Six pedestrians killed on Washington region streets in February

February, a short, dark month of dreary weather around Washington, was notably deadly for people on foot, according to data collected by AAA.

Six pedestrians and a man on a railroad were killed, the automobile club said.

“It is happening all too often on area roads,” John B. Townsend II, with AAA, said. “Grieving families, and many pedestrians as well, are left wondering if the monthly increase in pedestrian fatalities across our region is an alarming pattern, a statistical anomaly or a fluke.”

At least three pedestrians were killed by vehicles in the District last month, two of them by hit-and-run drivers, and three more died in Montgomery County, Townsend said.

 “February’s pedestrian death toll in the District alone represents more than one-third of the overall number of pedestrians killed in the city in all of 2012,” he said. “The number of pedestrian deaths in Montgomery County in the 28 days of this past February alone is equal to 50  percent of the total of such incidents that cropped up in the county in 2012.”

The AAA’s list of fatalities included a 94-year-old pedestrian killed on Georgia Avenue NW, a 20-year-old who was struck by a hit-and-run driver in the 100 block of M Street NE and a man struck on New York Avenue NE near Kendall Street.

On Tuesday, a 53-year-old woman in Wheaton was also killed by a hit-and-run driver at a bus stop at Connecticut Avenue and Everton Street . Two weeks earlier, a pedestrian was killed in Aspen Hill on Georgia Avenue at Heathfield Road.

On Feb. 7, a 44-year-old pedestrian was killed in White Oak on Route 29 at Oak Leaf Drive. About 7 p.m. that same evening, Fairfax County Police said a 64-year-old man from the North Springfield area, reportedly on foot, was killed by an Amtrak train. The incident happened west of the Backlick Road overpass.

Last year, eight pedestrian deaths accounted for 42 percent of total traffic fatalities in the District. That death total tied with 2002 as the lowest number on record in the city, according to the District Department of Transportation.  

Six pedestrians were killed in Montgomery last year.