On the afternoon of September 10, video started circulating of a car driving along the I-90 Trail, the shared-use path that runs across Lake Washington on the side of the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge. It went up on Reddit that same day and onto Bluesky by early evening, passed along by cyclists who use the crossing daily. The clips show a car moving along a path built for people on foot and on bikes, with nowhere for anyone to go but over the railing into the lake.
The reaction has been predictable and the coverage has mostly stopped at “look at this.” The more useful question is what actually happens to someone who does this in Washington, and the answer turns out to be a genuine mess.
The trail exists because cars are banned from the bridge deck
Start with why there is a path there at all. Washington Administrative Code 468-58-050 prohibits all nonmotorized traffic on state highways built as fully controlled limited-access facilities, with an explicit carve-out for “pedestrian overcrossings and undercrossings or other facilities provided specifically for the use of such traffic.” The I-90 Trail is that carve-out. It is not a bike lane bolted onto a highway. It is a separate legal facility that exists precisely because bikes and pedestrians are barred from the roadway beside it.
That framing matters when you start looking for the statute a driver would be charged under, because the trail is not a road and it is arguably not a sidewalk either.
Four statutes, four wildly different outcomes
RCW 46.61.606 is the obvious one and the weakest. It reads, in full: “No person shall drive any vehicle upon a sidewalk or sidewalk area except upon a permanent or duly authorized temporary driveway.” It has been on the books since 1975. Washington’s infraction statute, RCW 46.63.020, does not list it among the criminal exceptions, so violating it is a civil traffic infraction, not a crime…