By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

The 24-year-old woman rescued from her submerged car after a speeding driver hit her on Alki Avenue on Sunday is improving.

Harborview Medical Center tells WSB that Madison Kelly is now in serious condition, an upgrade from critical, which is how she was assessed after bystanders pulled her from the water and performed CPR even before SPD and SFD arrived at the scene. Crowdfunding continues to help her and her family with expenses.

We don’t know the status of the 23-year-old man reported to be driving at high speed before hitting her car so hard it was pushed over an embankment and into Puget Sound; police say they placed him under arrest at the crash scene but did not book him into jail as he was also taken to Harborview, with non-life-threatening injuries.

Nearby residents have long lobbied the city for more action against racing and other street disorder on Alki and Harbor Avenues. SDOT installed some speed humps/cushions and raised dividers last fall, but a long stretch of Alki Avenue – including the 1300 block, where the collision happened – remains without them. After Sunday’s crash, resident Steve Pumphrey, a leader of the neighborhood group that’s been pushing for changes, emailed city leaders a letter reading in part:

… The accident that may yet result in a fatality was reported as caused by high speed (a witness reports in excess of 90 mph) and reckless driving by the person behind the steering wheel of a so-called “racer.” It sadly becomes the capstone in an argument we have been making for years to have the city install speed humps along Harbor Avenue where they do not exist, along Alki Avenue to the beach business district, and around SW 63rd to Beach Drive. This stretch from the West Seattle Bridge to the beach and beyond is, and has been for years, a popular raceway known throughout the county, and if nothing is done, more incidents like (Sunday’s), and worse, will continue to occur. I should add that the problem becomes even worse during the dark hours.

The situation along Harbor and Alki Avenues has not improved except for a small part of the stretch where speed humps were installed earlier this year from the water taxi dock to Anchor Park. This is an urgent need, and something must be done before more innocent people — residents and visitors alike — are injured or worse yet killed!

Pumphrey also urged City Councilmembers to approve the speed-camera proposal currently before them.

We sent inquiries to both SDOT and Councilmember Lisa Herbold‘s office on Monday morning to ask about the status of more traffic calming in the area. Councilmember Herbold and her office told us today that they contacted SDOT in both May and June to advocate for the neighbors, and shared a previous email chain with SDOT’s Bill LaBorde in which he told them last month in part:

… Regarding the traffic safety requests, we’ve been prioritizing all traffic safety requests against serious and fatal crash data overlaid with a racial and social equity screen and, by these criteria, the Harbor-Alki corridor doesn’t rank as high as requests we receive from other parts of the city with more urgent needs safety needs, more so given the speed humps and other traffic calming we’ve already added to the corridor over the last several months (the corridor ranks in the lowest 20th percentile of arterials in the attached 2022 High Injury Network map, which was compiled before the new speed humps were added). …

That’s from LaBorde’s email response dated June 9th. SDOT’s response to us, via spokesperson Mariam Ali, arrived less than an hour ago:

We are aware of the reckless and illegal driving occurring in these areas and are looking into identifying safety improvements to help address residents’ concerns. We continue to monitor the traffic data in the area as one of the steps to help us determine if any additional short or long-term safety improvements can be made.

As you know, we built safety improvements in this area to address community concerns to the reckless and illegal driving incidents. This includes:

-Building safety enhancements along Harbor Ave SW and Alki Ave SW between the West Seattle Water Taxi and Luna Park.
-Installing about a half dozen sets of speed humps, as well as a raised center divider to prevent people from illegally driving in the wrong direction to pass other cars.
-Working with Seattle Parks Department to consider whether to put speed humps within the Don Armeni Boat Ramp parking lot.
-Building speed humps and crossing improvements further west on Alki Ave SW between 63rd Ave SW and 57th Ave SW.

In addition, we’ve collected feedback on the early designs for the Alki Point Healthy Street project and working on a proposed design concept. We plan to share this proposed design concept with the community soon.

We also asked SDOT about the current price tag for a speed hump/cushion; roughly $10,000, Ali said.

We will continue to follow up on multiple facets of this, from the safety concerns to the people involved in this specific collision.