Pedestrian safety issue hits close to home

Early Wednesday afternoon, a Department employee was struck by a dump truck while crossing the street near DOT Headquarters and taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening injuries.

She was in the crosswalk.

Sadly, she was not the first pedestrian coming to or from our building to be hit by a car. In late April, Amy Polk, a DOT contractor and mother of two young children, was killed.

Now, our headquarters is in a newly redeveloped area of Washington, DC, with plenty of transit access and a growing number of neighborhood amenities. But it also sits on M Street, SE, a very busy route for commercial vehicles.

And I am really, really worried about our employees' safety.

So I met this morning with DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier, DC Transportation Director Gabe Klein, and staff from the Metropolitan Police Department and the DC DOT to see if we could brainstorm some ways to prevent future pedestrian injuries.

Meeting with DDOT's Gabe Klein and DC MPD Chief Cathy Lanier in the DOT Lincoln Room

We agreed to work on a plan that attempts to solve this problem from a variety of angles. Some ideas under consideration include:

• Extended crossing-guard hours
• Stepped-up pedestrian and vehicle enforcement
• Pedestrian training and education
• Speed trailers (the roadside digital signs that display a driver's speed)
• Prohibiting "right turn on red" in the Southeast Federal Center area

I'm encouraged by these. And--thanks to DC's DOT and our Federal Highway Administration--we already have a pedestrian workshop planned for September.

However, the quickest way I can think of to prevent more accidents like these is for employees and visitors walking to and from our building to, please, stay alert.

Whether you're a pedestrian, a bicyclist, or a driver, having the right-of-way does not guarantee your safety. When navigating around town, you must protect yourself by remaining focused and aware.

You can't cross the street safely with your head buried in the latest text messages. And you can't cross the street safely with music blasting in your headphones. Safety means keeping your mind on the traffic around you.

I am very concerned for the thousands of people coming into and out of our building each day, so I appreciate Gabe Klein and Chief Lanier coming in today to help us address this issue.

I hope you'll stay tuned to see what ideas we put into action.

Comments

[Dr. Siena Jonnes]

Yikes, that is awful news. I am growing increasingly convinced that smartphones may be the culprit in lot and lots of accidents. Not sure what to do about it but please keep looking into it. THanks for your work and all the info. Siena

[C. Craig Morris]

M Street is 6 lanes of high-volume, fast-moving construction, industrial, and commuter traffic separating the DOT headquarters building from the Navy Yard metro station and 99.9% of all restaurants and shops in the vicinity. Street blocks are long, and crosswalks are few and far between. The wait for pedestrians to get a signal to cross is long, and the time they have to cross when they get a signal is very short. Harried drivers sometimes turn rapidly in front of pedestrians in crosswalks while pedestrians have the cross signal but drivers also have green. Nearly all vehicles on M street are moving much too fast to slow and stop in time if/when a pedestrian does inadvertently step in front of them. It's a simple mobility-benefit/safety-cost tradeoff, which appears to me much too heavily biased towards mobility and against safety. Some potential mitigation strategies: (1) reduce speed limit on M St; (2) prevent turns on to or off of M St while a pedestrian crosswalk signal is on; (3) provide pedestrian crosswalks and/or tunnels across M St to separate pedestrian and vehicle traffic; (4) provide immediate pedestrian cross signals when the request button is pressed; (5) enforce laws on the books for both drivers and pedestrians; (6) accelerate deployment of technologies to allow all vehicle drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists to detect imminent collision threats and respond accordingly, e.g., using otherwise distracting electronic devices such as smart phones to do the sensing and warning applications automatically.

[Allon]

I read through many various ideas for solving the safety issues. It seems that almost all ideas involves a lot of times, costs, and resources. Being a simple person, lets look this way - whenever an accident between a pedestrian and a vehicle happens, who get hurt the most? Obviously, the pedestrian - no matter whose fault is it. I think that no matter how hard we try to improve the pedestrain safety, the pedistrains always end up being victims. Hence, the pedistrains need to be more cautious -

- stop texting
- look both sides of street
- if you see a car coming and you aren't sure, stay put.
- if you see a car waiting to move and you aren't sure, stay put.
- IMPORTANT TIP - if a car is waiting at light or parking with a driver inside, make sure to get eye contacts and gesture to ask if you can walk on. WAIT WAIT for the driver to respond with a gesture that you can walk on. Again, if you aren't sure or the driver doesn't respond, stay put!

I think that these safety tips are a good way to protect yourself, and they involves no additional resource.

[Video Surveillance]

I'm surprised that the DOT's are still finding themselves so interested in Public Relations instead of focusing directly on their businesses

[Survey Monkey]

If you would like your community livability initiative to succeed, then more attention must be paid to pedestrian safety, especially with the design and location.
it is actually more cost effective. After all, safety is always DOT's top priority, right?