Last week Seattle politicians spent a whole lot of time talking about public safety, but one actually did something about it.
The big news came on Friday when Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson signed an executive order on Vision Zero, the city’s goal to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero by 2030. Numbers have been trending the wrong way for years—19 pedestrians died on the city’s streets in 2025, compared to six in 2016.
Safe street advocates have said the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has been too slow to install barrier-protected bike lanes and narrow roads to discourage speeding. They also say SDOT has historically favored drivers’ concerns, like preserving on-street parking, over reducing collisions.
Wilson’s executive order aims to rebalance the department’s priorities. It directs SDOT to move several planned safety projects to the top of the queue and make more short-term improvements on dangerous arterials. The executive order also directs city-owned vehicles to be retrofitted with better mirrors and side guards, authorizes up to 10 new automated speed cameras, and instructs the City’s lobbyists to advocate for traffic safety laws in Olympia.
But as with anything related to City Hall, the Vision Zero announcement couldn’t go ahead without a lot of gesturing, grandstanding, and political point scoring. Last week’s culprits: Councilmembers Rob Saka and Bob Kettle.
Days before Wilson’s signing ceremony, Councilmember Rob Saka proposed his own safety legislation, the “SAFER Streets Act.”
It’s so similar to Wilson’s order—both call for truck side guards, ask for infrastructure improvements like intersection daylighting, and assign SDOT’s chief traffic engineer to oversee traffic safety—that it is unclear why he introduced it in the first place. The Vision Zero order wasn’t a surprise. Wilson and Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck had been working on it for months. Another wrinkle: he did not formally introduce the bill during Thursday’s Transportation, Waterfront, and Seattle Center Committee meeting he chairs. Instead, Saka added it as an informational item onto the agenda because it was incomplete. He still has not officially introduced the legislation. Saka did not attend Wilson’s signing ceremony with Rinck and Councilmember Eddie Lin. When asked about this, Wilson said, “we’re going to work together, and I’m excited about his leadership too.”
“Public safety” talk is in the air. Wilson’s Vision Zero order, and Saka’s rush job, come amid a month-long media cycle over public safety and gun violence following the tragic Seattle Center shooting. (In an attempt to reframe the conversation at the press conference, Wilson said, “traffic safety is part of public safety.”)
But an August 20 opinion poll commissioned by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce once again brought public safety to the top of the news agenda. Carried out by the firm Fulcrum Strategy Group, it showed a dramatic 46 percent decline in Wilson’s approval ratings since April. Only one third of the 500 respondents said they were confident in Wilson’s public safety plan, while the City Council also received a dismal -16 percent approval rating.
Councilmember Bob Kettle seized upon the poll with a Friday morning press conference during which he said the words “public safety” 45 times in 50 minutes. He criticized Wilson’s delayed Bite of Seattle shooting press conference and commended the response from police department officers as “textbook.”
Not everyone viewed the SPD response as positively. Multiple armed police officers were present in the vicinity of the shooting, suggesting their presence did not deter the violence. The department did not use its emergency text alert service, leading some Bite of Seattle attendees to resort to calling 911 for guidance. A month later, one of the shooting suspects remains at large.
At Wilson’s request, the Seattle Office of Inspector General for Public Safety is investigating the City’s response. Kettle urged the office to include Wilson and her staff in its report. While he was at it, Kettle once again lambasted Wilson for pausing the expansion of the Seattle Police Department’s CCTV surveillance program. The corporate media audience—the Seattle Times, the four TV news stations and conservative-leaning Center Square—dutifully bought into the framing, despite the lack of any substantive announcements.
Kettle did not address traffic safety or Vision Zero, topics he said were outside the remit of the Public Safety Committee he chairs.
Last year’s annual public safety survey from Seattle University showed more than 45 percent of nearly 9,000 respondents listed traffic safety as their top concern; data from the Washington State Traffic Safety Commission and the SPD suggests both traffic fatalities and serious violent crime present serious hazards to the public. Between 2016 and 2025, 443 people died by homicide in Seattle, whereas 328 people died in traffic-related accidents. For every four homicides in that period, three people died during road collisions, nearly half of them pedestrians. With last year’s dip in homicides, the numbers reached near-parity.
For safe street advocates like Seattle Streets Alliance executive director Gordon Padelford, Wilson’s Vision Zero order gives hope that traffic safety will no longer be relegated to the bottom of the City’s political agenda.
“We’ve just gotten so numb to death and serious injuries on our streets that sometimes people forget about it,” he says. “They just think it’s inevitable.”
