This is the second post of a four-part series covering the ongoing damage from the 2021 police pursuit law. Part one covered skyrocketing highway deaths. Part three will cover the catastrophic crime wave, and part four will cover environmental setbacks from this law.
In my previous post I showed that our state’s traffic fatalities are up dramatically since Washington’s police non-pursuit law was implemented. Highway fatality rates which had been getting better for decades went up across the US in 2020 due in large part to police choosing not to pull people over for unsafe driving during the pandemic. As Covid concerns diminished, other states began rigorously enforcing driving laws again, and road safety started trending back to baseline. But Washington State implemented a new non-pursuit law, and our highway fatality rates are climbing faster than ever. Deaths on our roads and highways are 37 percent higher than pre-pandemic, and climbing fast, representing a current excess death toll of 207 lives lost per year over the baseline.
Thank you to all of you who left comments on my blog post. I also received many great comments and questions in a private facebook forum where I shared this post. I’ll respect others’ privacy by paraphrasing and bundling their questions, but because others may have the same questions, I will share my answers here. READ MORE »
“Mad Max Fury Road” features a post-apocalyptic lawless future. My wife and I think of this movie as we get increasingly passed by dangerous, law-breaking vehicles on local highways.
This is part one of a four-part entry about the damage caused by the 2021 Washington police pursuit law. This entry covers the lives lost to traffic accidents as a result of this legislation. The associated spike in drunk drivers will be covered in part two, the unprecedented crime wave and it’s horrendous impact on Renton residents and businesses will be handled in part three, and the setback to Washington State environmental progress will be covered in part four. 10/28/2023 Update: I’ve covered this topic extensively during the past ten months, since publication of this first article. To see these later entries, click here
Last week Washington Transportation Safety Commission reported that 2022 saw the most traffic deaths on Washington roads since 1990, a total of 745 last year.
After decades of positive safety trends on Washington highways, our lawmakers in Olympia have seemingly put Renton’s and other Washington streets on the path to becoming Fury Road.
Sunset Gardens, being developed by Renton Housing Authority, will provide 76 new units of permanent housing for our veterans and others experiencing homelessness. In February Renton Council provided critical funding for this project from a new 0.1 percent sales tax in Renton under HB 1590 . This project will add to Renton Housing Authority’s growing portfolio of high quality permanent subsidized housing. One of the candidates running this year has said he would not have given this funding to Renton Housing Authority and would have sent it to the county instead.
For 28 years on Renton City Council I’ve worked diligently to strengthen our partnership with Renton Housing Authority, which is a separate agency from the City of Renton. A year ago City Council implemented a 0.1 percent local option sales tax to help fund our Renton Housing Authority and provide other homeless-related services such as rent/utility vouchers and hiring mental health professionals to assist our police in responding to people in behavioral crisis.
Dear Beloved Renton Community,
After more than 27 years of serving you on Renton City Council, I’ve decided not to seek an eighth term in this coming election season. A shifting situation in my extended family has caused me to reassess where I want to focus my time and energy in the next few years. Additionally, I was going to run another term to help the city recover from the pandemic, and now I’m increasingly confident that we can get the COVID-19 crisis behind us, resolve our financial challenges, and restart our businesses before the end of this term.
I am enthusiastically endorsing long-time Renton Chamber of Commerce Board Member James Alberson for my vacant position. James has served as President of the Chamber Board for six years, and is a business owner and business development consultant who is very active in our Renton community. I endorsed him during his run for City Council position 3 in 2019 and he came within 2 percent of winning the seat. A few months later I nominated him as a finalist for the vacant Council 2 position and during his Council interview he demonstrated excellent preparation and readiness for a council position. He will be an outstanding council member. Please join me in supporting James.
This coming Monday March 22, a seemingly small “street vacation” item on our Council Consent agenda will usher in construction of another 275 units of affordable housing for households making between 60-80% of area median income. It’s another typical week for those of us in Renton working hard to build affordable housing.
The latest project in the Renton Housing Authority’s pipeline, Sunset Oaks Apartments, will provide homes to 60 low income families when completed later this year.
To increase our affordable housing options, we have recently completed and approved a ground-breaking new ordinance to encourage backyard cottages. These cottages, technically known as Accessory Dwelling Units, can be enjoyed by your family or rented out to an individual or family in need of housing. Our new ordinance gives you a choice of beautiful, pre-approved designs and waives the building permit fees. We’ve also dropped several other impact fees and slashed hook-up charges. The City will soon put links on its website that show you how you can begin planning a backyard cottage. Until the links are up, you can get started by phoning Community and Economic Development at 425-430-7200 and letting them know you would like to get started on an ADU. As you’ll see in the presentation below, the city can get you approved in just a couple weeks.
New active waterfront at Southport replaces the shuttered Shuffleton power plant thanks to long-term planning, rezoning, and follow through
As we approach primary election day I’ve been meeting with residents on their porches and in coffee houses. When they ask what distinguishes me in this race, I say city hall experience on top of my professional engineering and management background.
Renton Community Planning areas. Map sections in color are withing Renton’s Potential Annexation Area. City limits (at time of printing ten years ago) are depicted by heavy red line.
My wife Cathy, center, enjoying water-walking exercise on a cloudy morning session at Henry Moses Aquatic Center.
I’ve depicted Henry Moses Aquatic Center in my yard sign and taken credit for helping get the aquatic center and Veteran Park built. Here is the history of getting these projects funded:
We closed our old Henry Moses Pool in the mid 1990s, after it began leaking 30,000 gallons of water per day. One of our wells was pouring replacement water into the pool at the rate of a fire hose. The pool was becoming impossible to heat, spilling chlorine into the ground, and potentially becoming a risk for catastrophic collapse. Replacing just the pool tank was not an option, since the work would trigger codes requiring that everything including the pool house be brought up to latest standards.
Hence, we were looking at a multi-million dollar investment. It was a time when the county was trying to off-load their “Forward-thrust” pools throughout the area because pools were expensive to operate even when they were not leaking water into the ground.
So we set about building a pool that could operate financially in the black, where admission fees would cover all the costs of operating the pool. To pay for life guards, energy, and maintenance costs, we needed to get admission fees up. We learned people would pay much more to enter a pool with amenities like slides, wave machines, and lazy rivers, and other interactive features. Such amenities only added about 20% to the price of the pool, but doubled or tripled the ticket revenue. Hence, our Henry Moses Aquatic Center was conceived. It would be too large for the old Henry Moses Pool location, so we moved it across the freeway near the community center, and built a much-requested skate park at the old pool site.
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Hi Randy, thanks for your current and past service to the City of Renton. one quick question about your platform, what do you think about the concept of “responsible growth”? I feel that this concept is key in my decision making for election choices, since I am feeling the economic and financial pinch of soon not being able to afford living in Renton, higher prices everywhere and more congestion and busy. Uncontrolled growth is no good. If you can address this and with a few specifics on tactics. I really like many of your positions because you do go into more details of the tactics, vs. just the main message points. Thanks