Photo by Mr. Dagnino Reloaded.

On Wednesday’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, DDOT Director Gabe Klein said:

A lot of my job is to balance competing needs… to balance this right-of-way that we have between cars and cyclists and pedestrians…

You have to realize that the pedestrian is the most vulnerable because they’re the slowest and they have no armor. The cyclist is second-most vulnerable. Then you have cars. Then you have trucks and buses. And so you really have to look at the food chain and make sure that you’re protecting the most vulnerable people first.

So safety is number one at DDOT. And number one is peds, and then cyclists, and then cars. And a lot of times, when you can slow traffic down and make a more livable city, it’s actually safer for the drivers, as well.

Prioritization of vulnerable road users goes by many names, from “feet first” to the green transportation hierarchy. Whatever you call it, it’s a sensible policy that a growing number of city and state departments of transportation are adopting.

Since Director Klein has made bicycle and pedestrian safety “number one,” we’ve decided to help make it easier for all of us to keep tabs on this priority by mapping each week’s cyclist and pedestrian crashes as reported by Struck in DC, which has been tracking crashes on Twitter since June 1. While it is not a comprehensive listing of all pedestrian and cyclist incidents on our city’s streets, Struck in DC does keep tabs on reports from DC Fire/EMS and other sources. If you know of a crash that wasn’t mapped here, leave a note in the comments.