(Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
(Click on the image for Katherine Shaver's Washington Post report)
- In Montgomery County, where more people are killed in road accidents than in homicides*, planners recently asked residents to tweet about their experiences as pedestrians.
- They responded with photos of four-lane thoroughfares lacking sidewalks, bus stops with no nearby crosswalks, traffic whizzing past without buffers, and narrow sidewalks that end abruptly or are blocked by utility poles and overgrown bushes.
- “We’ve had highway plans for 60 to 70 years,” said Montgomery planner David Anspacher. “This is the first time we’re doing a pedestrian master plan, and it shows. The pedestrian conditions aren’t great in Montgomery County.”
- Advocates of Vision Zero point to the success of Fremont, Calif., where wide roads designed for higher speeds reflect its growth during the 1950s. The city implemented Vision Zero in 2015, and traffic fatalities and serious injuries fell by 50 percent, from 36 in 2015 to 17 last year, officials said.
- Matt Bomberg, a senior transportation engineer for Fremont, said the city added bike lanes, painted crosswalks with higher-visibility stripes and installed flashing crosswalk beacons. Repaved roads get re-striped with 10-foot-wide lanes, down from 12 to 14 feet wide. After the city replaced its street lighting, nighttime crashes dropped by 23 percent, he said.
- Bomberg said the city also started focusing on the high-speed arterial roads where the “vast majority” of its most serious crashes occur.
- “We started connecting the dots and found that 10 percent of our road network had 90 percent of the fatalities and 57 percent of the serious injuries,” Bomberg said.
- * The same is true in Prince George's County. See https://dviicac.blogspot.com/2019/07/traffic-fatalities.html