2020 begins with a stark reminder about our dangerous roads

At the start of the new year, many of us wish to celebrate the babies born at the stroke of midnight, but in our area families and friends are mourning four people who lost their lives while traveling the streets of DC––three east of the Anacostia River. Worse yet, in all of these cases, there have been community requests and/or studies of potential fixes that haven’t yet been implemented.

The new year was barely four hours old when Loleita Patricia Gross was struck and killed while on a sidewalk near Pennsylvania and Minnesota Avenue SE, in Ward 7. Two days later, an unidentified pedestrian was killed along North Capitol Street NE, in Ward 5’s Truxton Circle neighborhood.

On Monday––two days after the second pedestrian fatality of 2020 by a driver––Michael Hutcherson and Seret Medhani were killed in a crash along Alabama Avenue in Congress Heights. Three people were also taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries in that incident.

A friend reminded me that given the challenges we face with violence as a city, people are going to be on the lookout for the first violent crime of the new year. To our discredit, we anticipate traumatic violence, in whatever form it may come, for a part of our society.

It is especially telling that some of the first violent deaths of 2020 occurred on notoriously dangerous streets. The start of 2020 brings an opportunity for the District to be bold in its commitment to Vision Zero, or to admit that we will not achieve zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2024, as Mayor Bowser has pledged.

Residents have spoken out about these streets before

In 2018, the Penn Branch Citizens Civic Association penned a letter to District Department of Transportation (DDOT) Director Jeff Marootian offering a number of recommendations for a road diet at Pennsylvania Avenue and Minnesota Avenue SE, the intersection near Gross’s killing. Last year, some residents in the Henson Ridge neighborhood, a few blocks away from the site of Monday’s fatal crash, expressed concerns about a proposed road diet along Alabama Avenue that included bike lanes, while also stating their concern with the high number of speeding drivers and lack of safety for pedestrians.

Meanwhile, last week’s death makes the fifth pedestrian death on North Capitol Street in the past year.

DDOT and the NoMA BID studied that corridor in 2018, analyzing 649 crashes over three years between Massachusetts Avenue and R Street. The final report, released last January, documented large and small safety deficiencies: from broken sidewalks and unmarked crosswalks to bike infrastructure and traffic signal adjustments, and made 60 individual recommendations. DDOT also studied the Alabama Avenue corridor in 2017, analyzing 875 crashes from 2013 to 2015, which found similar deficiencies in the streetscape.

What stands in the way? There are often many factors, including simple inertia, but we know that many people simply covet parking or fast driving over all else, since they themselves often get around by car and the idea of death seems remote. Other times, elected officials have spoken highly about the need for investment in communities where traffic fatalities and injuries are absurdly high, but have not matched their words about Vision Zero with real commitments in the city’s budget. Those who lose out are more often than not people of color and the poor.

The sites of these fatal crashes have a glaring commonality

Alabama Avenue, the Pennsylvania/Minnesota intersection, and Truxton Circle are all areas of the city with large African American populations, and in particular ones that have high rates of poverty. Wards 7 and 8, east of the Anacostia River, continuously have the highest rates of pedestrians killed in the District. 3 out of the 4 traffic fatalities in 2020 occurred there, as were 13 out of 27 people killed last year.

There is an inextricably close relationship between poverty, race, and morbidity when it comes to traffic violence here in the District. Along the North Capitol Street corridor once sat the Sursum Corda Cooperative, a low-income neighborhood long plagued by violence and poverty. Several District Housing Authority-owned or subsidized properties, including the agency’s own headquarters, sit along North Capitol Street. Congress Heights, Fairlawn, and Penn Branch in Wards 7 and 8 while differing in median incomes are all majority African American neighborhoods.

We have just 4 years left in the mayor’s Vision Zero timeline

Mayor Bowser set a deadline to achieve zero traffic fatalities or serious injuries by 2024. That’s no longer in the next decade, and it will be here faster than we know it, especially with the complexities that come with delivering infrastructure projects on time in the District.

As the DC Council and DDOT prepare for performance oversight hearings and budget writing, there is once again an opportunity to make a commitment to Vision Zero by investing in communities hit hardest by unsafe streets. If we are to get to Vision Zero we must prioritize systemic safety improvements in communities where vulnerable road users are at the highest risk.