Our streets aren’t safe for children

Yesterday, a driver in an SUV killed a four-year-old child at the intersection of Georgia Ave and Kennedy Street NW.

There’s a Jewish saying: He who kills a person destroys a world. The dreams of this family’s child are shattered. Friends will turn to find no one there. Teachers won’t see the light of learning in his eyes. A partner will not know the joy of his love. His own children will never be.

In this instance, it’s not just the one driver who’s responsible for the loss of that world, but a whole system that prefers, very demonstrably at the expense of others’ lives, people who are able to afford cars, at the fastest speed possible, on trips that, for the most part, they are making alone.

Every time we say that it’s more important for someone to easily drive and park than anything else, we choose a world in which a four-year-old’s death is acceptable.

Communities along Georgia Ave deserve better…

The intersection of Georgia Ave and Kennedy St NW sits in SMD 4D01, where ANC Erik Lindsjo is a vocal advocate for safer streets, bus priority, and cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. Following the crash he tweeted a thread calling for roads that prioritize safety over car throughput: “We must stop treating every “Ave” in the city as an express way. If we were serious about the health of our residents we would design every road so it was impossible to drive over 20 mph not design 4 lane highways.”

Lindsjo goes on to make the case that when people have access to good transit and biking facilities, cars recede as the mode of choice, lessening the very real pressure to ensure people can get around that way. Without going into specifics, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George highlighted the “unspeakable tragedy”.

Less than a month ago, we published an article looking how Georgia Ave could be better used for social and economic activity than as a thoroughfare. In October 2019, it played host to the District’s first major “Open Streets” event, with proponents overcoming concerns to achieve a well-received community occasion. In the early days of the pandemic, there was trepidation around opening up much public space lest it spread COVID-19. But since that initial resistance there’s been a subsequent recognition that outdoor risk is very low in uncrowded environments. Who now is thinking about the future of this pivotal public asset and what it means to the neighborhoods it runs through?

…But it’s not about any one intersection or road.

Many lives have been lost to streets where drivers’ presumed rights to drive fast and park where they want is the highest priority.

It is not possible for safe neighborhoods to exist holistically when roads designed and operated as thoroughfares are rammed through them. Georgia Avenue is the spine of neighborhoods that are full of vibrancy and community, but it works against its residents every day.

In DC, the most crashes involving people on foot happen in neighborhoods where the fewest number of people own cars. But driving, and owning a car, represents autonomy, freedom, upward mobility—understandably so, when our elected and appointed officials, from the federal government to the most local level, have starved public transportation and treated non-drivers as a second (or third, or fourth) class.

When ANC commissioners want a bikeshare station at a less intrusive corner, because parking spots are more important to “the community”; when councilmembers drive to work; when the mayor’s marquee transportation initiative is making the Circulator free — every time the balance that so many people believe we need to strike tips another degree in favor of driving, the world in which a kid gets killed in a crash is calcified.

Systemic choices have systemic consequences

GGWash does not say that police officers who abuse and kill people are simply bad apples. We understand their lethal actions as the result of a system that enables and supports them. Likewise, when a preventable crash kills a child, we see the work of individual engineers, planners, administrators, and politicians within the scope of the legacy of our car-centric country, and how federal policies can at best deter and at worse poison state and local efforts to make things safer.

We support the District Department of Transportation’s work, and we have been pleased to see progress on transit priority, specifically bus lanes. We’ll continue to request more money in the District’s budget for projects like the bus priority program, Vision Zero, bike and micromobility lanes, and curbside adaptations that make our public spaces more fit for living than parking.

Nonetheless, in the District, like all other cities in America, cars are king, and the loss of human life is the collateral damage. Changing that requires tradeoffs over a sustained period; bandages don’t forestall death, but tourniquets can.

This tragic event grimly reminds us of the cost of sticking with old paradigms. Putting cars first has cost us dearly, not just in terms of lives but community cohesion, commercial activity, recreation, and opportunity.

Fund the Vision Zero bill, and keep going

Vision Zero is a contested concept in the District of Columbia, where bike lanes have been seen as gentrification. Following decades of neglect and displacement, symbols help us understand and communicate what’s going on.

But if we do it well, Vision Zero’s not there to give privileged people nice things long denied to many. It’s also not an idea designed to make politicians’ and public servants’ life hard. It’s about making public spaces safer for everyone and especially underserved communities. It’s a chance to redress past wrongs of highways and thoroughfares tearing communities apart. It’s, at this point, our strongest grasp of a world in which four-year-olds aren’t killed by drivers.

Last year, the Council unanimously approved the Vision Zero Omnibus bill. But the bill hasn’t been funded.

In the short term, Mayor Bowser could fully fund the Vision Zero bill this year as a signal that she’s serious about rearranging priorities, and the council could pass its budget accordingly. Maybe the bus priority program, which ekes out dedicated space for public transit, could get the same prized treatment as the Circulator. Maybe we realize that $50 a year is still too low to adequately reflect the cost of someone parking their car in public space. Maybe the District, which has had decongestion pricing in its lexicon since the first moveDC rollout in 2014, will charge wealthy commuters to drive into the city’s business district, funding and expanding public transit in the process.

Funding the Vision Zero bill is one piece of a complex puzzle by which DC and other cities in the region can shift from a car-based economy and society. The COVID-19 recovery won’t happen on the back of outdated mobility systems that relied on single-occupancy vehicles. It will happen and it will be better and more lasting if we choose a physical environment that’s safe, easy to get around, and not the domain of those who can afford to drive.

In a testament to the matrix of ways in which transit, safety and enforcement interact, a camera on a Metrobus caught footage of the event, footage which could help figure out what went wrong in this particular moment. Car priority is a crusty, outdated paradigm that other cities are successfully shedding - to one where it’s easy to get around by modes all can afford and access, including cars for those who absolutely cannot use transit, bikes or walk.

We can and must do better

Not everyone can take public transit, walk, or ride a bike to where they need to go—of course we understand that. Of course, we understand the economic, geographic, and social constraints that people navigate daily, and know that, to many, it seems complacently privileged to suggest that the “solutions” GGWash offers will make a difference.

But driving needs to be last. The District and, eventually, the region, needs to be a place where people primarily walk, take transit, and bike. This will be a painful shift that may put strain on our historical sins of racial and class disparity. We have to be intentional about redressing those and not shunt them aside. The costs will be great. There will be loss—of identity, of agency, of authority.

But there will be no cost so high, and no loss so great, as a four-year-old’s life in a world in which people are dead last.