Park to extend into Madison Street road end

The vision of replacing the somewhat disheveled East Madison Street road end by extending Madison Park into that prime space is being advanced, however glacially, by the Madison Park Community Council (MPCC) with the apparent support of the principal governmental bodies that must ultimately approve the plan. A committee of the MPCC, headed by Kathleen Stearns, is busily working on the practical implications of turning cement into greenbelt. But there are significant obstacles which stand in the way of quick realization of the vision. Planning is complicated not only by the high cost of the project but also by the fact that multiple agencies must be involved in the approvals.

According to Stearns, all of the principal players are in general agreement that putting a park at the road end will not only beautify the space and create a better recreational amenity for the community, but it will also improve safety for both drivers and walkers at the intersection of E. Madison Street and 43rd Avenue E. The MPCC’s Waterfront Park Expansion Committee is engaged in discussions with the City and with the State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) on how to move from vision to reality.

The dock at the road end is owned by the City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, but the water underneath, plus the shoreline and a triangular land parcel are owned by DNR. From the edge of the shoreline, part of the Madison Street extension is controlled by the Parks Department, while the roadway in front (43rd Avenue E.) is owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation. According to Stearns, “It’s my impression that the City and DNR are supportive.” In the end, she noted, even the Army Corps of Engineers may need to weigh in on any reconfigurations that might affect the shoreline.

So making the necessary changes will not be easy. Among the issues the committee will have to grapple with, according to Stearns, are how to properly deal with any wildlife habitat located in the vicinity, how to remove blackberry bushes at the road end in an environmentally correct way, and how to ensure that water shading at the site is not changed adversely for Lake wildlife.

Because of the scope of the project and the lack of immediate funds to implement it, the Committee realizes that the project will have to be broken into smaller segments. She says that under existing City programs, application can made for individual grants of $15,000 in support of the ultimate proposal. At that rate it will take a very long time to fully implement a comprehensive park plan for the road end. But there may also be private funding raising in support of the project, says Stearns.

Stearns cautions that this is really just the initial phase of the process, and there will be “extensive” opportunities for the community to be involved in the planning process as the committee moves toward the goal of an implementable plan. The first stage of such a plan might involve “adjustments” to the traffic pattern at the intersection of Madison and 43rd, she noted. A future stage, well short of the final vision, might be to grass over the area from 43rd to the Lake edge. In the end, the committee would love to see the area restored to parkland, easily accessible to the community. Since the road end is currently used for parking, the committee will recommend that any new design includes some parking spaces in the immediate area of the intersection of Madison and 43rd.

Stearns says she hopes for the support of neighboring property owners and businesses at that end of Madison. She notes that Madison is the only Seattle thoroughfare that extends from water to water (Elliott Bay to Lake Washington), and it would be an asset to the community to have Madison end in a park area opening onto the Lake. “We have a vision and plan to move ahead,” she said, “but it’s going to take us a very long time to get there.”

I, for one, hope I live to see that day.

[Graphic by Jim Quigg, Madison Park Community Council.]

False raccoon alert masks burglary

(not the actual perpetrator)

Recently some Washington Park neighbors of mine up on the 1100 block of 39th had a rather disconcerting late-night experience. It seems that their small dog often becomes upset when hearing raccoons rummaging about (as do my dogs). So on that particular night when their dog became super agitated in the early morning hours, they assumed that it was another case of raccoon fever and ignored the warnings.

The dog, of course, knew better.

The next morning when the family came down from their second-floor bedrooms they discovered that during the night the first floor had been “cleaned out.” Missing items included the TV and various other electronic gadgets. It was not a pretty scene.

And as far as I’m aware, this story is not generally known in the neighborhood (it was reported to me as an anecdote by another neighbor). As I mentioned in my earlier post on crime in Madison Park, there is no source of crime information readily available to us; so if information is power, residents of the Park seem to be comparatively powerless. Although the Madison Park Times does publish a police report, the paper only comes out monthly, and its coverage area for police reporting includes Madrona and Leschi, as well as Madison Valley. I am aware of no timely source of crime information that covers just our neighborhood.

So, in an attempt to help rectify this situation I’ve decided to add a Police Blotter to this blog where I will post on a timely basis the relevant police reports from the East Precinct. From my review the the police reports for all of the Seattle precinct's last week I can say that the East precinct seems to be a quieter beat than the others, and Madison Park is comparatively crime-free relative to the Capitol Hill area. Let's hope this week is a representative sample.

My first Police Blotter follows.

POLICE BLOTTER
WEEK OF MAY 1-8

May 2: A resident of the 1500 block of 39th Avenue reported that he believed his ex-wife had stolen three pistols from his residence sometime since the end of the year. He said he believed his wife still had possession of a garage door opener and a back-door key to the residence. He admitted that he did not have any proof that his ex-wife was responsible for the theft.

May 4: A resident of the 2300 block of 43rd reported an attempted burglary at her residence that occurred while she was out of the house doing errands. She stated that when she returned home she found her door standing open with damage to the door and frame. She found the apartment empty and nothing appeared to be missing, so she assumed that she may have frightened off the suspect(s).

May 1-5: In three separate incidents in the Arboretum, individuals reported that their cars had been broken into while they were away from their vehicles enjoying the park. In two of the cases, laptops were stolen. In the third case, a man reported that someone had taken advantage of his open car window to reach in and unlock the door in order to steal the man’s dog from the back seat.

Pedestrian crossing at Broadmoor explained

Given the low-grade controversy the City generated by installing improvements to the crossing at 36th and Madison, it is perhaps a bit surprising to learn that the new “median island” was not constructed because of pedestrian complaints about the crossing; nor were the changes made because of a high level of vehicle/pedestrian collisions there. Moreover, it seems that no petitions were made by any Madison Park group requesting a revision of the traffic pattern at that location.

So what happened? The short answer is that it was just our turn to get upgraded under an on-going City program to make Seattle more walk-able. Some of you may have noticed the Seattle Times article this morning concerning the Pedestrian Master Plan that the City has just released in draft form. The pedestrian crossing at 36th Avenue East and East Madison was specifically mentioned in the story as an example of the kinds of pre-plan implementation projects that are already underway but are consistent with the plan’s overall process and objectives.

I spoke this week with Carol McMahan, who runs the “early implementation” program at the City’s Department of Transportation. She told me that the Broadmoor crossing meets the criteria for an upgrade. When it comes to “uncontrolled marked crossings” (those without traffic lights or stop signs), the priority this year is to make improvements where pedestrians must cross a three-lane road that has average daily traffic in excess of 12,000 vehicles. In 2008 all of the priority four-lane crossings with a high level of traffic were upgraded. This year the City is moving on to the three-lane roads. A Crown Hill crossing preceded ours, and a Georgetown crossing is next on the list, she said.

The primary purpose of placing a crossing island in the middle of the road, according to McMahan, is to eliminate the “multi threat” of having pedestrians worry about cars coming at them from both directions while crossing a wide roadway. After arriving at the median island, a pedestrian can reassess the crossing in a relatively safe way. Additionally, cars are prevented from using the middle lane as a passing lane, further improving pedestrian safety.

So there you have it. As for the motorists who are inconvenienced by these changes, they will clearly have to get over it. The City is officially unsympathetic, and more protruding curbs and median islands are on the way. Public comment on the new Pedestrian Master Plan is being solicited through June 15. (http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/pedestrian_masterplan).

Is crime up in Madison Park?

Good question. Unfortunately, there is no official data available to answer the question. Why? Because the City of Seattle has not published any crime statistics since June 2008, and there are currently no East Precinct reports available online for months later than December 2007. The supposed reason for this lack of reporting is that a change in the precinct boundaries has made it difficult to do comparative studies of crime in the City. However, this is not much of an explanation for why overall crime numbers are not now available for the new precincts or even for the City as a whole.

So crime may well be on the increase in Madison Park, but who knows? What we do know, however, is that historically, Madison Park is not considered a high-crime area relative to much of the rest of the City, especially that part of Seattle south of the ship canal. The total number of annual major crimes per square mile in the neighborhood has been well below the 500-incident threshold every year since the late 1990s, placing Madison Park squarely in the bottom crime-risk tier of the five-category scale used by the City. In contrast, several areas of downtown that fit into the top risk category suffer with major crimes at a level of 3,700 or more incidents per square mile annually.

We may feel, based on anecdotes, that crime is headed in the wrong direction, but in fact the crime trend for the Madison Park neighborhood (census tract 63) was actually in the right direction to the point reporting stopped at the end of 2007 (see chart above). What happened in 2008 and thereafter is apparently a secret known only to a select few police statisticians. And they’re not saying.

I asked the media relations officer of the Seattle Police if he thought it was acceptable for the City not to have current Seattle crime statistics available to the public, and he agreed that it was certainly not a good thing. But he expressed the hope that this information would be made available to everyone very soon, maybe this week!

Don't hold your breath. I discovered an entry posted seven months ago by a blogger for another East Precinct neighborhood. In it he reported that the Police were saying monthly crime information would be available beginning the following month. Didn’t happen.

If and when Madison Park crime information is ever again made available to the City’s taxpayers and crime victims, you will see the report here.

My (brief) life with the cybercriminals: an object lesson for us all

Who hasn’t THIS happened to? You’re going along minding your own business when suddenly you discover that Nigerian cybercriminals have hijacked your email account, stolen your identity, and are now posing as you by sending out emails asking your friends, family, and associates to send you money in London, where supposedly you are stranded after having lost your wallet! You have no ability to regain control of your email account because the cybercriminals have changed both your password and all of account’s security settings, so you can’t even prove that the account was ever yours! Sound familiar?

Well, if not, don’t think it couldn’t happen to you. Reportedly, this kind of thing happens to about 80,000 email account holders every single month. And last month, it happened to innocent little me.

Okay, okay, so I don’t really know that they were Nigerians. They could just as easily have been Poles or Russians, or even people from Moldova. The fact is that the internet gives everyone with access an equal opportunity to think up a scam and implement it. Nigerians are at the forefront of many of these deceptions, but they have plenty of nefarious company from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I admit that I don’t know who did it, but I can now surmise how it was done. And knowing the how is valuable information for those who would like to avoid my fate.

I first got the suspicion that something was terribly wrong when my father-in-law called my wife to ask her how I was doing and whether it was true that I was visiting London. My wife assured him that I was perfectly fine and was definitely not in London. Then why, he wondered, had Bryan just sent him an email asking for money to be sent to London to help him get home? Gosh, I don’t know, she replied. She yells “Bryan, did you send my Dad an email?” I replied that I had not--and that could have been the end of that. Except for the fact that about an hour later I got an inquiry from an old friend with a question along the same lines. No, I was not in London! Don’t send money.

What was going on? Then I remembered that when I had tried to access my email account the previous evening I had been unable to do so. My password was not accepted and I was locked out of the account. Now I tried to sign in again, but I was still locked out. Then someone forwarded the email to me that I supposedly had just sent them (reproduced here with the incorrect syntax and spelling intact):

“Hello, How are you doing ? hope all is well with you and family,i am sorry that i didn't inform you about my traveling to England for a program called Empowering youth For social change. I need a favour from you as soon as you receive this e-mail, I misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable's were kept. Urgently assist me with a soft loan of $2,500 to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home. I will appreciate whatever you can afford and i'll pay you back as soon as i return,Kindly let me know if you can be of help? so that i can send you the details to use when sending the money through western union. Regards,Bryan”

Well, anyone who knows me would, I hope, also know that I am a much better writer than is evidenced by this missive. Where is the pathos? Where is the stirring call to action that anyone should have expected of me? And that use of the British spelling (“favour”) was just so not me! I was impressed, however, with the cybercriminals’ correct use of the possessive “my” in the sentence stating that I had failed to inform the recipient about “my traveling to England.” Most cybercriminals probably would have been satisfied to use the ungrammatical “me” at that juncture.

Anyway, here’s the point. Some gang had taken control of my account and was engaged in a form of identity theft: my identity. The fact that they were, to some extent, fools did not mitigate the fact that I was no longer in control of my email account, one that had been mine for the past 15 years or so. How could this happen?

Well, here’s how. I had a very short, simple password for my email account at Hotmail (part of Microsoft, by the way). And more importantly, this password was the same one that I also used for many other on-line accounts (such as for signing on to catalog-order sites and web-based retailers). In hindsight I now understand that using the same password for multiple purposes is an absolute no-no. But like many others, I suffer from both a lack of creativity and a poor memory. One password for everything seemed like a fine idea at the time.

But it’s not. For even though it is unlikely for cybercriminals to directly hack into the site of an email provider such as Hotmail, it is not so rare for these guys to hack into the server of an internet retailer or other on-line service company. Once the thieves have done this, they immediately have knowledge both of the password you use on the site they’ve hacked and (in most cases) your email address as well. If you are one of the many people who use the same password for virtually everything, knowing your email address and your password on the site they have hacked has just given them access to your email account. They simply go to Hotmail (or whatever company you use as your email provider) and try the password to see if it works. If it does, they are then into the account as you. At which point they change the password and the security settings so that when you go to sign in you can’t. And when you go to reset the password you can’t do that either (because these devious guys pretending they are you have already changed the password reset question from “What was your first grade teacher’s name?” to “What is your father’s middle name?” Guess what, you don’t know that the answer to the new question is “Kashimawo.” And the city that Hotmail had previously thought you were located in has been changed from “Seattle” to “Lagos.”) You lose.

So the answer is: use a unique password for your email account, one that is used by you on no other website. It is also better to have a longer password than mine was (pesker), and still better to have an alphanumeric password than otherwise. Though I got away being a password innocent for more than a decade, take a lesson from my experience.

I now have a new email account with a long alphanumeric password that I use for no other purpose. But while I have wised up, the cybercriminals who hijacked my account apparently haven’t. They are still wasting their time trying to get money from my contacts. I heard from a friend that just a couple weeks ago she had been in a chat session with the Nigerian Bryan Tagas, who had lowered the amount of money he said he needed from $2,500 to a measly $600.

Still, no takers.


[I am indebted to Ira Glass of This American Life for my opening line. In a teaser spot for a then-upcoming This American Life on NPR he introduced the week’s story along the following lines:

Who hasn’t THIS happened to? A widow contracts with a cryogenics company to freeze her dead husband in case there’s ever a cure for his disease. Only she later discovers that the cryogenics company owner failed to tell her… (Voice of the Cryogenics Company Owner: “Well, if there’s one thing I’m a bit embarrassed about it’s the fact that I didn’t tell her that I was putting her husband in a cylinder with several other dead bodies…”).

I just love Ira’s show and if you’re not a fan yet, just listen to the show one time and you will be. It’s available on podcast: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/]

[The above photo, courtesy of Flickr, shows the passport and other documentation of an actual Nigerian email scammer!]

Has it really come to this?

It’s hard not to notice the recent improvements to the center turn lane at the crosswalk in front of the entrance to Broadmoor. City crews apparently completed their work on the project this week, but the concrete and asphalt bumpers (and associated signage) have left many of us wondering: Has it really come to this?

Madison Park resident Dave Hutchins, who took this lovely shot of the new barrier, provides his own list of possible explanations:

· A pedestrian safety island?
· A traffic hazard?
· A clever device for discouraging people from using the center
turn lane as a high-speed passing lane?
· All of the above?
· None of the above?
· Other?

If the City has an answer, it’s not saying (or, at least the City’s Department of Transportation did not respond to our request for comment last week). Personally, I suspect that the City DOT is simply recognizing the fact that crossing Madison is so unsafe—even in such a well-marked and lighted location as at Broadmoor—that some kind of shelter must be provided to pedestrians so they can huddle there while waiting to make the second half of their journey across the thoroughfare. Most of us have had multiple bad experiences of practically being run down by both inattentive drivers and those who, upon seeing someone in a crosswalk, decide to speed up in order to get through the crosswalk before the pedestrian can. I hate to say it, but I think that about a third of the drivers through Madison Park do not stop for pedestrians who are at (or, in many cases, in) marked crosswalks. It was not that long ago that an elderly Madison Park resident was run down and killed in a crosswalk about a third of a mile down the road from the Broadmoor crossing. Those worthy souls who recently installed the orange crossing flags at various crosswalks in the neighborhood recognized that we have a real problem in the Park.

Even so, it appears that some people are not happy with what the City has done at Broadmoor. Dave reports that the subject came up at a recent meeting of the Madison Park Community Council. “Several people spoke of their unhappiness about the platform,” he said. “Folks from Broadmoor are unhappy because it makes it difficult for them to make a left hand turn out of Broadmoor onto Madison, especially during heavy traffic times. Folks who use the alley across from the Broadmoor entrance are unhappy because it makes it difficult to make a left hand turn onto Madison.” Others, however, said they were “pleased with the platform because it restricts the use of the center lane for those trying to use it as a passing lane.”

For my part, I vote in favor of the new barrier. I only wish that the City had thought to stock the center island with a supply of nails that the sheltering pedestrians could throw into the path of oncoming cars whose drivers refuse to yield the right of way.

But perhaps that’s just asking too much.

If the City decides to provide an explanation of who requested the barrier and why it became a priority you will find the answers here.