In a rapidly urbanizing area like Montgomery County, with multilane roads that were designed to move traffic quickly, keeping pedestrians and cyclists safe has long been a public concern. Anybody who walks or rolls here, whether on a bike or in a wheelchair, knows there are places where it isn’t safe to cross the road because tra ffic is moving too fast, there’s not enough time to safely cross multiple lanes or there’s no crosswalk. Anybody who drives here knows that pedestrians sometimes dart into the street in the middle of a block or cross against the tra ffic lights.
“We know pedestrians want to walk in straight lines,” but intersections are designed so pedestrians may need to cross more than one street to get to the opposite corner, says Miriam Schoenbaum, an ACT board member. “The issues are the same all over the county: people trying to navigate big, fast roads on foot or on a bike. That’s the same whether you’re in Bethesda or in the east county or the upcounty.”
DiMauro was one of 13 pedestri-ans killed in the county in 2019. Typically, 70 to 75 pedestrian collisions in the county result in severe injury or death each year, with the number of fatalities usually between 10 and 15; in 2018, there were 14 pedestrian fatalities, according to county data.
“For a county our size, we’re actually pretty low” in the number of pedestrian fatalities, says Wade Holland, a former county data analyst who in January was named coordinator of Vision Zero, the county’s version of a global tra ffic safety initiative. All told, there were nearly 500 tra ffic collisions involving pedestrians in 2019—a 9% increase over the year before. There were nearly 120 incidents involving cyclists, with one fatality, nearly identical to the 2018 numbers, according to preliminary data provided by county police. Just two weeks into January 2020, three pedes- trians had been killed in collisions on county roads.
County officials say no traffic death is acceptable. That’s why the county in 2016 adopted Vision Zero, an initiative to eliminate severe and fatal traffic collisions by 2030. Based on the concept that traffic deaths are preventable, Vision Zero says the impact of human error can be minimized through improved engi- neering of roads, enforcement of traf- fic laws, and education. The initiative incorporates other county programs designed to improve road safety.
“We have a ‘blame the victim’ culture, and even today we quickly get into the discussion [when] there’s a collision: Was it the pedestrian’s fault or was it the driver’s fault? Was it the bicyclist’s fault or the driver’s fault?” Friedson says. Vision Zero is “the idea it’s not about the people, it’s about the policies. It’s about the engineering of the road.”
Montgomery is among several local jurisdictions, including Prince George’s County, Arlington County in Virginia, and Washington, D.C., that have adopted Vision Zero-style strategies. In April 2019, Gov. Larry Hogan signed legislation making Maryland a Vision Zero state. Across the country, jurisdictions have credited the strategies with reducing traffic fatalities, though there has been some backlash over the cost of road system changes and their impact on traffic, according to published reports.
Vision Zero’s focus on preventing all collisions through a comprehensive approach is a marked change from the way most jurisdictions have dealt with their transportation systems. “In a lot of places, Montgomery County included, the focus of the way we were building road networks, the way we were building our sidewalks, was to prioritize people driving and to make it so people can get from point A to point B as fast as possible,” says Eli Glazier, multimodal transportation planner coordinator for the county’s planning department. “So what Vision Zero says [is] it’s not really about the speed, it’s about the safety. And if we need to do something that makes a person’s commute five seconds, 10 seconds longer to save lives, that’s something we’re gonna do.”
Local planners and transit activists acknowledge that some residents probably won’t embrace the road design changes—including lower speed limits and lane reductions—required to achieve the Vision Zero goal. “Everybody wants safe streets,” Schoenbaum says, “but they don’t necessarily want what it will take to get the safe streets.”
