On Rainier Avenue, shop windows are made for cars to hit. Its a natural fit.
On Rainier Avenue, shop windows are made for cars to hit. It's a natural fit. Charles Mudede

Nearly a month after Capitol Hill Station liberated me from Rainier Avenue South, I paid that most awful, most unruly, most unloved of Seattle streets a visit. What did I find? Almost immediately, the boarded up window of a shop on the corner of Rainier and Genesee Street. What happened here? Of course, it was hit by a car. The shops in Columbia City know all about this kind of thing. This is the price you pay for operating on the most dangerous street in the city:
Rainier Avenue has one-fourth the vehicle volume of Aurora, but twice the accidents per mile — over one a day. Part of the problem is that Rainier used to be part of State Highway 167, and it still acts like a freeway.

Some effort to make this road safer and its traffic slower, particularly in Columbia City (it's called a road diet), has been made, but it's not at all enough. Accidents just keep happening again...


And again...

And now there is even talk about SDOT postponing projects that were to make the street a little bit safer...


Seattle Bike Blog also points out that "delaying Rainier Valley safe streets projects is not the kind of bold action people voted for when passing Move Seattle by a big margin." But SDOT does not love that street. All of the evidence shows it has other and more pressing things to care about.

Because the city refuses to do anything meaningful about this horrible street that thinks it's a highway, my only option is not to use it all. And thanks to Link, that option is available to me.