Why this started
A main road and a pattern I couldn't ignore
Watch: presenting six years of traffic data to Snohomish County.
My name is Shyla Agrawal, and I live next to a main road in the suburbs of Seattle. Late at night, vehicles race through the street at high speeds, putting both themselves and others at risk. At first it just disturbed my family's sleep and pulled my focus away from schoolwork. Then further research showed me that Snohomish County records one of the highest rates of traffic casualties in Washington State, with over 450 crashes here in the last ten years. That's when it stopped feeling like an annoyance and started looking like a genuine public safety concern.
I began researching neighborhood road safety efforts across the country and discovered that Snohomish County tracks vehicle counts and speeds on all its roads every year. That led me to analyze six years of this traffic data, and eventually, to speak directly with the county about what it shows. Across many populated areas of Snohomish County, nighttime noise consistently exceeds the WHO's recommended decibel limit.
Now I'm going door to door in my own neighborhood, because the data is only half the argument. The other half is knowing how many of us are actually losing sleep over it.