The day before her October wedding anniversary, Judy Sunny posted her nuptial portraits from decades earlier on Facebook. One shot captures a tender moment as the then-young bride, with delicate features framed by a flower-studded veil and wearing a sari, receives help with her necklace from the groom, Sunny Kanjirappallil, handsome with dark wavy hair.

“May both of you live happily ever after,” wrote a well-wisher on her page. Less than a month later, on November 18, 2014, that hope would be shattered by a King County Metro Transit bus that struck her while turning left across the crosswalk where she was legally crossing a street.

Metro has faced an increasing number of bus-pedestrian accidents in recent years, leading to stepped-up efforts by the agency to improve safety and educate both drivers and pedestrians to the potential dangers.

Many of the accidents followed Metro’s introduction of a type of bus that some union safety experts believe created particularly large blind spots. The blind spot issue is drawing attention with transit systems nationally, in part because of work by an international union safety expert formerly employed by the union local representing Metro drivers. And the spokesman for a major bus manufacturers’ trade group told Crosscut that the safety expert’s proposal for a redesign to improve sightlines has promise.

Both the state Department of Transportation statistics and Metro’s own figures show that collisions with pedestrians grew substantially after schedules were tightened and drivers had less time to recover. Metro presented figures to Crosscut that indicated a 35 percent jump in bus collisions with walkers in the past four-plus years, from 94 to 127. WSDOT figures, based on calls significant enough to bring an immediate police response, show Metro bus versus pedestrian collisions rose from six in a four year-plus period before the schedule change to 20 over the same time after the speed-up. And eight of those accidents proved to be nearly identical — a bus turning left hitting a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

In addition to Sunny, victims of left-turning buses include a wheelchair-bound woman and a young blind woman, struck as she legally crossed a Belltown street.

In some of the pedestrian crashes examined for Crosscut, hurrying by individual drivers also seem to have been factors. State public records suggest that Metro's overall accident numbers also rose with tighter scheduling of its buses in 2010, a change that has also led to state findings that Metro was doing too little to provide restroom breaks for drivers. But the effects of scheduling changes on accidents generally is far from clear: Metro provided data, collected under federal guidelines, that shows an overall drop in accidents since the schedule changes.

In an interview, Metro officials denied that any cause-and-effect relationship can be drawn between pedestrian accidents and the schedule changes or the new bus model. The transit agency officials also said Metro has a strong safety record, which the federal statistics bear out.

Metro officials outlined a series of measures they have taken to improve safety since 2014, due to their own tracking of upticks in collisions with people on foot. They include classroom and on-the-road training for all operators. Among other steps, Metro organized a half-day refresher class this year for all drivers, a significant undertaking requiring considerable coordination, and a three-hour pedestrian awareness training in 2014.

Pedestrian deaths in Metro bus collisions remained static after driver recovery times were cut — two each in the four-plus years before and after, according to DOT stats. Neither of those two most recent pedestrian fatalities appeared to be connected with squeezed schedules or bus sightline problems.

In Sunny's case, a Route No. 164 Metro coach, one of the Orion buses whose sightlines have been questioned, approached the stop sign at East Pioneer Street on the east side of the Kent light rail station, shortly before 9 a.m. The bus driven by Mary Ting, then 57, was running five minutes behind schedule when the bus arrived at the previous stop, according to information provided by Metro. Video obtained from the Kent Police Department shows that the driver did not obey the stop sign, instead continuing and making a sharp left-hand turn onto Railroad Avenue North, the one-way loop with bays for more than a dozen bus routes at the Kent transit center.

Sunny, 56, a Kent grandmother of two, was crossing Railroad Avenue in her running shoes with laces that resembled candy canes. As her husband, parked on the east side of Railroad south of the crosswalk, waited for her, Sunny, clad in a red jacket, started to walk, and then saw the bus barreling toward her. She froze momentarily — then desperately tried to run out of its way. But the left front corner of the bus struck and tossed her to the ground, with the bus’s left front tire running over her legs, causing multiple compound fractures.