Robert McCartney:

Just four blocks from my home on a stretch of Little Falls Parkway in Bethesda, Maryland, the authorities recently reduced the speed limit by as much as 10 miles per hour to a low of 20 going over newly installed speed bumps. I've used that road for many years and never thought it unsafe, but so far I find I welcome the slower pace, which does feel more secure and adds only a few seconds to each trip. Others in the Washington Metro region have seen similar changes. As traffic agencies seek to improve safety, they are adjusting speed limits in other regulations and re-engineering roads and other pathways. The changes aim not only to reduce fatalities and severe injuries, but also to protect the environment and achieve other goals. Some proposed measures do draw community opposition, especially when traffic lanes or parking spaces are removed. Along another stretch of Little Falls Parkway near my house, the recent conversion of two lanes of traffic to a roadside park with a biking and walking trail has drawn formal protest from a neighboring civic association. Such resistance is familiar to Hillary Orr, Deputy Director of the City of Alexandria, Department of Transportation and Environmental Services.

Hillary Orr: It is hard. I mean, a lot of people aren't super supportive of change and there's of course the clash, I would say, between folks who are thinking about, "Well, me as a driver versus me as a pedestrian or me as somebody who rides a bike." And I feel like a lot of people forget that well, even if you drive a car most of the time you also walk some of the time. And so it's just keeping in mind that we all get around in different ways and we're going to have to change our streets if we want them to be safer and we want to change our climate and be more sustainable and be more resilient.

Robert McCartney: As we prepared this episode on roadway safety, I was surprised to learn that the United States in recent years has had a singularly bad record among similar industrialized countries in preventing roadway deaths and injuries. Here's COG's Systems Performance Planning Program Director Andrew Meese. He oversees the Roadway Safety Program.

Andrew Meese: Since the middle of the last decade, the United States is just about the only nation among comparable nations where traffic fatalities and serious injuries have gone up and not down. Almost everywhere else they've gone down. And so something's different here.

Robert McCartney: But leaders in the region are looking to change that. Kelly Russell, a City of Frederick Alderman, has been a leading member of the Regional Transportation Planning Board at COG for several years. As TPB chair in 2020, she oversaw adoption of two major initiatives. One was the Regional Roadway Safety Program, which provides planning assistance to localities to address roadway, bicycle and pedestrian safety issues. The other was issuance of a safety and equity policy statement for the National Capital Region. It laid out guidelines for helping to redress historic neglect of communities with high percentages of lower income persons and racial minorities.

Kelly Russell: There were really several factors that played a role in shaping our actions. Tragically, fatal crashes on our roadways had increased each year since 2015, and this was a reversal from the decline that we had seen between 25 and 2013. And our Washington region unfortunately mirrors a national trends.

Robert McCartney: Russell elaborated on initiatives in her home jurisdiction. Kelly Russell: We've created a new CIP, capital improvement program specifically for traffic calming, as we know that speed is a big issue and exacerbates any conflicts between people and vehicles. So we are starting our program. This program right now creates high visibility striping parking lanes on some very wide old roadways that we have to sort of, it gives the appearance of a narrower lane, which slows down traffic and installing crosswalks and signage.

Robert McCartney: A couple other possibilities that spring to mind are speed bumps in the roadway and speed cameras. What about those options?

Kelly Russell: Absolutely. Automated enforcement is a force multiplier. It's really a great tool to have in the state of Maryland. Speed humps are, they can be a useful tool. You have to, with any of these traffic-calming methods, you have to look holistically and see there are concerns with those with emergency response. Sometimes they just push traffic to a different roadway. So you really have to look at the whole system.

Robert McCartney: Russell emphasized that individual drivers, bikers, and walkers have responsibilities too.

Kelly Russell: We have to educate folks to understand that you also cannot engineer your way out of a problem all the time. There's another component to safety, and that is the driver or the walker or the [inaudible 00:06:49] themselves, the human being that's moving. And it's important, and I was going to speak on this later, it's important to take individual responsibility. So if you just take your foot off the gas a little bit and slow down as a driver, you are increasing safety.

Robert McCartney: Worsening roadway safety statistics were not the only topic addressed by the Transportation Board in 2020.

Kelly Russell: Our focus was not just on data. That year was the tragic murder of George Floyd, and that sparked a national reckoning about racism. And so at the TPB, we were compelled to make an introspective examination of our own approaches to transportation safety and to ensure we were developing our policies and applying resources equitably. With these resolutions, we acknowledged that there were some transportation projects and policies in the past that had been inequitable. Highways had divided and destroyed lower income and minority neighborhoods. Transit stops were inaccessible or there were no stops at all in certain neighborhoods. There was a lack of walkability and access to critical services, and those were just some of the more obvious examples.

Robert McCartney: Russell described how COG's equity emphasis areas map, which we've discussed on previous episodes, helps jurisdictions analyze trends and target investments to needy areas. You may recall that these areas have high concentrations of low income individuals and/or traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic population groups.

Kelly Russell: But one of the most valuable tools that we developed was the result of TPB's analysis work to determine and provide computerized maps of what we call equity emphasis areas, census tracks. And as we looked at that, we were distressed, but sadly not surprised when staff analysis found that occurrences of fatal crashes overall were higher in the region's equity emphasis areas compared to census tracks outside those areas. And increasingly, this tool is being deployed by jurisdictions not only in the transportation realm, but to identify and focus other resources to underserved areas. So for example, in my city, the City of Frederick, we are using this data to deploy funding to improve parks and recreation facilities in our equity emphasis areas.

Robert McCartney: Looking at Frederick, the City of Frederick, but also the immediate surrounding area within the county. I mean, say 10 years from now, what would you hope to see as the main changes in how transportation looked and walkability and livability looked?

Kelly Russell: Well, it's pretty exciting because the City of Frederick has a comprehensive plan and we're focusing on those things. Frederick County just released their comprehensive plan, what they're calling Livable Frederick, a couple of years ago, which was a really, as they all are, community-based initiative. And they're also renewing a bicycle and pedestrian plan that was kind of languished for a long time under different administrations. And so the county and the city are very much in tune in terms of creating communities now that are compact, that are accessible and walkable where its services are within reach without having to get in a car and drive there by yourself.

Robert McCartney: Now let's return to Hillary Orr of the City of Alexandria, whose transportation department has enjoyed some success in reducing crashes. She credits initiatives dating back to 2012.

Hillary Orr: I would say that everything we do is really based on safety when we're thinking about how we kind of design our streets. And so we adopted a Complete Streets policy in 2012, and then we developed some design guidelines that we've been following since 2016 for that initiative. And then in 2017, we adopted our Vision Zero policy and subsequent action plan to help us try and get to zero severe injuries and fatalities by 2028. So really everything we do, every time we look at a street to redesign it, our core focus is on making sure that it's safe and accessible for all of our roadway users.

Robert McCartney: The effort has shown results.

Hillary Orr: Overall, our trend of severe injuries and fatalities is going down. We did a 10-year crash report, 2010 to 2020 last year, pulled all that together and we are seeing a trend down in crashes, which I think is great. We certainly have more work to do. There's a couple things that we're doing that I think are really important and helpful toward this goal. And one, we've been reducing speed limits across the city. Every year, we've continued to drop speed limits on certain streets down from 35 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour, and we're going to be piloting our first neighborhood slow zone in one of our neighborhoods later this year.

Robert McCartney: Of course, given human nature, it's not as if drivers are suddenly obeying the speed limit.

Hillary Orr: We definitely have data for each of our streets to see how much the speeds have gone down. They haven't gone down as much as we would hope. They're not, people certainly aren't going 25 miles per hour at all times on these roads. I think what we have seen is that we're seeing the speeds go down more on streets where we've also done engineering and street redesign along with the speed limit reductions. Even on those streets where we've just decreased the speed limit, we're seeing a couple miles per hour. And that certainly matters when you're looking at crashes and how fast people are going.

Robert McCartney: Orr recognizes that it's also unrealistic to prevent crashes altogether.

Hillary Orr: The severity of crashes really is what we're looking at. We're not too concerned about fender benders, right? We're looking more at those severe crashes, and we know that when people are going over 40 miles per hour, particularly if they're hitting a pedestrian, the crash is going to be much more severe or even fatal for that person.

Robert McCartney: Circling back to solutions, Alexandria recently won a federal grant to re-engineer seven intersections with a history of crashes. Five are in those census tracks designated by COG as having high populations of lower income residents and racial minorities.

Hillary Orr: Having kind of these defined equity areas through COG and these policies, it enables us to better prioritize the projects in a proactive manner. So I think it's just really shifted how we decide where we're going to do these projects.

Robert McCartney: When I asked at the end if she had anything to add or put roadway safety in the broader context of improving the built environment to meet multiple objectives.

Hillary Orr: Coming from this planning world, I'm personally a fan of continuous improvement in everything we do and in our government organization. But also I think that it's really important for how we look at our infrastructure as well. I think we should always be seeking to make things better and our public space has to change if we're going to meet our safety and climate and sustainability goals. And I mentioned, I think change is hard for people, but we can't just live with the status quo. We really are going to have to change our spaces. And I do think that they will ultimately be better for everyone in the long run, but we're going to have to come together and understand that there's going to be trade-offs and not everybody's going to have a win-win-win for everything.

Robert McCartney: Now, let's return to COG's own Andrew Meese, who told us at the beginning how the poor US performance on roadway safety compared to similar nations. He said some of the best available data on crashes in the Washington Metro region are from a 2020 study of the period from 2013 to 2017.

Andrew Meese: We called it the deep dive. We looked at the safety data that we could get and looked at the various factors that federal databases show for fatal and serious injury crashes and say, "Which ones are we seeing the most here in our region?" And there are behavioral factors and there are types of crashes or placement of crashes that are especially significant in our region. So for the behavioral factors, were not wearing seat belts, speeding, impaired driving and distracted driving according to what was in the database. And the three types of crashes that accounted for a disproportionate share of fatalities and serious injuries were crashes involving pedestrians, crashes at intersections and crashes on major arterials.

Robert McCartney: I asked Meese about the Washington Metro area's overall performance on roadway safety.

Andrew Meese: I would say there has been good work all around in the National Capital Region. Certainly, safety is on everyone's radar screen. I'd like to point out the places in our region that have had a multi-element approach in a coordinated fashion attacking the problem from multiple angles. District has done this. Montgomery County, Arlington and Alexandria. There are certainly others, but I think the District has made great strides in trying to retrofit its street system into a system that's more friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists. And you've seen this with the protected bike lanes and even say, planning for a community where people are getting around and don't depend on a motor vehicle. The district was a pioneer in bike sharing about 10 years ago.

Robert McCartney: So what are the principle barriers when we're looking at trying to make progress on roadway safety? Is it a question of money? Is it a question of driver or community resistance to bike lanes or other traffic-calming devices? What are the obstacles?

Andrew Meese: Like so many aspects of regional planning, retrofitting is our biggest challenge. Making the dozens of communities and thousands of miles of streets and roads already out there better. Retrofitting is expensive. It has a lot of challenges. You have to coordinate with the community. We have a long way to go to overcome the legacy of car-centric development and street design, and it will take years, many investments and working together.

Robert McCartney: I end with some personal thoughts. The United States needs to copy the experience of other industrialized countries to reduce fatalities and injuries on our various roadways and other travel paths. Our nation ought to be ashamed that it performed so poorly at protecting its citizens against death and severe injury. We should accelerate all the changes described in this podcast to minimize crashes. The measures that yield the biggest effect are those that get us all simply to slow down. Thus, we should tolerate and even welcome lower speed limits, installation of traffic-calming devices and yes, speed cameras too. I confess I have slowed down since getting slapped with a number of fines from speed cameras. Improved signage and traffic lights can make a big difference along with building bigger and more visible crosswalks and adding pedestrian islands, walkways and protected bike lanes. As we heard, speed bumps and bike paths can't do it all alone. Much responsibility lies with all of us, the individuals involved. To influence public behavior, considerably more money could be spent bolstering initiatives such as Street Smart and other public service advertising to reinforce the importance of slowing down, watching for pedestrians and bicyclists, et cetera. This would all cost money of course, but there would also be financial advantages. Updating our streets and other public pathways would create good jobs with marketable skills, such as in road building and road repair, transportation design and signaling, road and park services, public transit staff, and public communications. Unlike so many issues in contemporary America, roadway safety need not be the subject of partisan political disagreements. Nobody wants to be on either side of a crash that claims a life or causes serious injury. Those most vulnerable on our roadways are children, the elderly and others with less mobility. Protecting them is a goal all can support. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. We welcome your feedback. Please email comments to Think Regionally, one word, at mwcog.org. This podcast is produced by Lindsey Martin and Steven Kania. This is your host Robert McCartney, urging everyone as always to Think Regionally.