After tearful testimony from the parents of a West High freshman killed by traffic last year as she tried to catch her school bus, Cincinnati City Council’s Law and Public Safety Committee heard about ways in which city officials are working to make the streets safer for pedestrians.
Gabby Rodriguez, 15, was struck and killed September 10 when she was sideswiped by a Dodge Journey on four-lane Harrison Avenue as she ran for her bus. As she struggled to get up, a white Honda Civic hit her again. The driver of the Dodge stopped. The Honda did not, and authorities are still searching for the driver. Rodriguez succumbed to her injuries at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital later that day.
“September 10, 6:40 a.m. was the worst phone call I’ve ever gotten,” Eduardo Rodriguez, Gabby’s father, told Council today. “And then to see her in the back of the ambulance, there was my daughter like a fish out of the water. It’s the drivers. We tend to be in a hurry. One minute late, two minutes late. We don’t think about the outcomes. We have to pay attention, especially when we’re driving on busy roads with a lot of kids around.”
The incident that killed Rodriguez was just one of 13 traffic accidents involving Cincinnati Public School students making their way to school since the beginning of the school year, CPS Superintendent Laura Mitchell told council today. Three other students were involved in separate late December accidents as they walked to schools on the West Side. One, Kenya Austin, was walking across an intersection when a car struck her, breaking her femur. The two others also involved students in crosswalks; in one case, a Cincinnati Police cruiser was just feet away.
In addition to those accidents, numerous other high-profile incidents involving pedestrians have occurred in the past few years. In December of last year alone, drivers hit more than 40 pedestrians in Cincinnati, according to city data.
One of the most recent fatal incidents also involved a child: the Dec. 30 death of 2-year-old Dameon Turner as his parents walked him in a stroller on the Hopple Street Viaduct. An impaired driver in a pickup truck hopped the curb, striking and killing Turner.
Officials from the city’s Department of Transportation and Engineering, the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority’s Metro bus service and Cincinnati Public Schools today outlined potential measures to address pedestrian-involved accidents around Western Hills and Dater High Schools — where a number of recent accidents have happened — specifically.
John Brazina and Dennis Lechlak of DOTE said the department is considering or has already implemented specific improvements to the area in order to improve pedestrian safety. Those include:
• Updating streetlights along Ferguson Road to brighter LED lights.
• Replacing missing in-street paddles reminding drivers to proceed slowly at crosswalks
• A potential crosswalk and crossing lights at Glenway Avenue and Sydney Road. That could take three to six months and about $15,000.
• Working with CPS to potentially change school drop-off and pickup locations and patterns
• The possible installation of rapid flashing beacon at crosswalks
• Reviewing the configuration of Ferguson Road and Ferguson Place. The timeframe for this step could take a year or more. One possibility: the intersection could become a four-way stop.
• A potential school zone along Ferguson Road, which would include new signage and flashing lights. That could cost between $8,000 to $10,000.
• Traffic calming measures along Ferguson Road. Those could take six months to study and more than a year to implement.
Along with those improvements, DOTE officials said educating students about the hazards of traffic needed to be a priority.
“Pedestrians have to be educated on how to use these crosswalks,” Lechlak told council.
That drew a response from CPS Superintendent Mitchell.
“Our first and number one priority is that our children need to be safe,” she told council. “I do agree that our students need to be educated. But we’re finding that even when our students are educated, sometimes they’re hit. I think the bigger issue is really around driver safety. How can drivers across the city be more cognizant of pedestrians? It goes beyond, quite honestly, just educating our students. We need more active support as it pertains to (crossing guards) and as it pertains to educating drivers.”
Mitchell said the city should help increase the number of crossing guards working for the district. CPS currently pays about $750,000 a year for 94 crossing guards across the district. Three more crossing guards joined the complement around Dater and West High this month.
Metro, which carries a number of students to school each day, also promised changes to help improve safety. At West High and Dater, that includes changing bus stop patterns so that students are always dropped off on the side of the street their school is on, reducing the need to cross busy roads, Metro CEO Darryl Haley told council. Metro bus drivers have also been told not to stop their buses across crosswalks.
In the longer term, it remains to be seen what the city will do about increasing rates of pedestrian injuries and fatalities — something that has been a national trend in recent years. Almost 6,000 pedestrians died in traffic accidents in 2017, according to data from the Governors Highway Safety Association. A decade ago, that number was fewer than 4,000.
Last year, Cincinnati officials included $500,000 in the city’s budget for improvements to pedestrian safety, an amount that activists say is not nearly enough. Pedestrian safety efforts could come from other parts of the budget, however.
And the Cincinnati Police Department temporarily stepped up traffic enforcement in some hot spots last year. That enforcement comes after media reports showed that the number of traffic citations written by Cincinnati police dropped 60 percent between 2009 and 2016.
Council members promised more efforts are forthcoming.
“People have to watch out for children, for adults, for high school kids, in crosswalks,” Councilwoman Amy Murray said today. “We need to make sure people are safe where they’re crossing, but we also need to ask people at home, please make sure you’re not texting and driving, make sure you’re driving the speed limit and if you see a school bus or a Metro bus, be aware because we don’t want this to happen again.”
Other council members said they will be introducing legislation to work on pedestrian safety more broadly.
“We’ll be putting forward a comprehensive pedestrian safety motion this week, including the adoption of Vision Zero,” Councilman Greg Landsman tweeted today, referring to an initiative that looks to end traffic-related deaths. “This is about keeping children and families safe, and right now, we have a ton of work to do.”
This article appears in Jan 2-8, 2019.
