The reward for making it through a tough exam was fried ravioli from Aladdin Express on West Broad Street. On a Monday night in February, with takeout in hand, VCU sophomore Nicole Madda waited for the walk signal and crossed Broad, heading north toward her apartment. At the corner of West Broad and North Harrison streets, a car hit her, and her head hit the windshield.
Madda says she suffered a traumatic brain injury, a brain bleed and a concussion. Her mother flew in from India, and Madda was sent home to Northern Virginia to recover, missing a month of classes. Six months later, she struggles with hearing loss as well as neck and back pain that seems to get worse.
Just three weeks before Madda’s injury, another VCU student had been killed on the other side of campus. By May, a second student would be dead, hit and killed on the same street three blocks east, when two cars collided. He just happened to be standing on the sidewalk nearby. “To be in the situation where I was so close to that is crazy,” Madda says.
After two fatal accidents in a single semester, many Richmonders wonder what is being done to keep pedestrians safe on the road.
Nicole Madda, a sophomore at VCU, stands at the intersection of Broad and Harrison streets, where she was hit by a car while crossing the road in February. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Pedestrian Deaths Are Rising
The United States has become a dangerous place to be a pedestrian. In 2022, more than 20 pedestrians were killed each day, the highest number in 40 years, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Between 2010 and 2021, pedestrian deaths increased 77%. In Richmond, there have been 88 pedestrian-involved traffic accidents since the beginning of the year, resulting in 86 pedestrian injuries and four deaths.
Overall, driver fatalities increased 33% from 2011 to 2021, when 42,939 people died on American roads, including 7,388 pedestrians killed in traffic crashes. The most common contributing factors were alcohol, speeding, falling asleep, distracted driving and poor visibility, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
What’s behind the pedestrian death toll? There’s no single factor, but a confluence of many.
For one, we’re driving more. American motorists logged 3.26 trillion miles on the road last year, 280 billion more per year than a decade ago. In Richmond, the average household accounts for about 31,000 road miles per year. We’re also walking more, about 1 to 5 more miles per day than we did before the pandemic. More cars and more people on the road create more opportunities for deadly collisions.
Another factor is the size of our rides. Americans love SUVs, which may be safer for drivers but not for pedestrians. SUVs sit higher, making it harder for drivers to see pedestrians, especially short adults, children and people in wheelchairs. They’re also heavier, about twice the weight of a sedan. The number of SUVs involved in fatal pedestrian crashes increased 82% between 2009 and 2016 — more than any other vehicle type.
We’re also driving our big cars much faster. In 1974, the national speed limit was 55 mph. Since 1995, states have set their own limits, and it’s not uncommon for them to be well above the old ceiling. In Virginia, the maximum for highways is 70 mph. The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety estimates that 25 years of rising speed limits have cost us 37,000 lives.
The higher the speed limit, the higher the risk of severe injury to pedestrians: The odds of a pedestrian dying in a motor vehicle crash increase by an average of 11% for every 1 kilometer added to impact speed — that’s less than 1 mile per hour. A study in Toronto found that speed limit reduction by 25% lowered the rate of pedestrian-vehicle accidents by 28%.
Pedestrian actions can also play a role. Just as there are distracted drivers, there are distracted pedestrians, too, walkers paying more attention to their phones than to traffic and their surroundings. But traffic fatality trends indicate that our tendency to blame pedestrians may be misplaced. It’s dangerous to be a motorist, and car accidents are getting more deadly.
Safety by Design
Urban and suburban design has a major influence on pedestrian safety. “Our cities are not fully designed for a safe pedestrian experience,” says Adie Tomer, who studies infrastructure policy at the think tank Brookings Metro. Especially in cities and towns developed after the widespread adoption of automobiles, new developments are scaled for cars, not people.
Compare Carytown and the stretch of West Broad Street at Willow Lawn. Where would you rather be a pedestrian? Both are shopping districts, but Cary Street is scaled for people, West Broad Street for cars. Where houses and shops are bigger and farther apart, driving is more convenient or simply required.
Modern development has put people in low-income households (disproportionately people of color) and the elderly most at risk due to an effect known as the suburbanization of poverty.
It works this way: White flight from city centers in the 1950s and 1960s led to car-centered suburbs. In the 21st century, the affluent are migrating back to city centers for perks like walkable streets, shopping and human-scaled infrastructure. Prices in urban areas rise, and people with low incomes are priced out, pushed out to the suburbs where, if you want to get around, you need to drive. You also have to be able to afford a car.
Dironna Clarke leads the city of Richmond’s Office of Equitable Transit and Mobility. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Making Streets Safer for Pedestrians
Civic leaders across the country are trying to solve the problem of pedestrian safety from different angles.
In Washington, 100,000 drivers with at least two traffic camera tickets since 2021 are getting warning notifications that they’re endangering themselves and others. Some states are imposing harsher punishments for reckless driving. In June, a man in Florida was given a 30-year prison sentence for an accident he caused in 2016, which killed a 9-year-old boy and injured three other passengers. In Richmond, a driver received a 25-year sentence for an accident he caused in 2020 that killed two people and injured a third.
This summer, more than 130 teenagers spent four days at James Madison University learning how to be community advocates for traffic safety during a retreat sponsored by Youth of Virginia Speak Out About Traffic Safety.
Some cities have adopted a plan called Vision Zero. Richmond is one of them.
Vision Zero is a global safety project whose goal is to eliminate traffic-related deaths and injuries. If that sounds ambitious, it is, but it’s also possible: Jersey City in New Jersey went a full year without a traffic death in 2022. Hoboken, New Jersey, hasn’t had one since 2019.
These cities haven’t overhauled their streets to see a difference. Many changes are small: Slowing traffic on narrow avenues or preventing cars from parking close to intersections so they don’t block drivers’ line of sight. “We need roadways designed to protect drivers and pedestrians from one another,” Tomer at Brookings Metro says.
Richmond’s department of public works is seeking federal grant funding for a slate of small-scale projects designed to meet Vision Zero goals. Among them are building sidewalks and traffic islands around St. Catherine’s School in Westhampton, adding pedestrian crossings and curb ramps at Route 1 and Dinwiddie Avenue and at Westminster Avenue, adding bike lanes downtown and along Patterson Avenue, and pouring sidewalks in Scott’s Addition and in Maymont. Grant determination is expected in June 2024.
City leaders have long emphasized the importance of pedestrian safety, but residents are ready to see it happen. Infrastructure changes take years, and Richmonders wonder if we can wait that long. There’s a new project in the works that may deliver changes as early as next year.
“Our office is all about those small wins,” says Dironna Clarke, who leads the city’s Office of Equitable Transit and Mobility. “If we keep getting small wins, small wins, small wins, small wins — we will win every time.”
She may talk of small wins, but Clarke’s plan for pedestrian safety is ambitious. After three years of looking for funding, Clarke created Richmond Connects, a multiyear project to make it easier and safer to get around Richmond without a car.
Our cities are not fully designed for a safe pedestrian experience.
—Adie Tomer, Brookings Metro
Her team spent a year studying the needs of walkers, cyclists and transit riders. They looked at our most dangerous streets and intersections, the areas most affected by suburbanization of poverty and redlining, the ones blown apart by interstates, neighborhoods where investments could increase access to jobs and housing, air quality and water quality. They found areas where safety and security issues coincide — maybe there is a sidewalk, but it’s poorly lit.
They took their data, opened it up for public comment and went out into the community asking, where do you see problems? The ones they heard repeatedly were prioritized. A cluster of public comments, a concentration of violent crimes or property crimes could also bump something up the list.
Crunching crash and crime numbers doesn’t catch it all, says Kelli Rowan, who is leading the data collection process. They needed to hear from residents. “If there’s a ton of people that keep saying it over and over again, there’s probably a problem there that we just haven’t captured in the data yet.”
In June, Richmond Connects released a needs identification report that includes a detailed list of problems that need attention — intersections that don’t feel safe, roads where cars often speed, crosswalks not conducive to wheelchair users.
Next, the team will collect ideas for improvements. So, this intersection is unsafe for walking — should we put in a crosswalk? Lower the speed limit? “We’re in the stage where we’re saying, ‘We know that there is a problem. Here are a few solutions. What do you want to prioritize and how do you want to get it done?’” Clarke says.
The city’s master plan, Richmond 300, states that plans will prioritize people over cars, and Clarke wants to hold them to it. “Richmond 300 said that we were going to move away from cars and go to a walkable city. That’s the vision they have for Richmond. This plan is getting us that,” she says.
The plan makes 140 recommendations for non-motor transportation improvements, though not all will make it into the final document. Clarke envisions major changes over the long term. If bikeability and walkability are what they want, then that’s what they’ll get. “I don’t know if people really understand what that means,” she says. “It means we may take a lane off of a street to create capacity for bikes and pedestrians. It’s not going to be building a new lane [for cars].”
Waiting for Change
Richmonders who cross the same dangerous intersections and walk the same high-speed streets every day feel like their concerns have been ignored. Just about every neighborhood has a thoroughfare it calls the “Richmond Motor Speedway”: Patterson Avenue, Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Broad Street, Semmes Avenue, the Richmond Highway. You don’t need an engineer’s report to know these arteries are dangerous for pedestrians, so why don’t we slow it down?
![FEA_PedSafety_Infographic_rp0923[88].jpg](https://richmondmagazine.com/downloads/40012/download/FEA_PedSafety_Infographic_rp0923%5B88%5D.jpg?cb=791a078469c95818947cf132f1e3643d&w={width}&h={height} "FEA_PedSafety_Infographic_rp0923[88].jpg")
Source: Governors Highway Safety Association
The process of changing public infrastructure is plodding. The public typically doesn’t hear about a project until at least a couple years of work have been done, says Brantley Tyndall, director of outreach at advocacy group Bike Walk RVA. “The paperwork, the grant applications, the approvals, the budget cycles can take a long time. It’s public information. Nothing is being hidden from what grant requests are being put in, but it’s not readily accessible.”
For instance, the bike lane built on Brook Road in 2020 first appeared on a city plan in 2000. It didn’t enter the design stage until 2016. In February, the city received an $8.8 million state grant to make Vision Zero safety improvements like high-visibility crosswalks and warning signs. The grant was approved earlier this year, but the money isn’t available until summer 2024.
But some projects do get done more quickly, and that’s left Richmonders frustrated. After the two VCU students were killed, speed tables (wider, flatter speed bumps) were added within weeks. Mike Sawyer, the city’s transportation engineer, says there were existing plans to add speed tables all over the city, and these took precedence after the crashes occurred.
Chet Parsons, director of transportation at regional planning organization PlanRVA, hears the frustration. “There are a lot of plans, and that’s something I think more and more people are aware of, and we’re starting to hear, ‘Well, it’s time to build things instead of planning for them.’” Cities everywhere compete for limited grant funding, and Parsons hopes the size of the federal infrastructure bill means money will move more quickly.
In 2022, First District City Council representative Andreas Addison proposed the creation of a city department of transportation, which, he argues, would speed up changes by reducing the number of departments that must coordinate on projects. The council approved a resolution to create the department, but it was not adopted in the city budget. Resolutions, unlike ordinances, are nonbinding.
Clarke’s office is confident that they can see the Richmond Connects recommendations through to implementation. The project is being led by the Office of Equitable Transit and Mobility, which has been charged with running projects just like this one. And Richmond Connects has supporters in the city council, Rowan says, so there is the political will to make this happen, and the money, too — the Central Virginia Transportation Authority, created in 2020, makes funds available, and there are federal dollars to be had for equity-focused transportation projects.
Rowan also credits a culture change that wants to focus on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure: Both people and politicians want to see this happen.
Clarke plans to ask the city council to approve changes this fall and start implementing a list of “cheaper, faster, lighter” changes by the spring. Those are things that can be picked up, like buffered bike lanes or temporary traffic circles — inexpensive ways to test infrastructure ideas while her office goes looking for money to fund permanent changes.
If you’re eager to see something done, say so. “I would encourage anybody to get involved with the local decision-making process,” Parsons says. “Planning commissions, city council, boards of supervisors, they’re all public meetings, and a lot of these are virtually accessible. Anyone who has something to say or wants to express a desire to improve their community, get out and participate in these meetings, be involved in the process.”
