by David Mendez

Aurora Avenue and Ballinger Way are built to bear the load of traffic. They’re state routes designed to move cars and link communities, and they’re two of the three busiest streets in Shoreline. The third, however, is 175th Street, which links Aurora and Interstate 5 for thousands of students, commuters, bus riders, emergency responders and commercial drivers.

At its heart is Meridian Avenue. Spend some time there during morning or afternoon rush hours and you’ll see one of the busiest, highest-trafficked intersections in the city. Meridian and 175th has been reported as one of the spots with the most crashes in Shoreline. It’s also the northeastern edge of Meridian Park Elementary School, which serves more than 600 students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

On March 30, the Shoreline City Council will discuss an ordinance that would allow automated speed ticketing cameras in school zones. The first set of cameras would be installed outside of Meridian Park Elementary. If approved, the cameras would snap license plate photos of any car breaking school zone speed limits, and send a citation and a fine to the vehicle owner’s address.

After years of asking, many parents, neighbors and school staff now have what they hope will be a solution to the close calls and near-misses they see on an uncomfortably regular basis. They hope, at least, that this can get drivers to change.

John Norris, a retired Navy Commander who has been a Meridian Park crossing guard for three years, said that he hasn’t personally had any close calls.

“Well, not close, like I thought that I was in danger, or the kids. But every once in a while, you know—” he grimaced, emphatically urging an imagined car to “stop!”

“But that’s pretty rare. Maybe once a month,” Norris said. “Which, you know, tell a parent that, and that doesn’t sound rare, does it?”

Let’s put it this way: If you visit the crosswalk at 175th and Wallingford on a Friday afternoon when school lets out, crossing guards will be there for half an hour — 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after the bell rings. During that 30 minutes, you’re bound to see a handful of cars rolling through the crosswalk, even after crossing guards like Norris step out, waving flags and staring drivers down. Some of those drivers will weakly wave as they roll through the painted crosswalk. Some will hardly hesitate as they continue through. Others will stop, but only a foot or two outside the crosswalk. If you peek into the cars, you’ll see folks looking for their kids or their friends; you’ll see people waiting (with boredom or anxiety) for traffic to get moving again; and you’ll definitely see people fiddling with their phones.

“It’s funny. I don’t think they’re aggressive. I think they’re not just paying attention. Cell phones are a big problem,” Norris said. “I had a guy the other day. The guy, coming up in the middle lane, just kept coming. Kids behind me, I had the flag out, he kept coming. He didn’t stop until he was halfway in the crosswalk. And he had his head down, looking at his lap, had his headphones on.”

That’s not to say there aren’t aggressors. Multiple folks mentioned an incident in which a driver’s car hit a crossing guard’s flag; the driver then allegedly got aggressive toward the guard. Others recalled a van, associated with a local radio station, that slowly rolled through a crosswalk active with kids.

“Sometimes you get speeders too, going through,” Norris said. “That’s what the traffic cameras will help.”

Speed cameras have been on Shoreline’s radar for more than two years. The city began considering them for use in 2024, when city staff were asked to study driver habits around schools across the city. After two months of data collection, staff found that Meridian Park Elementary School had the highest instance of cars breaking the 20 MPH school zone speed limit each day.

The 2024 survey measured traffic going both east and west from Meridian Park Elementary along 175th Street, as well as traffic going south on Meridian Avenue during school zone hours. More than half of drivers measured were found going at least five miles faster than the posted 20 MPH limit. During morning measurements, 79% of vehicles — four out of every five cars — on 175th were measured going faster than the 20 MPH school zone limit. Nearly 30% of all traffic was found to go faster than 35 MPH.

A 2013 study found pedestrians face a 10% risk of being killed when hit by a car going 24 MPH or lower. As vehicle speed increases, the odds of surviving being hit by a car fall along a curve. A person hit at 32 MPH has a 25% chance of dying. For a person hit at 40 MPH, survival becomes a coin-flip, with 50% odds of death. And vehicles with taller front-ends (like nearly every late-model truck or SUVs) have been shown to cause serious injuries even at slower speeds.

So the question is, how does a city work to slow vehicle speeds, especially in places like school zones, where some of the most vulnerable pedestrians are around in high concentrations?

Molly Chapman has been asking that question for years as one of the parents urging the city into action. She observed that there are already nine different safety measures set up at 175th and Wallingford, at the northeastern-most edge of Meridian Park Elementary School. There’s a painted crosswalk, flashing school zone signs, crosswalk signs that flash when a pedestrian presses a button. Crossing guards set out an A-frame sign, wear bright vests and carry flags. Signs warning drivers abound. But there are still instances where drivers simply aren’t paying attention.

Chapman is a Meridian Park mom and a former president of the Meridian Park Parents Teachers Students Association. She’s spent many mornings walking her kids to school, and experiencd her share of close calls and alarming incidents. After learning that the City of Edmonds was installing speed cameras near its schools and speaking with its traffic engineers, she began carrying a petition around town.

It wasn’t long before she had gathered more than 180 signatures in support of installing speed cameras.

“It’s like I was handing out free money,” she said.

Speed enforcement cameras are generally accepted to make drivers slow down, and one nearby speed camera bears that out. Speeding citations near Broadview-Thompson Elementary School, at 130th Street and Greenwood Avenue, dropped from about 17,001 in 2013 to 6,242 in 2023.

At issue Monday is whether or not to approve an ordinance allowing the city to use automated cameras to enforce speeding violations. Cameras likely wouldn’t be installed until the end of 2026, and tickets wouldn’t be issued until the end of a 30 day warning period, pushing the effective date of the cameras to January 2027 at earliest.

But before any of that is resolved, the city would need to make a deal with a vendor. And that’s where Norbert Steele’s problem with the plan comes in.

“So, speed cameras do work. There’s tons of studies on how they do reduce speeds and change behavior. But my main problem with the cameras are primarily that the city is planning to go to an outside national security contractor,” said Steele. “There’s no reason to use these companies. Also, they’re going to charge you $100,000 a year for one camera. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life.”

One city staff estimate suggests the cameras would cost $250,000 in annual costs to an equipment vendor. Another estimated that the cameras may cost around $100,000 annually, depending on the length of the contract with the vendor.

Steele believes that the city could cut costs by bringing the job of building and operating the camera program in-house. To do so the city would have to build out its information technology staffing — though Steele believes the city could easily pay a few salaries with the savings.

“What do you mean you can’t spend, like, $150K on two IT nerds to set up your IT infrastructure and not end up contracting that work out to somebody else at like, $500K a year?” Steele said.

The city believes it can negotiate clauses into its contract with a vendor insisting that citation data not be shared with third parties unless required by a court order. City staff also believe that costs for the cameras can be evened out — and start generating revenue — at about 4,000 annual citations, starting at $130 per violation.

Gracie Mathieson, 12, is a Shoreline sixth grader. She’s well acquainted with the dangers of her neighborhood — her family lives close enough to 175th and Meridian that they can hear car crashes from inside their home, her mother said.

In Gracie’s last year at Meridian Park Elementary, she joined the student patrol, a program that gives students a chance to take care of their campus and their fellow students. During her time on the patrol team, she had two two-week shifts on crossing duty.

“When I first started, I knew there were a lot of red light runners, so I was kind of expecting that. I just wasn’t expecting how many there were,” Gracie said, estimating about 15 red-light runners each week.

Ironically, her closest call came not on last year’s crossing guard duty but just a few months ago on her way back from middle school. Her bus drops her off next to Meridian Park Elementary School, leaving her to cross 175th and Meridian again on her way home. “And every day when I get off the bus, I have to cross the busier side of the intersection,” Gracie said.

“I looked at the car behind me, and they waved at me to let me know I could go. So I stepped into the crosswalk and then they came speeding around the corner, so I had to step back,“ Gracie said. Now, she has to keep her head on a swivel.

“It was just a little shocking at first, because they signaled that I could go, then they went ahead,” she said. “Now I check over my shoulder very often and stay away from the curb…I don’t want that to happen twice.”