Connecticut municipalities are considering new technology to stop roadway fatalities.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Tom Condon to discuss his article, “No walk in the park: Road design a threat to walkers and bikers,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short.
WSHU: Hello, Tom. You say being a pedestrian or riding a bike in Connecticut on our roadways is no walk in the park. Why?
TC: Because a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists are hit by cars. It's a scandal. It's amazing. I mean, this year, as of April 16, 21 pedestrians have been killed on Connecticut roads, which is two more at this time of year than in 2023 and 2022. The point I'm trying to make is that it's dangerous out there. And you really have to be careful. And so that's, that's why it's no walk in the park.
WSHU: First of all, the big problem we have is the roads were made for cars and not for walking, right? Can you just tell us a little bit about the history of how we ended up with these super highways running through our urban centers? Even the main roads have four or five lanes of traffic you have to cross.
TC: We call those arterioles. And if you look at these, look at something like Route 1 or the Berlin Turnpike, these were the highways before the interstates were built. They were built for cars, and they were built for speed. And anything for pedestrians was an afterthought, if a thought at all. I think the key point is people drive according to how the road is designed, not to what the speed limit is, overwhelmingly. I mean, the speed limit is posted every quarter or a third of a mile. The road design is omnipresent. So if you've got a big, wide, good sight line road, boom, people take off. So the arterioles, which are these high-speed roads, going through town centers, Route 44, a lot of parts of Route 1, traffic moves very fast, but they're in the population centers. That kind of road is where most pedestrians are killed or injured.
WSHU: What I've noticed is that we seem to have more bike lanes. Now I know that bicyclists have been hit as well. Does having bike lanes also help with pedestrians? Narrowing the road?
TC: I don't know if there's an absolute answer to that. I mean, bike lanes are a step in the right direction, especially if they are protected bike lanes. I mean, if it's just a line of paint on a road, somebody can obviously cross it and people do. There was a couple over on Silver Lane in East Hartford a few years ago who was hit in the bike lane. So I mean it's a step in the right direction.
But what you really want to have, I think, are protected bike lanes. Something to keep the cars in the bike separate. I think that's the gold standard of bike lanes. I would also advocate that in major arterials there should also be bus lanes. You know, the more people we can get to ride the bus, the fewer cars there are in traffic and less pollution in the air, etc. Buses, for some reason, have a bad reputation, but actually, they're good.
WSHU: We have a situation in some of our urban centers like New Haven, for instance. You talked with Mayor Justin Elicker in New Haven, and he has put certain things in place. Could you just talk a little bit about what the new road designs are in New Haven?
TC: New Haven had a real problem and there are a lot of pedestrians that were getting hit in New Haven over the last five years. And the mayor, who, by the way, is a bicyclist himself, has responded to it with a number of initiatives. A lot of the accidents took place on another arterial Ella Grasso Boulevard. They have put traffic calming kinds of plastic dividers to narrow the travel lanes, shorten the pedestrian crosswalks, and calm traffic. They're putting two bus rapid transit systems through the city to get more people to take the bus. You can't really get hit by a car if you're on the bus. So it's a good thing. They're doing a major redesign of State Street downtown with protected bike lanes and shortened pedestrian crosswalks, and that's a $6.7 million redesign. And I think that's the idea there. also, he's deploying speed humps around the city.
WSHU: The bumps that they put on the road?
TC: Some people call them speed bumps as well. Yeah, wrapping those around. The city of Hartford has done that also and other communities have as well. They work pretty well; usually, after somebody runs over one at full speed, they don't do it anymore.
WSHU: The DOT commissioner is someone who has had experience with being hit by a car.
TC: That was several years ago when Commissioner Eucalito was hit by a car in Washington D.C. The story that I have is that he survived because he was able to roll off the hood of the car, but was seriously injured. And then a close friend of his was killed riding a bike in Washington D.C. So it's pretty personal with him. And then he has a number of initiatives out there. So he's trying to calm these roads down.
WSHU: So that's a term that they use — to calm the roads.
TC: Yeah, traffic calming, you slow down the movement of traffic so that speeds are much lower. People are gonna make mistakes. But if a car is going slower, a pedestrian has a much better chance of surviving a collision. There's a point I wanted to make about Mr. Eucalito’s accident, if that had been one of these modern cars, these huge SUVs and trucks, the hoods five feet off the ground, you can't roll off unless you're an NCAA high jumper. I mean, you know, you can't roll off. If you take the full Road Runner, I mean, wham. And that's that, that is another, you might call out a design problem. It is. It's a serious problem.
WSHU: Okay, but things are being done. Are we going to see a lot more of this being done? Do you think that the tide is turning because, basically, we have had several years where the number of fatalities has been on the rise?
TC: Absolutely. Well, there's a major step. I think the legislature passed a law allowing towns to install speed and traffic cameras. I think they work.
WSHU: I believe New Haven is one of the first cities to implement the red light traffic cameras, right?
TC: Yes, yeah. New Haven looks to be the first but a lot of others are in the works. You know, it is a way of getting people's attention. They've had these in some of the states. And it was quite controversial when it was passed last year. I don't really get that. I mean, there was one argument that it had violated the right of privacy. Well, I mean, what right of privacy do you have on a public road? We're getting hundreds of people killed every year, don't we want to do something about that? And you're right, then the number of pedestrians being hit here and nationally has been rising for at least a dozen years. people would argue they're not really accidents. If these crashes can be prevented, why don't we prevent them?
WSHU: And another thing is safe driving behavior. There's a movement to have people redo their driver's test after a certain number of years. How is that going?
TC: It's gone so far that under the law passed a couple of years ago, the Department of Motor Vehicles is developing a video on traffic safety, and they and people have to watch it every other license renewal. Now, I don't know how much good this is going to do. Because license renewals are now every six years, moving up to every eight years by 2031. So if you're watching the video once every 16 years, it's not going to do that much. I don't know. I don't believe it'll do that much good. But you know, it's something that there are retraining programs. Triple A has one for senior citizens, the DMV has them for people who have had some serious traffic violations, they can go to classes. The question is, should everybody have to do it? And you can make a pretty good argument for it. I think people like me, I haven't seen a driver's test in more than 50 years.
WSHU: Oh, that's interesting. Before we go, I'd like to talk about this later. Elicker made the analogy that we spent a lot of energy on trying to deal with gun safety. And actually, the number of people who die from gun-related injuries in the United States every year, it's almost a comparable number for the amount of people who die on the roads.
TC: It is correct that about 43,000 people died last year of gun violence and about 41,000 from traffic violence. I think the underlying problem here is that traffic crashes have kind of been treated as a cost of doing business. You know, there's nothing we can really do about it. It's the driver's fault they move on. And what Mayor Elicker’s point is that we have to take this more seriously. And we've got to attack it, because it's a tragedy and a huge public health problem. Between traffic violence and gun violence, they wipe out the population of Danbury every year. Thousands of injuries, we might add, you know, I mean, being injured and seriously injured in a traffic accident becomes a life-changing experience. I've known people who 30 years later will refer to the accident, you know, the time before and the time after, it's, it can be a really traumatic injury.
So it can't be taken as a cost of doing business. It has to be everything that can be done, should be, should be done. For example, some advocates want an interlock device in cars, which DOT is testing right now, and you have to breathe into it. And if your alcohol if your blood alcohol count is over a certain level, which you're trying to reduce in the legislature this year, then the car won't start. Well, about a third of fatalities involve drunk drivers. Wouldn't that help? I think it would. DOT is testing this technology now. And so we'll see. We'll see where that goes.
