District Targets Perilous Crossings

City Studies Ways To Manage Traffic, Pedestrian Safety

George Branyan, coordinator of pedestrian programs for the D.C. Department of Transportation, discusses a map that charted pedestrian fatalities. A consultant is working to propose solutions for dangerous stretches of roads. (2006 Photo By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

At home Wednesday night, watching the 11 o'clock news, George Branyan learned that two women had been struck and killed by a Metrobus in downtown Washington. The report said the tragedy had occurred at rush hour that evening as the women were crossing Pennsylvania Avenue at Seventh Street NW.

Right away, Branyan said, a sequence of events flashed in his mind.

"When I heard where the crash was and that the bus had hit the pedestrians in the crosswalk," he said, "my first thought was: The bus was moving north on Seventh and likely making that soft left-turn movement to the west-northwest, from Seventh onto Penn."

Precisely. The turn there isn't a sharp 90 degrees but is a wider, easier angle, and Branyan knew that drivers generally don't slow down as much as they should. "About 40 percent of pedestrian crashes at Seventh and Penn happen that way," he said.

As coordinator of pedestrian programs for the D.C. Department of Transportation, Branyan is assigned to make the city safer for people on foot. He is familiar with that perilous intersection near the Federal Trade Commission building, where the women worked, and other dangerous pedestrian crossings in the District.

But identifying trouble spots is just part of the job -- making them more hospitable to walkers is another matter and no easy task, transportation experts said. They said Wednesday's fatalities and other recent pedestrian deaths in the District illustrate the difficulty of managing busy urban streets and balancing the safety of thousands of pedestrians against another imperative: the need to keep traffic flowing.

"There isn't a simple solution, and there isn't one solution that's going to work at every location," said Colleen Mitchell, a transportation planner for Toole Design Group, a consulting firm hired by the District to pinpoint the city's 10 most hazardous stretches of road (not just intersections) for pedestrians and to propose solutions for each danger zone.

Branyan said the Hyattsville company began working on the $250,000 project in November and is expected to complete it by fall. The study is part of the District's new pedestrian master plan, an effort to make the nation's capital a more walker-friendly city.

"Intersections are very complex, and in urban areas, we're dealing with high volumes of traffic and people," Mitchell said. "A lot of thought has to go into the engineering to ensure that people on the ground and in vehicles are sharing the space safely."

Branyan said that in devising countermeasures to use at crosswalks along the most dangerous pedestrian traffic corridors, the consultants will "look at using all the things in the traffic planner's toolbox."

The possibilities include illuminated crosswalks, which would allow pedestrians, with the push of a button, to activate warning lights embedded along the width of the road.

In some places, officials might narrow intersections by adding curb extensions to the sidewalks at each end of a crosswalk to encourage drivers to slow down.