Over the course of two months last year, three pedestrians died after cars hit them on streets in various Cincinnati neighborhoods.
On Nov. 26, 2016, 3-year-old Khloe Pitts died after a car hit her and sped away as her family left the Festival of Lights at the Cincinnati Zoo in Avondale.
Less than three weeks prior, on Nov. 7, 2016, a car struck Federico Ventura while he was crossing Warsaw Avenue in East Price Hill. That car sped off and another dragged him onto nearby McPherson Avenue. He died soon after.
The month before Ventura’s death, Northside’s Sarah Cole died after a car hit her while she was walking across busy Hamilton Avenue to get coffee for coworkers at Tickle Pickle, the restaurant she owned.
These deaths and other pedestrian accidents have led to an outcry from community leaders and business owners. Neighborhoods feel less safe to walk in, they say, even as the city touts walkability as a valuable urban amenity.
As they waited for the city to take action in the wake of Cole’s death, Northsiders got creative, posting signs and small buckets with flags at crosswalks pedestrians could carry to make themselves more visible.
Even after the city has started working on the problem, some in Northside have raised concerns that a few pedestrian paddles and new signs won’t make a dent in the dangers pedestrians face. Others, however, feel that the changes are positive, even if they’re not enough on their own.
It’s not just a Cincinnati problem. The tragic losses of Cole, Ventura and Pitts, among others, are part of a national trend.
In 2016, 6,000 pedestrians across the country died in accidents involving motorists. That was an 11 percent spike from 2015 and a more than 25 percent rise from 2010. The increase greatly outpaced the rise in auto accidents in general last year, and the number of people killed represents the highest pedestrian death toll in two decades. A variety of factors could explain the surge, such as the rise of high-tech devices leading to more distracted driving and more people walking and running for fitness and lifestyle reasons.
“This latest data shows that the U.S. isn’t meeting the mark on keeping pedestrians safe on our roadways,” Jonathan Adkins of the Governors Highway Safety Association told the Associated Press earlier this year. “Every one of these lives represents a loved one not coming home tonight, which is absolutely unacceptable.”
Locally, things haven’t gotten much safer this year. In October, according to the latest available city data, there were 33 accidents involving pedestrians and cars. Twenty-three of those involved pedestrians crossing at intersections.
But the wheels are just now starting to turn on major initiatives to increase safety for pedestrians on Cincinnati streets.
Those efforts include, but aren’t limited to, $500,000 in new safety equipment at intersections in Northside, Hyde Park and other neighborhoods. Cincinnati City Council, spurred on by council members Chris Seelbach and P.G. Sittenfeld, approved that funding back in June.
Sittenfeld says the money is for “citywide, high-impact, low-cost, nimble, ready to go” solutions to pedestrian safety issues.
“This was not meant to be half a million dollars to patch up or widen one road,” he says. “It’s meant to make people safer and more secure in their daily lives as they’re doing the routine things we all do — crossing the street, walking down the sidewalk, navigating your neighborhood. The headlines way too often are filled with tragedies that unfold relative to pedestrian safety.”
The city’s Department of Transportation and Engineering has installed so-called yield paddles — florescent, waist-high markers in the centerline of busy streets — to alert drivers that pedestrians cross nearby. Each of those paddles costs about $700 to purchase and install, according to DTE.
Those paddles have gone up on Hamilton Avenue at Lingo and Palm streets in Northside, where a busy business district and cross-town traffic heading between popular neighborhoods like Clifton and College Hill make walking dangerous. DTE has installed another paddle at Chase and Cherry streets in Northside, across from popular McKie Recreation Center.
Hyde Park has also received the safety features, and several paddles will also be installed in neighborhoods like East Price Hill — where Ventura was struck and killed — Lower Price Hill, Walnut Hills and other neighborhoods.
Those are welcome changes, but it’s been slow going to get bigger efforts off the ground. So far, the city has put just $14,000 of its $500,000 pledge toward these fixes. That’s because the city hasn’t issued the bonds that will pay for the more expensive elements yet, which was a point of frustration for Sittenfeld and Seelbach at a Nov. 28 Cincinnati City Council committee meeting about pedestrian safety efforts.
“It’s taken longer than expected to get the money bonded and in our bank, but much needed changes are happening…and will continue to ramp up,” Seelbach wrote in a Facebook post about the safety efforts Dec. 1. “A friend of mine was just hit crossing the street at Clifton and Glenmary last night. Walking in a crosswalk with the signal. We have to do better.”
In the future, DTE plans to install overhead blinker signs and rapid flashing beacons. Those bright lights flash at intersections when pedestrians push a button, hopefully grabbing drivers’ attention.
The city would like to put those lights at two locations in Northside and another two spots in Hyde Park. It is also looking at the possibility of putting raised curbs at locations in some neighborhoods.
“There’s sort of a hierarchy of tools we can use,” DTE’s Mel McVey told council at its recent meeting. “At the bottom is the crosswalk paddle. We’ll start with that and see what results we can get. If the community still doesn’t feel like they’re seeing the traffic calming it wants, we can move up to the next tool, which is going to be a little more expensive.”
The beacons cost between $20,000 and $30,000 to design, purchase and install, DTE says. The eventual goal is to get at least the yield paddles in the central business district of every neighborhood, DTE Director Michael Moore says.
The department has meetings set up with community representatives in East Price Hill, Westwood and Clifton to discuss the location of the paddles in those neighborhoods.
“It’s been a matter of conversations and engagements with the neighborhood as to what goes where,” Moore says.
The city is also looking forward to the launch next month of a citywide crowdsourcing site that would encourage residents to report issues with pedestrian safety. That site would then map the incidents to provide a clearer picture of where more safety measures need to be taken.
“Historically, we’ve really relied on crash data to inform where we locate safety improvements,” McVay says. “It’s really exciting that we now have a tool we can use proactively to engage the community and dig down and prevent some of these issues.”
There are other efforts on the table, small and large, to increase safety on streets in neighborhoods like Northside. The community council there looks to vote next month on requesting the city study the idea of allowing people to park on Hamilton Avenue 24 hours a day, for example. That would effectively narrow the busy street to two lanes, hopefully calming traffic.
Some city officials have also floated more ambitious changes. Earlier this year, Vice Mayor David Mann and Councilwoman Yvette Simpson proposed making the intersection known as Knowlton’s Corner, where Hamilton Avenue comes together with Spring Grove Avenue and other roads, into a roundabout.
The intersection has been a historically hectic one, carrying traffic rushing downhill from Clifton and coming from wide-open stretches of road like Colerain and Spring Grove avenues. The idea generated a good deal of enthusiasm, as well as no small level of derision from some residents.
Sittenfeld says the city’s efforts so far are just the beginning .
“This $500,000 can’t be all that we do,” he says. “We can do other things that will be more effective than signs.”
This article appears in Dec 6-13, 2017.