ARTICLE: A nightmare November for Seattle pedestrians

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, December 3, 2003

One thousand.

That's the number of signatures on the giant get-well card sitting in the Harborview Medical Center room of Mulugeta Endale, an instructor at Seattle's Ingraham High School.

Before the early hours of Nov. 8 Endale -- known as "Mulu" -- was a personality dynamo, an English instructor who spoke five languages and relentlessly helped many of Ingraham's four dozen African students adjust to a new tongue in their new country.

The East African immigrant is also immensely popular with the rest of the student body because he chose to eat lunch every day with students rather than retreat to the faculty dining room.

He truly cares about young lives.

"He is extremely well liked and so influential. Just a tremendous guy," Ingraham Principal Steve Wilson tells me. "You know, he just got engaged to a young lady in California."

Barring a miracle, the wedding will never happen.

Mulu is in a coma after being struck by a hit-and-run driver near his home in Rainier Valley. Seattle police say that in the early hours of Nov. 8 he was crossing near the intersection of Martin Luther King Way South and South Brandon Street. The driver of a white car -- a late-'70s to mid-'80s four-door sedan -- sped away, leaving Mulu in the middle of the road, clinging to 41 years of life.

What happened to Mulu is part of what turned out to be a particularly violent November for pedestrians in greater Seattle.

The incidents are enough to make you want to hang up a neon sign: Walkers Beware.

In Tukwila on Saturday, 23-year-old Sheila Marin was struck and killed by a 40-foot Metro bus as she entered a marked crosswalk. Witnesses say Marin had waited for the light before she began to cross the street. The young woman had been working two jobs so that she could bring her 2-year-old son to Seattle from the Philippines.

Four days earlier, Victoria Chiudina, 57, was fatally hit by a bus while walking to her car at a Metro base. And on Nov. 21, Thien Nguyen -- a refugee caseworker I wrote about for a column -- was killed after a suspected drunken driver plowed into her in a Shoreline crosswalk.

While the current number of pedestrian fatalities in King County won't be tabulated until the end of the year, the deaths of walkers hit by cars have been on the rise since the late 1990s: 15 deaths in 1999; 18 in 2000; 25 in 2001; and 23 last year.

The majority of those deaths occurred within cities or on state highways.

Other key numbers:

Washington state has about 80 pedestrian fatalities a year.

In Seattle, between January 1996 and June 2002 there were 923 hospitalizations of pedestrians hit by motor vehicles -- an average of 142 hospitalizations per year -- according to the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center.

More than half of those pedestrians had an average hospital stay of 4.7 days. Five percent of all those admitted later died from their injuries.

For some, these grave injuries and deaths are a wake-up call.

"We're all pedestrians," David Levinger says. "But we're not respected on foot. Walkers are often the majority without a voice. My job is to help them have a voice."

Levinger heads up Feet First, a pedestrian advocacy organization based in Seattle that seeks to foster more walkable, more livable communities. Levinger grew up "very enthusiastic" about cars in Amherst, Mass. But he "increasingly began to see the importance of walkability." His doctoral dissertation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York focused on pedestrian issues with an emphasis on political anthropology.

Levinger says neighborhoods such as Seattle's Central Area are, relatively speaking, more pedestrian friendly. But places such as Delridge and Shoreline have more room for improvement. Delridge, for example, lacks east-west pedestrian routes and that encourages people to jump in the car for even short trips. And Shoreline, he says, has many streets without sidewalks. "The arterials there are wide, often four-lane streets that invite drivers to go faster," Levinger explains. "It's a culture that is hostile to pedestrians."

Feet First just received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to promote "pedestrian friendly environments" in five Seattle neighborhoods: Delridge; Beacon Hill; Central Area; Lake City; and the north Aurora Avenue area.

Speaking about his organization, Levinger says: "This feels like meaningful work."

Absolutely. Car accidents injure a pedestrian once every seven minutes in this country.

Feet First is a step in the right direction. But we could stem the carnage that puts good people in hospital beds or in their graves if drivers would just do this:

Use their heads first when they get behind the wheel.

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