The Boston City Council held a hearing today on Vision Zero and traffic calming in the city. WalkUP Roslindale attended and submitted testimony, reproduced below and available as an official PDF. The preliminary take-home is it’s going to take a lot of work and pushing our officials zealously to really turn the ship in the right direction.
Roslindale Bulletin: City Speed Limit could Fall to 20mphWe appreciate how well the Roslindale Bulletin continues to cover WalkUP Roslindale’s core issues. Earlier this month, Christopher Roberson wrote this piece about the Boston City Council’s move to set the default Boston speed limit to 20 mph. This will save lives, as the survivability of a pedestrian-automobile crash is mainly a function of speed: 90% of
pedestrians hit by cars die when struck at 40 mph compared to 5% at 20 mph.
District 5 Councillor Timothy McCarthy said the last speed limit change was implemented by a transportation commissioner who was from Ludlow, where higher speed limits are more common.
“If you go 20 mph in Ludlow, you probably wouldn’t get out of Ludlow for a few days,” said McCarthy. “But in our area, 20 mph is plenty.”
He said that West Roxbury Police Sgt. Michael O’Hara has done demonstrations in the past to show the actual speed of a vehicle traveling 30 mph relative to a pedestrian. He said O’Hara would ask residents to stand on the side of the road while a he drove by at exactly 30 mph.
“If you’re standing on the edge of the road and a Crown Vic goes by at 30 mph, you might as well be at NASCAR, you’re not getting out of the way,” said McCarthy.
Kudos to Councilor McCarthy for helping push this walkability initiative.
We should remember that setting a safer speed limit is only a starting point. Most drivers will follow road design more than posted limits, so the ultimate solution must involve safer road design including narrower car lanes and other traffic calming measures (all key aspects of Vision Zero). A recent letter to the editor in the Boston Globe makes this same point. But we need not let these broader infrastructure challenges get in the way of a common-sense first step.
Breaking news (4/27/16 afternoon): From City Councillor Michelle Wu‘s summary of today’s city council meeting:
Speed Limits: We voted unanimously to pass Councilor Baker’s home rule petition to lower the default unposted speed limit from 30mph to 20mph in thickly settled areas and business districts and from 20mph to 15mph in school zones, as well as giving the City the authority to post speed limits without state approval and the requirement for a traffic study. Councilors Baker and Flaherty noted that speeding is one of the top issues councilors hear from residents. The matter now goes to the Mayor for his signature and then the state legislature for approval.
WalkUP Roslindale ally Longfellow Area Neighborhood Association is hosting a visioning session regarding the South and Walter Street Corridor on Thursday, April 7, 2016 from 7pm-9pm at the Weld Hill Research Building, 1300 Centre Street. South and Walter Streets connect Centre Street near Bellevue, West Roxbury at one end back to Centre Street adjacent the Arboretum and Faulkner Hospital at the other end, cutting through one of a densely populated, mostly residential, area of our neighborhood. These streets were historically designed (or more likely re-designed in the car era) to move cars quickly with little concern for pedestrian safety, walkability, and quality of life. There have been some small recent improvements but much remains to be done to reclaim this important corridor. Please show up and share your views!
This time at Belgrade Avenue and Walworth Street (near Fallon Field), this morning around 7 am. Only report so far is on Keep Roslindale Quirky’s Facebook page (reproduced below for those without access). The report indicates that an ambulance was on the scene. More needs to be done to put an end to this wave of car on walker crashes. The city’s Vision Zero ramp up this spring can’t come soon enough.
We don’t yet know exactly which corner the crash occurred or any other circumstances, although one after-the-fact eye witness reports it may have been near the auto body shop on the back right corner in the image below. Here’s the general area, which, unlike several other recent pedestrian crashes, at least has crosswalks and signals albeit poorly designed (and hence dangerous) due to the odd angles of the crossings:
We’ve all been following the tragic spike in deaths resulting from car-on-human-being-walking crashes in our city, including our neighborhood, to start this year. As Dante Ramos asserted in an opinion piece in last Friday’s Globe (“If jaywalking is wrong, I don’t want to be right“), the answer to the carnage is not, as one of our state legislators has reportedly proposed, to jack up jaywalking fines. Instead, we need to reorder a badly disordered transportation system and reclaim the right of human beings on foot to safely use and inhabit our streets, intersections, and squares throughout Boston and here in Roslindale. It’s worth quoting from Dante’s piece at length as he talks about how Vision Zero will work here:
Ironically, [Sen.] Chandler’s legislation comes up at the State House just as Boston is embracing Vision Zero — a strategy for eliminating all motor vehicle deaths and serious injuries by 2030.
Heightened law enforcement may be part of the strategy, at least at certain key intersections. But according to Chris Osgood, Boston’s chief of streets, the city will rely more on education and on a deeper analysis of street-level conditions: the physical design of intersections, the timing of traffic and walk signals, the movement patterns of people and vehicles not just at individual intersections but throughout the surrounding blocks.
Of course, the gradual fine-tuning of a city’s overall transportation system may not seem emotionally satisfying to a driver who’s been delayed by a jaywalker. And when you’ve grown up in a world where transportation laws primarily serve cars’ needs, it’s easy to persuade yourself that stiffer jaywalking fines — what Chandler calls “the stick approach” — are for pedestrians’ own good.
Never mind that pedestrian fatality rates are lower in places where jaywalking enforcement is lax than in Los Angeles, where it’s been far more aggressive. Motorists don’t need greater protection from the supposed threat of wayward pedestrians, and, anyway, not every annoyance in life can or should be fixed through tougher laws and stiffer tickets.
WalkBoston recently sounded the alarm that serious (and fatal) pedestrian incidents are fast becoming a near-weekly occurrence in Boston. The latest such event occurred last night in Roxbury, where a mother and her baby were struck by a car at the intersection of Humboldt Ave and Humboldt Court. Our local CBS affiliate reports on two sisters coming to a quick rescue and performing CPR on the 5-month-old victim. We have scant information on details of the crash and the fate of the pedestrians remains unknown. We can only hope they both survive and make a full recovery. Update 6pm: we were devastated to learn via the Boston Globe that the baby has died.
That said, we would urge the media not just to cover the “human-interest” aspect of these tragic incidents, but also highlight potential root causes so that we don’t have to keep re-living the same sad story. Poor infrastructure and bad design decisions in particular are recurring themes–for far too long, Boston’s professional traffic engineers have prioritized fast and unimpeded traffic flow over other needs, including the very real risks to human lives of car-centric streets. Again, we don’t know the details of this incident, but a quick look at the intersection where the crash occurred shows (1) a long stretch of street with no crosswalks [despite a bus stop across the street]; (2) extremely wide travel lanes; (3) in a densely-settled area, a certain recipe for predictable harm to pedestrians. Once ago, it’s time to move into action on Vision Zero.
Residents on Friday said the car that allegedly hit the woman and her child was speeding: one woman who declined to give her name said she heard it whipping down the street before she heard the crash.
We’re pleased to publish the report documenting the Walk Audit of Roslindale Square that we did with WalkBostonback in December. There are lots of issues to be addressed, but also exciting opportunities to improve the pedestrian environment in and around the central business district. Our next steps will be to set up meetings with the appropriate city officials and elected leaders to begin to address the highest priority items. If you have any thoughts about the report or what our top priorities should be, please leave them in the comments below.
pedestrian hit by a car in intersection of Firth & Washington in Roslindale- she was on the ground but alert- tons of traffic.
While the City has a formal action response plan for any pedestrian incident involving a fatality, non-fatal incidents don’t necessarily result in anything more than a statistic. Yet these non-fatal incidents are often equally indicative of poor road design creating dangerous conditions.
The important thing to remember is most of these incidents are preventable and not merely the result of poor judgment by a driver (or pedestrian). Cities that take Vision Zero seriously have seen dramatic results–in Sweden, pedestrian fatalities have dropped 50% in the past five years; we’ve also seen a 43% reduction in traffic fatalities in Minnesota, a 48% reduction in Utah, and a 40% decrease in Washington State (source: Vision Zero: Learning from Sweden’s Successes). Thus far, the City of Boston’s Vision Zero aspirational plan hits all the right notes, but we’ve yet to see real changes “on the ground.” These recent incidents in Roslindale are powerful reminders that immediate action is urgently needed.
We wish the victim of the latest incident a quick recovery. If anyone has more details, please leave them in the comments here.
Site of the Crash at Hyde Park Ave and Arlington Street (image courtesy Google Maps)
We learned with dismay of another recent serious pedestrian incident in our neighborhood, this one at the intersection of Hyde Park Ave and Arlington Street. As is frequently the case, it appears that poor street design was a contributing (perhaps primary) factor, and excessive speed resulted in more serious injuries. If the city gets serious about Vision Zero, we should see fewer and fewer of these tragedies.
A pedestrian was hit by a car on Saturday, Jan. 19, at approximately 5:45 p.m.
Neighbors said when it happened they heard a smash and a scream. They said the ambulance and police showed up to the scene, as well as, the Boston Fire Department.
But such an accident is something that neighbors would say is not surprising, considering how fast the cars tend to speed through that intersection.
Nijha Middleton, who has been living on that intersection of Hyde Park Avenue and Arlington Street for three years, was home during the time of the accident that night.
When she looked out the window, she said she saw a woman lying in the middle of the street, and the girl who witnessed it screamed and called 911 standing on the sidewalk. Then she said she saw police and ambulances attend and family members running to the stricken woman.
“It looked really bad,” she said, explaining that the it took the EMTs awhile to put the victim in the ambulance.
According to the police report, the pedestrian has no lifethreatening injuries and the investigation is still ongoing.
Middleton said that such accidents is likely to happen at that intersection because of the speeding cars, lack of speed limit signs and lights, and having no crossing guard.
“People are such in a rush, they never really want to stop, so it makes it difficult to cross the street,” she said. She often walks on that intersection herself and said that almost every other morning she’s scared to cross the street.
“Maybe there needs to be a point that they have to put a stopping light, so everyone can stop rushing,” she said.
In light of this and other recent incidents in the neighborhood, WalkUP Roslindale member Alan Wright sent the following letter to the editor, which may appear in an upcoming edition of the paper. Thanks to Alan for highlighting the underlying factors and mentioning WalkUP’s efforts to push for change:
Dear Editor,
Thank you for reporting on the injury of a pedestrian who was crossing Hyde Park Avenue. This is the 3rd such incident in the past two weeks with two pedestrians killed when struck by dangerous drivers – one in Roslindale and another in Dorchester. It is important to note that these were not accidents, as was reported, for the pedestrians were not accidentally in the cross walks, but crashes in which drivers drove their vehicles recklessly. While the City of Boston has begun an important effort to improve pedestrian safety with the Vision Zero project much work needs to be done. In Roslindale an effort is underway by the citizen group WalkUP Rozzie to get the City to make changes now. For too long our streets have been designed for the benefit of motorists. Simple changes such as speed humps and sidewalk extensions can slow traffic and provide more protection to pedestrians and bicyclists.
