Car cruising down bike trail on Seattle’s I-90 bridge baffles troopers

Plenty of motorists are used to being passed by speeders on Washington's highways, but footage of a car illegally speeding down the I-90 floating bridge's bike trail now has state officials investigating.

That video, uploaded to Reddit on Thursday, shows a a westbound white car passing freeway traffic on the path for pedestrians and bikes, spotted from the car of a light rail train bound for Seattle.

The Washington State Patrol received reports about the incident but by the time troopers got there, the car was gone, Trooper Rick Johnson said. The car's license plate wasn't identifiable in the video.

We are hoping that witnesses call in if they have any identifying information," Johnson wrote in an email.

The state Department of Transportation is looking into the incident, as well, to see how a car got on the car-free path.

The agency learned about the post on social media and first had to make sure it was real and not generated by AI, said RB McKeon, a spokesperson for the department: "We were pretty quickly able to determine that it was real."

Agency officials checked out the area, McKeon said, and “there are no bollards on the Mercer Island side" of Interstate 90. Bollards are posts that are used to keep vehicles from entering prohibited areas.

McKeon called the incident an anomaly.

"The maintenance crews that I was talking to today, they don’t have any memory of something like this happening before," McKeon said Monday.

Still, the department is concerned enough to consider measures to prevent it from happening again, she said.

The department is waiting to see what the Washington State Patrol learns about the incident and must get an understanding of who has jurisdiction over the areas where protection might be needed.

"Although we don’t want cars there, we want pedestrians, walkers, rollers," McKeon said. "We don’t just want to swing the pendulum the other way so it can’t be used by the people for what it was designed.

The Reddit account that posted the video didn't respond to a Seattle Times request for an interview.

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