Seattle

Scott Kubly had been on the job as director of Seattle’s Department of Transportation for roughly a month before a cyclist was killed in a notoriously dangerous bike lane. Sher Kung, a 31-year-old attorney and mother, was riding down Second Avenue in the heart of downtown Seattle last August — a stretch once described by a Rutgers University bicycling scholar as “death-defying” — when she was hit by a left-turning box truck. Her death took place less than two weeks before a new protected bike lane was expected to be completed. Over the next five years, Seattle hopes to install more than 35 miles of protected bike lanes, and eliminate fatal and serious collisions within the next 15 years — all part of the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan. But one of the city’s biggest challenges overall is the antagonistic attitude between drivers and cyclists, says Kubly. A ghost bike was erected in Kung’s honor at the site of her accident.

Scott Kubly

I think that for whatever reason there is an antagonism between bicyclists and non-bicyclists in this city that is probably stronger than in any other city that I’ve been in. It’s really actually shocking. It’s a real angry kind of dialogue. We’re coming out of what, locally, people call ‘the mode wars,’ where people of different modes [of transportation] were kind of fighting amongst each other and not really recognizing that we actually live in a multi-modal city where all the things need to work well together.

The riders I see here in Seattle are really different than riders I’ve seen in other cities. I think they ride more aggressively here than in other cities, I really do. If you go to D.C. or Chicago, where the bike-commuting culture and the bike-riding culture is a much calmer riding culture, you see a lot fewer people in spandex and a lot more people in regular street clothes.

People who don’t like bikers are going to say, ‘Look at how obnoxious that biker was,’ and people who ride bikes and get frustrated by cars are going to say, ‘Look at how obnoxious that driver was.’ It’s so funny because Seattleites are so nice in so many other ways. I truly can’t figure it out.

Whenever we have a traffic fatality, I’m aware of it, and we’re doing everything we can to minimize them. When I get a traffic crash report across my desk that shows that somebody died, personally, as a DOT [department of transportation] director, and I’m not saying every DOT director is this way, but I don’t need a ghost bike to let me know that doing work to improve safety is critical. I think where they probably serve a purpose is a reminder to the general public that somebody died unnecessarily.

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Sadly, I would say [of the cyclist fatality on Second Avenue in Seattle] that it’s not the first time something like that has happened. And it’s not going to be the last.

When I was in Chicago, we had two crashes that were really similar in circumstance. There was a person who was riding their bike down Wells Street [and] they were traveling in the door zone. A car door swung open, so they swung out of the door zone to avoid getting doored. They happened to get caught up under a truck and they died. It was a matter of weeks before the street was [going to be] repaved and we were putting in a buffered bike lane, which would have had a buffer in the door zone, but not for a couple weeks. There was a kid named Bobby Cann, who worked for Groupon, I believe, and he was riding down Clybourn Avenue in Chicago. We had been as a city DOT going back and forth without getting permission to put a protected bike lane on Clybourn Avenue. This is three years ago, four years ago at this point, but it’s finally going in right now. This kid gets hit by a drunk driver and it severs his leg, and he dies right there on Clybourn Avenue. If the protected bike lane had been there, he would have been alive.