Just outside Seattle, residents endure a dangerous yet ordinary intersection

SKYWAY, Wash. – Red-light running? Every couple of minutes.

Speeding. Angry honks. Drivers shortcut through corner gas stations. People stand and ask for money on the yellow center stripe. Truck wheels roll up on the sidewalk.

Just about every risk converges at the intersection of Highway 900 and South 129th Street in unincorporated King County, beyond the city limits of Seattle, Renton and Tukwila, places where officials have more money and political clout to fix road problems. A new hazard arrived in December 2021, when damage to a Duwamish River bridge caused a BNSF Railway yard in Tukwila to detour hundreds of freight trucks through hilly Skyway.

A state study found 264 crashes from 2015-19 in a 1-mile stretch near the crossing, including eight when pedestrians were hit, and 86 collisions causing suspected and confirmed injuries. In 2022, a person died running into the path of a semi.

Congestion returned post-pandemic, causing backups on Highway 900, also known as Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. Many of the 30,000 daily drivers are zooming through to downtown Renton, rather than use busy Interstate 5 and Interstate 405 past Southcenter.

“Some days I feel like I want to just turtle, put my head in a shell, stick it out every once in a while, see if everybody’s OK,” said Beth Hughes, who lives in a mobile home park nearby and rides the bus into Seattle to work at sports events. “It seems like no one cares about the law anymore. Stop signs, speed limits, red lights. Guardian angels are the only reason I’m still alive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost been hit.”

Roads like these exist across the country, including 900 miles of state highways, from Port Angeles to Spokane Valley, that double as major arterials. They’re nicknamed stroads, for combining the complexity of city streets with high speeds of roads. Half the nation’s traffic fatalities occur on these “boulevards of death,” says the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

In a hit-and-run last week in South Everett, a 41-year-old pedestrian died on Evergreen Way, where police say six or seven vehicles may have struck her. Seattle has reduced speed limits on deadly Aurora Avenue North, and converted one lane to a bikeway along Green Lake, but crashes still happen and a $50 million, 15-block renovation concept remains stuck in a process quagmire.

By being egregious, the Skyway crossing offers a road map for what to fix anywhere.

And in fact, the Washington State Department of Transportation published plans this month, following community outreach, to build walkways on both sides of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and improve two intersections. All WSDOT needs is $40 million, loose change amid $5 billion spent yearly by road and transit agencies in King County.

Street corner scenes

For the decade ending Dec. 31, the 4-mile Highway 900 corridor from I-5 to downtown Renton produced 931 crashes, which killed four and injured 498 people, including 30 people walking or bicycling, according to crash data WSDOT released through a Seattle Times records request. Half the crashes happened in the mile near the Martin Luther King Jr. Way/129th Street crossroads.

Girmay Zahilay, the area’s Metropolitan King County Council member, said constituents constantly ask for help with unlit streets, missing sidewalks and speeding drivers near homes.

“That’s one of the realest ways they see the underserved, unincorporated area of Skyway – the lack of public services,” Zahilay said.

The corridor is no picnic for commuters either. The WSDOT study assigned the corner an F grade for congestion, after measuring peak-time delays at 161 seconds.

On a Tuesday afternoon, two trucks and 11 cars waited in a Highway 900 left-turn lane to descend on 129th toward Tukwila, using a signal that lasts only 15 seconds. Sometimes there are five semis in the lineup. Red-light running is expected. When the line gets long, drivers escape by veering left across the oncoming lanes, and cruise through retail lots. From there, they turn left onto westbound 129th Street, hunting for a gap between other stopped cars.

An SUV driver making this maneuver nearly hit a woman opening her car door, after she filled her gas tank at the corner Chevron. Two drivers whipped past Hughes during an interview, once next to a Metro bus shelter and once near the corner’s Taqueria El Oasis food wagon. School buses unload kids at the transit stop.

Taqueria owner David Hernandez parks his pickup at a right angle to the customer counter, so it shields the people ordering food. The pickup’s been hit, he said – “It’s the only thing I can do.”

Across the street, the rear wheels of freight trucks have broken the corner sidewalk, because the turning radius is too tight.

Brandon Harper, front door guard at Have a Heart cannabis, said he’s seen three corner crashes, and a high-speed rollover northbound. His phone contained a photo of a black hatchback, sideswiped by the right side of a wide-turning truck.

The corner’s an obstacle for moms with strollers, and shoppers rolling personal carts. Hughes avoids it entirely.

Alvin Walker, a worker at Kings Cannabis Dispensary, suggests longer signal crossing times for pedestrians.

“People need to focus, pay more attention to the roads,” Walker said. “My father passed away, he was hit by a car.”

Zahilay said conditions are dire five blocks south at Creston Point Apartments, full of families using school and transit buses. The busy Ukrainian Cultural Center is across the highway. People sometimes try to cross all five highway lanes on foot.

What’s being done?

WSDOT’s safety study recommends $21 million for a walk-bike trail along the northbound side of Highway 900, a signaled intersection at South 133rd Street, and a pedestrian-activated traffic light near Creston Point Apartments just east of 133rd. After that, a $6 million roundabout at 129th, and $13 million for sidewalks on both sides of the highway.

No construction budget nor dates exist.

In 2024, WSDOT expects the project to compete for federal money distributed by the Puget Sound Regional Council, as well as state walk, bike and school-safety funds.

WSDOT’s proposed two-lane roundabout brings a different safety risk, known as a double threat, to be tackled in final engineering. It’s possible one driver stops entering the roundabout, and a second driver continues through to strike a pedestrian. Roundabouts are proven to reduce severe injuries in car-to-car wrecks, though fender-benders often increase.

Flashing yellow crosswalk beacons are one common tool. Staggered stop lines before a crosswalk can give all users a better vision range, said Dina Swires, a state safety engineer. Reduced speed limits can also help, Swires said. Walla Walla, Olympia, Anacortes and soon Lake Stevens have multilane roundabouts.

The state already has $450,000 for predesign work next year. Major rebuilds will take a few years but in 2024 residents should see a safer bus stop, and lane-marking pylons next to Creston Point Apartments, and maybe an interim 45 mph limit, said Christina Strand, WSDOT area traffic engineer.

Speed-enforcement cameras aren’t allowed in Skyway, because state law authorized those only for cities and counties, Swires said. WSDOT will experiment with automated enforcement in freeway construction zones next year, and this week Gov. Jay Inslee said he wants to see speed-enforcement cameras proliferate along I-5 and highways statewide.

State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, whose district includes Skyway, said Highway 900 can compete for grants from Move Ahead Washington, a new $16.8 billion, 16-year program that allocates $4.3 billion in future carbon-tax income for transit, bike and pedestrian investments.

“Right of way is not just about how quickly you can move in your vehicle. It’s about moving safely so you can get home, no matter what your mode of transportation,” Saldaña said.

It’s unsurprising to her Skyway seems last in line for better infrastructure, compared with richer communities and louder incorporated cities.

Skyway has a low-income population and the state’s highest proportion of Black residents, Zahilay said. (Bryn-Mawr/Skyway, population 17,397, was 27.5% Black, the highest in 2020 among census-designated areas.) He believes the county historically neglected unincorporated communities like Skyway in hopes people would back pro-annexation movements into cities.

“I see the needle moving, but it’s going to take a while to cure the impact of generations of disinvestment,” Zahilay said.

Now that the state wrote a safety plan, Saldaña promises the 2024 Legislature will hear about Skyway.