Why this started
A main road, a light sleeper, and a pattern I couldn't ignore
I live next to a main road in the suburbs of Seattle. Late at night, cars sometimes race through the street at high speeds — engines revving, tires cutting through the quiet. At first it just annoyed me: it woke my family and pulled my focus off my work. Then I learned Snohomish County records the highest rate of traffic casualties in Washington State, with over 400 crashes here in the last ten years. This stopped being an annoyance and started looking like a public safety and public health issue.
I began researching neighborhood road safety efforts across the country and found others tracking speeding with simple sensors and sound data. That led to a research project analyzing six years of Snohomish County traffic data — and eventually, to speaking directly with the county about what the data shows.
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.
Watch: presenting six years of traffic data to Snohomish County.