In reference to the article “City, Sound Transit responsible for fatal bike crash, victim’s brother says,” which mentions the many bicycle accidents caused by streetcar rails, with wheels often getting trapped in the grooves, I want to point out that mixing rail cars with other traffic has been obsolete for many years.
I rode my bike to high school in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands more than 50 years ago and remember that they had taken out all streetcars and replaced them with buses because of the many accidents with bicycles, including deadly ones.
Rail transportation is only safe if completely separated from other traffic. Motorcycles can also slip on wet rails. It has been a blunder of Sound Transit and the city of Seattle to put them in where that separation is not possible. Competent traffic engineering would have prevented it.
The responsible solution is to take the street cars out again and certainly stop putting new ones in. Where is this infatuation with an obsolete concept coming from? Federal subsidies for rail transit? Bureaucratic ineptness? Perhaps both?
Peter Hammerschlag, Sammamish