Arlington community members take matters into their own hands regarding SR 530 speeding danger

ARLINGTON, Wash. — A fifty-mile stretch of State Route 530 has started to feel more like the Daytona 500 for some people who live near or commute the highway frequently. So much so, that the community has taken to shaming those speeding drivers on a social media page.

“Public shaming works, unfortunately,” said the creator of the page, Chloe Calhoun.

“I’ve learned that up here, especially in small-town Washington, people don’t like having their bad behavior aired out. It can effect really positive change when they don’t know if they’re going to be caught on camera and posted for the world to see,” said Calhoun.

The page has garnered close to three thousand members and is focused on the stretch between Arlington and Darrington, a two-lane, windy road that is frequent with commuters, semi trucks, and school buses.

“It gets busier and busier,” said bus driver Cathy Pater, “[There’s] a lot more traffic these days.”

Pater first moved to Arlington when she was four years old, living just off Highway 530. Since then, she’s lived on and off the highway four separate times.

The dangers of the highway became evident for her last November when two kids were nearly hit getting off her school bus.

She says it happened near Oso, where the kids have to cross the two-lane highway to get home. Pater had her hazards on for several hundred yards before stopping and putting out her stop-sign paddle. She checked the mirrors as the kids stood up from their seats, then checked them again as they got off the bus. Pater saw no one coming in the opposite direction, so she checked the mirrors again. She gave the kids the okay to pass and as they stepped forward, a car from the line behind the bus crossed into the lane of oncoming traffic.

“Somebody got impatient behind me [and] stomped on it,” Pater recalls, “[The driver] came driving right up beside me, all I can see is the passenger in my window and I scream to the kids, ‘Run!’”

The two kids got across just in time. Video from the bus shows the second student, a girl, having to jump forward as the car slows down. And after, Pater says the driver just drove off.

“My heart just sunk, it was very hard,” Pater said.

That happened in November of last year. The driver and prosecutors reached a plea deal for second-degree negligent driving and the driver was fined $250, according to the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney’s office.

Arlington Public Schools has been back in the classroom for just a week and a half now, and already, Pater has counted ten people trying to run her red stop sign, endangering students.

It’s the type of behavior Calhoun wants to address in the Facebook group, starting up the group after experiencing an incident herself. Calhoun, along with three others in separate cars, were nearly run off the road one rainy night.

“This guy decided to pass all four of us - in the dark, in the rain, around all those corners - and there was an oncoming vehicle he couldn’t see and we couldn’t see until we all hit that corner at the same time,” she recalls.

Calhoun remembers the oncoming driver redirecting towards the shoulder, as the four cars with Calhoun, all had to swerve to escape a serious crash.

It’s one of several incidents she can remember flirting with death or serious injury while driving on that stretch of road.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve barely escaped with our lives,” Calhoun said.

Three people have been killed on Highway 530 just this year. Washington State Patrol reports that in one crash, impairment was a factor, and speed was a factor in another.

Videos of drivers passing in no-passing zones, passing and forcing cars to the shoulder, as well as other risky maneuvers are captured on video and posted to the page. Calhoun encourages the use of dashcams to keep people driving safely.

While the page has led to more enforcement from Washington State Patrol, she thinks some of the road’s design is partly to blame for fast driving.

“People are trying to get home,” Calhoun said, “There are a lack of safe places for people to pass, so we get a lot of angry drivers and a lot of near misses.”

She also questions how many people are aware of the Washington State law that requires drivers to pull over and allow vehicles to pass if there are more than five cars behind them.

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