On Monday, City Council approved new Seattle-wide default speed limits. Unless otherwise posted, the speed limit for arterial roads will be 25 mph; non-arterials will be 20 mph. When imposed, this reduction will, as the fine folks at Seattle Greenways have pointed out in post after post, certainly save lives and make the city more of a city. As for SDOT (or, more correctly, The Department of Cars), it will now have to come up with physical and cultural ways to counter the fast-car culture unremittingly promoted by popular music, TV shows, and thousands of advertisements.

To play on something Nietzsche once said, and which was quoted at the opening of the movie Conan the Barbarian, a person hit by a car moving at 20 mph has a 90 percent chance of that experience making him/her stronger, whereas a person hit by a car moving at 40 mph will only have a ten percent chance of that experience making him/her stronger.