U Street accident

Over on DCist, a poster (a reasonable one…unusual for DCist!) wrote that the rider is a colleague and was in stable condition at the ICU

@Brendan von Buckingham 52883 wrote:

Washington Post reported the cyclist has died.

For those who still read the WaPo in paper form, that page of the Post was really depressing. Aside from the sparse article on the cyclist was an article about a woman who was killed on Viers Mill road. She was crossing the section near Georgia Ave and got hit while in the median. (A car accident led to a vehicle swerving into her.) The sheer randomness of it is bad enough, but it highlights just how ridiculously vulnerable we are as pedestrians (and cyclists, of course) because of the way walking and cycling is simply shoehorned into an infrastructure that’s 99.2% for cars. If this happened where I think it happened then it’s at a pedestrian crosswalk where walkers pretty invariably have to wait at the median for cars to clear. It reminds me a bunch of a crossing at Lee Highway that I frequently make (and my son will make in 3 hours on the way to swim practice) where cars are way over the speed limit and flat won’t stop and you’d be foolish to test them. So what walkers do every day is wait for one direction to clear, scurry to the median, wait for the next direction to clear, and then scurry to the other side. Ugh.

@thucydides 52887 wrote:

It reminds me a bunch of a crossing at Lee Highway that I frequently make (and my son will make in 3 hours on the way to swim practice) where cars are way over the speed limit and flat won’t stop and you’d be foolish to test them. So what walkers do every day is wait for one direction to clear, scurry to the median, wait for the next direction to clear, and then scurry to the other side. Ugh.

I live near the crosswalk at Lee and N Nelson (near the Cherrydale Safeway) and see this ALL THE TIME. Most depressing is when the ped waiting in the median is in a wheelchair (there’s a rehab center right there, so lots of wheelchairs) and cars don’t stop. Ugh.

Slightly more promising: ACPD says that they’ll monitor driver behavior at, e.g., crosswalks if there are citizen complaints. The best way to complain is through ACPD’s “SOS” number: 703-228-4141, option 5 (the non emergency number – 703 558 2222 – will also get you there). It seems like the way to do this is to pick a particular crosswalk and get lots of people complain over a period of time (like a week). Hopefully, that will get the police out. I just called, and will email our citizen’s association, to see if we can get some monitoring (and ticketing) at Lee & Nelson. If others also wanted to call, we might see some enforcement!

I do know someone for whom this has worked, so here’s hoping.

@KLizotte 52898 wrote:

Makes me wonder if simply installing in speed humps/dips/tables before *every* crosswalk as standard operating procedure might not be the way to go. At least it would get drivers to slow down.

Do you mean having raised crosswalks? Maybe, though I don’t love humps. Regardless, Arlington has made it very clear it does not want to do anything that resembles “traffic calming” on “arterial” roads, like Lee Hwy.

@dasgeh 52899 wrote:

Do you mean having raised crosswalks? Maybe, though I don’t love humps. Regardless, Arlington has made it very clear it does not want to do anything that resembles “traffic calming” on “arterial” roads, like Lee Hwy.

Raised crosswalks would do the same thing and possibly make the peds more visible. They would in effect become a speed table (of which there are many along Commonwealth Ave in Alexandria). It’s possible real change won’t occur unless the federal government starts requiring ped safety changes as a condition for fed money.

@Mark Blacknell 52968 wrote:

Oh, I wouldn’t quite say that. When I first moved here, Wilson Blvd was wider and much less ped-friendly. Arlington County has narrowed it over the years, and (slowly) improved the sidewalks, etc. I expect that will continue past Ballston (west) in the future, to boot.

Lee is harder, of course, because that’s VDOT controlled. Perhaps (hopefully?) Arlington will end up taking that over from the state the way it did Columbia Pike and we’ll see some progress. Assuming that Columbia Pike will eventually get sorted out, Lee Highway strikes me as the next transportation corridor that will need a major overhaul. It certainly has the raw ingredients to make it something great, too. I imagine your neighbors will go nuts over it, though.

I hope you’re right. My neighbors are turning out to be very promising when it comes to ped friendliness. In our neighborhood survey, they overwhelmingly said they wanted Lee Hwy (the corridor of business in Cherrydale: basically from the 66 underpass to Quincy) to be walkable (I think 90%), a majority (66%, I think) want it to be bikeable, and only 50% want it to be “car friendly” (you could pick multiple answers). I would say have not caring about “car friendly” is a good sign. And they want bike lanes on both sides of Lee Hwy.

But mostly they want trees. They are VERY bitter that the County hasn’t maintained the trees along Lee Hwy (I don’t know who’s responsible, but the County gets all the blame).

@rcannon100 52977 wrote:

And where Arlco does not control – boneheadness reigns: Intersection of doom; circle of doom; parkway crossing roulette; Lorcom and Old Dom; and I guess Cherrydale (10th St is also outside of Arlco control, which is why Dumb Power is routing its power lines up under 10th St — so they dont have to deal with the county).

Is the circle of doom Clarendon “Circle”?

Most of Cherrydale is great, it’s just the lack of respect for the crosswalk (though that’s not unique to Lee Hwy or Cherrydale) and the wonderful intersection known as Five Points (aka “I don’t know how to make a left turn” – where Lee, Old Dom, Quincy and Military meet). The County has tried a number of things with that intersection, but hasn’t tried the most obvious (retime lights so Quincy goes alone, then Military goes alone, solving the left turn debacle) and says there’s not enough space to do what would be expected anywhere else in the world: a traffic circle.