Systematic approaches to address pedestrian and bicyclist injuries from mixed traffic: create crash analysis committees to come up with consensus recommendations

I don't do twitter that much (I should, I know, it's for the cognoscenti)...

This was shared on an e-list I'm on, about a pedestrian death, in response to the report pretty much blaming the victim.

Transit planner: Extra bus stop half-way between lights to shorten rider's walk@MDSHA traffic engineer: Require half-mile detour on foot to reach marked crosswalk from bus stop@PGPDNews police: Blame dead pedestrian for not crossing at crosswalk https://t.co/3avG0J3nBU

— Benjamin Ross (@BenRossTransit) August 29, 2020

Here's my response.

When I was working in Baltimore County as a bike and pedestrian planner, a very similar situation came up, an instance in Atlanta. I was more towards blaming, I hate to admit.

The director of the planning office said in response "she had to cross the street, to get to the store, or to her children, or whatever." This is a design failure ("When design kills: The criminalization of walking," Grist Magazine).

-- "Pedestrian fatalities and street redesign," 2019

OTOH, I couldn't get my direct boss, an associate director, to evince any interest in this outside of our planning engagement, when the Baltimore Sun ran an article, "For people on foot, US 40 is hazardous," about the persistence of pedestrian deaths on US 40, a major arterial which extends across Baltimore County, going through Baltimore City in between ("Walk Hard: Baltimore is unsafe for and unsympathetic to pedestrians," Sun) the eastern and western sections of the county. She said people can call their councilmembers, that it wasn't the job of the Planning Office (nor me, since technically I was charged with working only in a smaller section of the county).

From the article:

From where U.S. 40 merges into Interstate 70 in western Howard County to the Susquehanna River - a stretch of about 52 miles - the highway has been the site of at least 29 pedestrian deaths since Jan. 1, 2003.

Baltimore city accounts for at least eight of the fatalities, all but two in West Baltimore. The city is working to make changes at two identified "hot spots" for pedestrians: at Franklin Street and Warwick Avenue, and Edmondson Avenue and Longwood Street.

More than twice as many, 21, have occurred on state-maintained stretches of the highway in Howard, Baltimore and Harford counties. At three spots - Ellicott City, Rosedale and Aberdeen - are clusters where three or four deaths occurred within a few hundred feet of one another.

Dave Buck, a spokesman for the State Highway Administration, called U.S. 40 "a challenge." He noted that it was built a long time ago, when pedestrian safety was a much lower priority. ...

U.S. 40 is classified as a principal arterial highway - a category of road that was identified in a recent report as especially hazardous for pedestrians. These are the heavily used, generally four-lane or more highways where pedestrian traffic is not separated from vehicular traffic as it is on interstates. They are typically roads that preceded the interstate system and evolved in an era where the car was king.

These must have been triggering incidents, making me super committed to applying the Pedsafe and Bikesafe protocols in systematic ways to these situations.  These "safety guide and countermeasure selection systems" were commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration to help local planners and traffic engineering professionals to identify safety problems and identify and implement solutions in a systematic manner.

So for the study, I asked for and received data from the police department traffic analysis section on all the accidents in the planning district I was working on, but I didn't have time to analyze it. (We were funded on a grant and the county was unwilling to pop for a few thousand dollars more to pay us for a couple more months to refine the plan and analysis.)

But these incidents, especially multiple incidents in particular locations, and the number of incidents related to high school aged student pedestrians not paying attention in high traffic areas, communicated the need for a systematic approach.

Even though I wasn't able to do the analysis, I was proud of the recommendation I put in the plan to create an accident analysis committee consisting of people from planning, DPW, police traffic enforcement, and police traffic safety, the State Highway Administration, which controls most major arterials, and advocates, to be able to provide a process for systematic evaluation of what happened and to be able to respond with not just a set of urban design related recommendations, what Pedsafe and Bikesafe call "countermeasure identification and selection systems" but also a system for overseeing the implementation of solutions.

Basically, instead of the transit planner, traffic engineer, and police department all analyzing the same incident differently, not working together, and not coming up with integrated solutions, you put them together, to create a consensus analysis and response.

That stayed in the plan. I don't know if they've executed it.

Grassroots traffic calming signs commissioned by the Salt Lake City Department of Transportation.

At the time, I didn't think to ask for some of the accident reports, and to do a workshop as a trial run, to imprint the idea more widely.

(Separately, Washington State recommends that school districts create traffic safety committees to do with SRTS.  Other communities have similar committees, but I doubt they do accident analysis, more they are focused on messaging, and safe routes to school.)

Anyway, I've made similar points sometimes in emails I think, but mostly in blog entries wrt Action Committee for Transit responses to pedestrian issues in Montgomery County, that they fail to advocate for a program and process for dealing systematically with pedestrian injuries and fatalities, instead, they agitate in an idiosyncratic way in response to pedestrian deaths and accidents.

Ben Ross' tweet identifies the problem, but he should be equally focused on coming up with a solution, because that's what advocates do.

Theoretically, the agency officials could implement this kind of process, but they don't think about it, usually and it needs to be a cross-agency initiative. That's why you need advocates (and elected officials) to push agencies to do what I think they should be doing anyway

The 2017 Baltimore Sun article "How Maryland decides to make roads safer for pedestrians," discusses how the State Highway Administration program addresses pedestrian safety on the roads they control and manage.  Mostly they don't do pedestrian-specific improvements but incorporate improvements into ongoing road projects.    The article was drawn from a longer piece by the Capital News Service.

SHA divides the state into districts, with specific offices in each.  Typically, advocates don't engage much with those offices.  When working in Baltimore County, I found them to be interested in working on sustainable mobility, but they weren't proactive.  They needed the county to ask them to come to the table.

ACT could promote this kind of systematic approach to elected officials, who would in turn push transportation department officials to work with SHA in a more systematic manner.