On the morning of Jan. 12, Schoenbaum and about 20 others organized by ACT gathered on the side of University Boulevard West in Silver Spring to attach a pair of ghost shoes to a telephone pole as a memorial for Rita Jo Sultan. The 81-year-old was struck and killed by a U.S. Postal Service truck as she was crossing the road on a rainy December night. Across the state highway stood the midblock bus stop where Sultan began her journey across six lanes of swiftly moving traffic to reach the driveway of her apartment complex. Sultan was crossing in an unmarked crosswalk,
which exists anywhere two or more roads meet, according to state law.
The group—including Montgomery County At-Large Councilmember Evan Glass, Montgomery County Planning Board Chair Casey Anderson and District 19 state Del. Vaughn Stewart—had walked two blocks along a narrow sidewalk with a curb about 1 foot away from the rushing traffic. They’d come from nearby Northwood High School, where another telephone pole bore bouquets of silk flowers and a photo of 19-year-old Shamarra Perry. She was struck and killed on the boulevard 19 years ago.
Standing with others holding a white sheet emblazoned with “A pedestrian was killed here” in black letters, Schoenbaum called for officials to conduct a pedestrian audit of the area and for the county to fund any recommended safety improvements “so we never have to stand on University Boulevard ever again.” During the 20-minute gathering, six people darted from the bus stop and an adjacent church across three lanes of the boulevard, pausing at a narrow median to wait for a break in traffic before crossing the other three lanes.
A few months earlier, ACT had created a similar memorial for Eleanor Cohen, 79, of Gaithersburg. She was fatally injured last September when she was hit by a pickup truck while crossing Copley Place in Gaithersburg’s Downtown Crown neighborhood. The driver of a 2017 GMC Sierra Denali was making a left turn onto Copley Place from the Harris Teeter parking lot when he hit Cohen, according to county police. Police later determined that Cohen, who wasn’t walking in a marked crosswalk, and the driver shared fault in the collision, according to her son, Doug Cohen of Ashburn, Virginia. No charges had been filed in the incident at the time of publication.
A few days after the collision, Cohen stood in the same spot where his mother had been hit. As vehicles approached to turn left, he asked the drivers if they could see him. “They were like, ‘Yeah, we saw you…get out of the road,’ ” he says.
Cohen says he stood there because he couldn’t understand how the collision occurred on a road that was more like a shopping center driveway than a regular street. “I was trying to get my head around how that could have
happened,” he says.
Holland says county traffic data indicates drivers are at fault in about 60% of pedestrian-involved collisions and pedestrians account for the remaining 40%, with both parties at fault in a few instances. Though public safety experts believe that distracted walking by pedestrians is on the rise—social media is full of videos of people walking into signs and light poles while staring at their phones—county officials say that when pedestrians are found to be at fault, it is more likely because they weren’t obeying traffic rules.
Traffic experts say other factors play a larger role in pedestrian deaths, including the speed at which a vehicle is traveling and the time of day that a collision occurs, with incidents more likely to happen at night when visibility is reduced. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), older adults and children are most at risk for being killed in a collision. In Montgomery County, six of the 13 pedestrians killed in 2019 were age 60 or older and two were children. On Jan. 6, Jose Renan Guillen, 75, of Olney became the county’s first pedestrian fatality in 2020 when he died after being struck by a car while crossing Georgia Avenue in Aspen Hill.
County police believe distracted driving also plays a role, and they are conducting enforcement campaigns and other activities to raise awareness of the state law prohibiting the use of handheld cellphones and texting while driving. As part of the county police department’s “Stay Alert, Stay Alive” campaign in 2018, officers pulled over 65 drivers for distracted driving at the intersection of River and Goldsboro roads in Bethesda during a two-hour stretch one morning in April. In 2019, officers issued 1,902 traffic citations and 3,914 warnings related to the state law, according to police.
