No walk in the park: Road design a threat to Conn. walkers and bikers

A man rushes across the pedestrian crossing at the intersection of Farmington Avenue and Main Street in West Hartford, Conn. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

“Leap Day” was a bad day to be out for a walk in Connecticut. 

On the evening of Feb. 29, a pedestrian was hit by a car and killed on Route 372 in Cromwell, and another was killed on the Berlin Turnpike in Newington.

A month or so later, in the last week of March, three pedestrians were killed in four days, including another on the Berlin Turnpike.

As of April 16, 21 pedestrians have been killed across the state in 2024, two more than during the same period in both 2022 and 2023, according to data from the state’s Highway Safety Office.

“Things are not good on our roadways,” said Department of Transportation spokesman Josh Morgan. 

Things certainly haven’t been good for the last couple of years, with 366 traffic fatalities in 2022 and 323 roadway deaths in 2023. Most, 223 and 205, respectively, were passengers in cars. Quite a few motorcyclists, 66 and 62, lost their lives in those years. 

Also, a stunning number of pedestrians: 73 in 2022 and 51 in 2023 were struck and killed, along with four bicyclists in 2022 and five in 2023. 

(Chart: José Luis Martínez/CT Mirror Source: Connecticut DOT Highway Safety Office. Created with Datawrapper)

Here’s the thing. Safety advocates say the deaths of pedestrians and bicyclists, sometimes called “vulnerable users,” are preventable. If so, why aren’t they being prevented? 

An obvious and not incorrect response is bad driving — speeding, impaired or distracted driving, running red lights, etc. Sometimes a pedestrian takes an ill-considered risk.  

But in recent years, another factor has come light: road design.

Dangerous by design

Some think it should be at the top of the list, that road design can induce bad driving.

“People drive at the speed the road is designed for, not at the posted speed,” said Jay Stange, transportation specialist for the Center for Latino Progress in Hartford. 

“Though cars are inherently dangerous, it is the design of the streets … that make them deadly,” according to a post from the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition, a safety advocacy group.  

“The way we drive, walk, bike and roll is determined by how we design our streets. Blaming ‘bad drivers’ or ‘irresponsible pedestrians’ ignores the real problem: roads are built for cars, not people.”

The majority of pedestrian deaths take place on roads called “arterials,” essentially fast-moving roads through built-up areas. Cross one at your peril.

At least two pedestrians have been killed so far in 2024 on the Berlin Turnpike.(Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

“These roads are exceptionally dangerous for pedestrians,” said staunch safety advocate Kerri Ana Provost. Her “Real Hartford … and beyond” website contains a Pedestrian Murder Map, which shows where walkers and cyclists have been killed around the state since 2020.

Types of roads

Roadways fall into one of four general classifications: interstate highways; arterials; connector roads, which connect local streets with arterials; and local streets. 

In addition, a hybrid classification has emerged in the past decade called “stroads,” a mash of “road” and “street.” The term is attributed to engineer/planner Charles Marohn, founder of the advocacy group Strong Towns, and refers to a high-speed road with many turnoffs and lacking in safety features. Marohn has said that stroads do not function well as either a street or as a road.

The limited-access highways have their own set of issues, from wrong-way drivers to race-car-level speeding. 

Though pedestrians are sometimes hit on the highways, the greater danger for citizens out for a walk is posed by arterials, multiple-lane roads without controlled access that can carry large volumes of local traffic at generally high speeds, 40 to 50 mph or higher. Some, such as Route 1 and the Berlin Turnpike, were the highways before the interstates were built.

Most arterials, while an essential part of the transportation system, have been designed for speed rather than safety, with broad lanes and shoulders, wide curves and good sight lines. Pedestrian amenities such as crosswalks and even sidewalks were often an afterthought, if a thought at all.  

Thus, many are unsafe, especially for pedestrians and bicyclists. According to the 2022 report “Dangerous by Design” from the nonprofit group Smart Growth America, arterials make up 15% of all roads in urban areas of the country but are where 67% of pedestrian deaths occur.

“While nearly every street in the U.S. could be designed to be safer, by far the most dangerous streets are the big, fast, wide streets designed for cars to run at expressway speeds through busy cities and towns,” the report says.

The report also observes that older adults and people walking in low-income areas were struck and killed at “much higher rates than other populations.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, most pedestrian fatalities occur in the dark. According to a  2022 Governors Highway Safety Association study, nearly 80% of pedestrians are struck at night: “Since 2010, nighttime fatal crashes have increased by 86%, compared with a 31% rise in daytime pedestrian deaths.”

Finally, another design issue — the design of some vehicles — also bodes ill for pedestrians. While passenger cars account for the greatest number of fatal pedestrian crashes, the number of deaths involving SUVs and light trucks has risen dramatically in the past decade, the GHSA report says.

“Deaths in crashes involving sport utility vehicles increased at a far faster rate (120%) than deaths in crashes involving passenger cars (26%). Because of their greater body weight and larger profile, SUVs and other light trucks can cause more harm to a person on foot when a crash occurs.”

A pedestrian can sometimes avoid death or critical injury by rolling off the hood of a vehicle. If the hood is 4 or 5 feet off the ground, the odds aren’t so good.

The killing of “vulnerable users” is a national crisis and seemingly getting worse. Drivers killed at least 7,500 pedestrians in 2022, a 41-year high, and injured more than 60,000 walkers.

In the period 2010-2021, pedestrian deaths rose 77% while all other traffic deaths rose 25%, according to the GHSA report, and the number increased again in 2022. Pedestrians as a percentage of all fatalities has risen from 14% in 2012 to 17% in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

Also in 2022, about 850 bicyclists were killed and another 50,000 were injured in collisions with cars and trucks. 

What’s our move

A principal means of protecting pedestrians is getting traffic to slow down. A pedestrian hit at a slow speed has a much better chance of survival than one hit at high speed. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. 

There are many tools in the public works handbook to calm traffic and protect vulnerable users: sidewalks, protected bike/bed lanes, pedestrian bump-outs, narrower travel lanes, speed humps, raised crosswalks, roundabouts, street trees, lower speed limits, better lighting and now red light and speed cameras. 

What has frustrated safety advocates is the slow rate of employing these measures, at least at a scale that will make a perceptible difference. But that appears to be changing. Consider New Haven.

New Haven’s ‘Death Boulevard’

The Elm City has reason for concern. Safe Streets Coalition member Maximilian Chaoulideer said 41 people have been killed by cars while walking or biking in New Haven since 2019, 10 of whom were killed on a single mile of Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, dubbed “Death Boulevard” by the New Haven Independent a few years ago. 

As with the national statistics, crashes were “extremely concentrated” on multi-lane arterials, he said, and residents of low-income neighborhoods were overrepresented among the victims. 

If you knock on doors in New Haven, one out of three households will ask for a speed hump.

– New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker

On the plus side, Mayor Justin Elicker has made road safety a top priority and has a number of projects underway. Several major roadways, including Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, are being calmed or redesigned to slow traffic and make walking and biking safer.

Notably, the city has just embarked on a $6.7 million project to reduce a nine-block stretch of lower State Street from a four-lane “stroad” to a two-lane roadway with protected bike and pedestrian tracks. Protected bike lanes are the gold standard for urban cycling safety, and Elicker, a cyclist himself, said in an interview he hopes to build more of them where feasible.

Other measures include increased traffic enforcement; two bus rapid transit lines  through the city; speed tables — slightly raised surfaces that cover an entire section of road — at key downtown intersections; and speed humps around the city. 

“If you knock on doors in New Haven, one out of three households will ask for a speed hump,” Elicker said.  

A speed hump in West Hartford. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

Finally, New Haven looks to be the first city in the state to deploy traffic safety cameras. The city plans to place up to 19 speed or red-light cameras at high accident locations. 

“We have made progress, but there’s still a lot of work to do,” Elicker said. 

Some of the arterials in New Haven and other cities are state roads, a situation that has sometimes led over the years to spats and finger-pointing over who was responsible for what on the roads. From where Elicker sits, that problem is going away.

“The state has been much better at engaging with us. They are open to newer approaches,” he said. 

For example, he said the state installed a raised crosswalk on Townsend Avenue, a first on a state road.

Hartford has taken action as well, with, among other things, dozens of speed humps around the city and a protected bike lane on Wethersfield Avenue.

More interest

Traffic safety hasn’t always been a front-burner issue, but that appears to be changing, and at every level of government.

“We’re seeing a concerted effort from the top on down, from the feds to governors and DOTs, to focus on safety and reducing deaths, particularly of vulnerable users,” said Amy Watkins, program manager for Watch For Me CT, a collaboration between the state Department of Transportation and Connecticut Children’s Injury Prevention Center that promotes pedestrian and bicyclist safety on a number of fronts.

On the national level, the U.S. Department of Transportation has a number of programs and initiatives promoting traffic safety, including one that supports the use of speed cameras.

The state has been quite active as well. In 2021, the CTDOT released a Pedestrian Safety Strategy that aims to reduce speeds and implement safer roadway design, among other things. The department has other programs underway as well, including a grant program to towns for safety measures.

Road signs along the Berlin Turnpike indicate upcoming pedestrian crossings. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

Among DOT commissioners across the country, there may not be a stronger pedestrian safety advocate than Connecticut’s Garrett Eucalitto, for whom the subject is personal. Eucalitto shared his connection to safety when he spoke at the first statewide World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims event, sponsored by Watch For Me CT, in Bushnell Park last November. 

Several years ago, he was struck and injured by a motorist while crossing a street in Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter, a close friend was hit and killed while riding a bike. 

Department officials, working with their local counterparts, are trying things they haven’t done before. For example, the DOT and Stamford officials have a pilot program underway on Washington Boulevard, which includes lane closures to shorten crossing distances, centerline speed humps to slow left-turning vehicles and bump-outs to slow right-turning vehicles, shorten the crossing distance for pedestrians and improve visibility. 

Local residents can have a major role in the process. Activists in West Hartford, led by the late MaryEllen Thibodeau, convinced the town to calm the traffic on a 1.8 mile section of North Main Street that was a four-lane arterial where traffic zoomed along at 40 to 50 mph, in some places about a foot from the sidewalk. 

It took several years, but officials implemented a “road diet” by creating wider bike lanes and, importantly, by reducing four travel lanes to two while adding a center lane for left turns. In a six-month trial period, both speeds and especially crashes were reduced. 

“It’s a great example of what is possible in traffic calming,” said Stange.

Thibodeau, who died in 2020, was the first president of the advocacy group Bike Walk Connecticut.

Lawmakers

The General Assembly has been on the case as well, passing major traffic safety legislation in 2021 and 2023. The 2023 law’s primary thrust was allowing towns to employ speed and red light cameras, if they so chose. But another piece of the legislation could end up being controversial: it orders a study of whether to cancel right turn on red.

The 2021 law has a number of initiatives including higher fines for distracted driving, new rules on yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks and a prohibition against “dooring,” which is “causing physical contact between a vehicle door and moving traffic” by opening a car door or leaving it open too long. Dooring is a constant threat to bicyclists.

The state and many municipalities also have embraced two national movements, Complete Streets and Vision Zero. The former is an effort to make streets safer for all users; the latter an effort to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries by a number of measures such as identifying and rethinking sites of repeat crashes.

Two questions

The various initiatives raise two questions: how do people find out about them, and are they adequate for the task at hand?

For example, the old law about crosswalks was that drivers had to yield to walkers only if the pedestrian had stepped off the curb and was in the crosswalk. 

The new law requires drivers to yield if the person on foot steps to the curb and “indicates intent to cross” by waving a hand or entering the crosswalk.

Though the change was reported in the press, anecdotal evidence suggests that some of our fellow drivers are unaware of it. Not everyone reads the paper or scans the DOT’s website. Is there a way to get the message to more people?

The 2023 law takes a crack at it. It directs the commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles to develop a video that would cover “state laws impacting drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists” as well as safe driving behaviors.

There are people on the road who haven’t seen a driving test in 40 or 50 years.

– Kerri Ana Provost, safety advocate

Drivers who are already licensed would only have to watch the video on every other renewal. The license renewal period for most drivers is six years (those over 65 can request a two-year renewal), but it is being moved to eight years by 2031, according to DMV spokesman Shaun Formica. Is once every 16 years a good enough update?

Provost thinks that this and other measures, while helpful, don’t go nearly far enough. The DMV has retesting and retraining programs for some drivers; she suggests that all drivers need to be retested periodically.

“There are people on the road who haven’t seen a driving test in 40 or 50 years,” Provost said. 

She thinks all cars should be manufactured with alcohol interlock devices, which are breathalyzers installed in a vehicle that prevents it from starting if the driver’s blood alcohol concentration exceeds a certain limit. Alcohol-impaired driving fatalities accounted for nearly a third of all traffic fatalities in 2022, more than 13,000 individuals. 

The DOT has a pilot program underway to test alcohol detection technology; one of the devices has been installed in Commissioner Eucalitto’s car. 

Provost also believes that cars should not be built that exceed the speed limit. “If the speed limit is 65 mph, why are we building cars that can go way faster than that? No one except NASCAR drivers need to go that fast.”

As for older residents, losing a step shouldn’t mean losing a life. One longer term solution is to design — or redesign — walkable communities where people can age in place, she said. 

“We know how to address this problem. We just need to summon the political will to do it,” she said.

New Haven Mayor Elicker offers a similar thought. “We put a lot of focus on homicides and how to confront gun violence, and rightly so. But we need to put as much energy into preventing traffic violence.” 

For the record, an estimated 40,990 people lost their lives on the country’s roads in 2023; 42,967 died from gun-related injuries.   

Connecticut Mirror is a content partner of States Newsroom. Read the original version here.

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