“We don’t know how much distracted driving is a factor” in crashes involving pedestrians, says Assistant Chief Thomas Didone, who directed the county’s traffic division before being promoted earlier this year. “Are [drivers] not paying attention? The only time we can tell is if they kill somebody and we can get a search warrant to look at their phone. Otherwise, we have a lot of suspicions and we have a lot of indications where they didn’t slow down in time, they didn’t stop in time.”
To raise awareness about traffic safety, county agencies are publicizing each collision involving a pedestrian or a cyclist through social media and weekly updates on the county’s dataMontgomery website, says Holland. “So when [people] see that nearly daily cadence of a pedestrian struck at an actual location—that really stands out to you that across the 500 square miles of county, it is averaging more than one a day,” he says.
During a Saturday morning forum on Vision Zero in mid-December, dozens of residents passionately urged county and state officials to move more quickly to make sidewalks and roads safer for able-bodied and disabled pedestrians and cyclists.
One resident said his wife and two friends narrowly escaped serious injury during an encounter with an aggressive driver while cycling on a county road. “Cars don’t go out by themselves and hit people,” he told a crowd in the council chambers in Rockville. “We do need to educate our community and fix our community. It’s a culture. People don’t care when they drive, and it’s ridiculous.”
The meeting, organized by Glass, came at the end of a deadly week in which Sultan was killed and 9-year-old Bradley Hills Elementary School student Sophia Chen died after being hit by her school bus in Bethesda. The morning after she was killed, Walter Johnson High School senior Eyal Haddad was struck and seriously injured by a 2018 Jeep Renegade as he crossed Montrose Road in Rockville to catch a school bus.
Alison Gillespie, a Silver Spring parent and chairwoman of the Safe Routes to School Committee for the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, said she’s heard from many parents who’ve clamored for sidewalks and crosswalks near their children’s schools. “I have seen brand new schools where there were no sidewalks,” she told officials. “This is not about retrofitting. This is about making sure that pedestrian and bike safety are a huge part of how we plan our schools.”
A Kensington parent with a special needs son who attends Walter Johnson implored the officials to consult with disabled residents before enacting road design changes. “You wouldn’t expect families like mine to walk in the street. Yet my son and his service dog are constantly navigating poles, fire hydrants and other things…that are huge distractions,” he said. “Don’t design solutions for families like mine without asking for input from families like mine.”
The December incidents fueled growing anger among residents and some elected leaders that the county wasn’t moving quickly enough to improve traffic safety through Vision Zero. Already, the county had failed to meet the goal of its initial two-year action plan adopted in November 2017: a 35% reduction in all types of severe and fatal collisions. Although many of the plan’s 41 action items—which include identifying the roads where most collisions with injuries occur and accelerating sidewalk construction—were completed or underway, the county had missed its January 2018 deadline to hire a coordinator to oversee the efforts of county agencies. Before his appointment was announced Jan. 27 by County Executive Marc Elrich, Holland had served two years as interim Vision Zero coordinator. Holland is expected to oversee the development of a 10-year action plan.
In the months before the appointment announcement, Glass had repeatedly said the delay was unacceptable. Hiring “one person to coordinate efforts across our vast bureaucracy” is key to the success of Vision Zero, he said.
Holland says the large county’s land-use patterns—ranging from dense urban centers like downtown Bethesda and Silver Spring to rural upcounty areas such as Poolesville and Boyds—and the need to retrofit infrastructure built over the decades have created challenges. “What we tried to figure out in our two-year action plan was what does Vision Zero look like in a county vs. what it looks like for a New York, Chicago or a D.C.,” he says.
