From the Times
Three pedestrians were injured when a car went out of control near the Pike Place Market late Thursday morning.
Seattle police said the driver was arrested and was being evaluated Thursday for impairment. He was booked into King County Jail and is being held without bail on suspicion of vehicular assault, which is a felony.
At about 11:30 a.m., a 1997 Subaru wagon was headed west down Stewart Street past First Avenue toward the Market, according to Seattle police Sgt. Bill Robertson and the department’s online blog.
All three pedestrians were taken to Harborview Medical Center, where hospital spokeswoman Susan Gregg-Hanson said Thursday evening the women were in satisfactory condition and the man was in serious condition.
None of them have life-threatening injuries, she said.
While a driver could have been out of control anywhere, the fact that it happened in one of the busiest pedestrian areas of the city means that more people were hit than would have been hit elsewhere. Would closing Pike Place Market to vehicles be worthwhile if it prevents accidents like these from occurring there?
Thank you for saying that the driver (and not the car) was out of control. For some reason it’s been really galling to me to see the language that most every media outlet has used to describe this incident. No newspaper, radio or TV station would ever report on a shooting by saying “a gun shot three people”, yet it’s perfectly reasonable to say that a car struck three people. By using such language, the media creates a disconnect between the actions of drivers and the consequences of those actions. This in turn helps create an environment where vehicular homicide laws prescribe ridiculous 3-year sentences, and where “I didn’t see them” is considered a legitimate excuse for killing folks.
People need to remember that when they get behind the wheel, they’re taking control of a potentially deadly projectile, and if they lose control of that projectile, they are (or should be) responsible for the damage they cause just the same as if they’d lost control of a gun. Listening to KUOW yesterday, the reporter mentioned “the car heading west”, “the car lost control”, “the car struck three people”. The driver—the person who actually set all this in motion, the actual causal agent—wasn’t mentioned until the very last line of the report.
The driver may well turn out to be morally or legally inculpable. Perhaps he suffered a stroke or seizure. Then again, maybe he was on his cell phone or fiddling with his GPS. Either way, the media do the public a great disservice by using language which suggests that anyone or anything other than the driver was the agent of these actions. The car didn’t decide on its own to hit these people. A person got into that car, lost control of it, and sent three people to the hospital.
As for closing Pike Place to vehicles, while this incident certainly gives me pause, it might be worse for pedestrian safety overall to remove one of the few places in the city where drivers are made to slow down and interact with pedestrians as near-equals. Seems to me we need more places like that, not fewer.
Well said. I know that interaction between cars and people is more common and successful in Europe. I’m struggling to think of other good places in Seattle where that might work.
Let’s not do another knee-jerk reaction here, similar to what the state with the Four-Loko incident.
This is a very dangerous slippery slope. Should we replace the brick pavement, because it’s uneven and harder to walk on, with smooth concrete? Should we ban the use of knives in the public area that some of the produce shop owners use when giving out free samples?
Yes, these are extreme examples, but where does one draw the line on “safety?” It is a shame that this accident happened, but this isn’t a regular occurrence at all. If this happened on a daily or weekly basis, then yes, perhaps cars should not be allowed there, but this is the first accident that I’ve heard of here at the market in the 3 years that I lived here. Hardly worth banning cars over.