On September 16 at 8:17 PM, a woman (who remains publicly unidentified several weeks later) was struck at 1310 Silas Deane Highway in Wethersfield. For once, the local news (well, NBC30, anyway) showed the vehicle involved: the windshield was smashed. More on that in a moment.

Paramedics provided assistance at the scene. The victim was taken to Hartford Hospital, where she sadly succumbed to injuries.

A law enforcement officer was quoted in the Courant: “It’s getting dark earlier, and people have to start getting used to the darkness.”

The newspaper offered no fact checking, so I will.

It has been getting dark earlier since the summer solstice. Sunset times have moved earlier since July 3, 2020. This is not unknowable information. We experience the gradual shift in light every single year. Darkness falls only a few minutes earlier or later each day, aside from on the two days when we adjust our clocks.

Why would this be the statement issued by police?

They may have different names and route numbers, but so far two pedestrians and one cyclist have died on Hartford’s Main Street and its continuation south as Wethersfield Avenue and then, in Wethersfield, as the Silas Deane Highway. Rather than attributing a person’s death to the position of the sun in the sky, why not look at the commonalities on this route?

Around 1:15 AM the day after the still unidentified pedestrian was fatally injured on the Silas Deane, David Toles was killed while riding his bicycle in Hamden. Ryan Bivens reportedly crossed the double-yellow line, drove onto the shoulder, struck Toles from behind, and continued on to strike and snap two utility poles. Bivens did not stop until he flipped the vehicle — making it physically impossible for him to cause any more destruction. 

Toles, 54, died on the scene.

Bivens was charged with negligent homicide with a motor vehicle, driving under the influence, and failure to driver in proper lanes. There was no application of the Vulnerable User Law in either of these deaths; do police not know about it or simply not care?

Bivens fatally injured Toles on Dixwell Avenue, less than half a mile from where two men were killed earlier this year when the bus shelter they were in was hit by another reckless, irresponsible driver. 

A 68-year old woman, Celeste Staten, was run down on Whalley Avenue in New Haven on September 27 and in that case, the New Haven Register had the guts to call the area what it truly was: a “crime scene.” Once again, an irresponsible driver (possibly more than one) ran off, tail between legs, rather than call for help.

Her dog, leash trailing, was found on the scene. A witness said that Staten had been out looking for her lost Lhasa Apso.

Staten died.

She is the second pedestrian to be killed on Whalley Avenue this year, and not the first to be killed on that particular stretch of Whalley Avenue. This happened with family members looking on, just a few feet away. 

Instead of scratching one’s head over how these incidents can happen, the first step is to pop over to Google and put those crash scenes into street view. What is obvious in almost every case is terrible road design. 

Angie Schmitt in her new book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America puts it this way: “We know that pedestrian deaths are not just random occurrences. There is a clear pattern in where they occur: […] wide, fast arterial roads, especially in lower-income areas. These are the patterns in who is killed: older people, men, and people of color are disproportionately at risk.”

She goes on to say: “The lack of urgency around the problem may, in part, reflect the relatively low status of those being killed. Walking deaths fall disproportionately on those who are poor, black and brown, elderly, disabled, low-income, or some combination thereof — marginalized people with fewer political resources to demand reforms.”

Soak that in.

Go to the map where I have been tracking our state’s fatalities and click on the pins. Take a look at the photographs, at the victims’ ages and names:  

“Statistically,” Schmitt writes, “[B]lack men are about twice as likely to be killed while walking (or wheeling) as [W]hite men and four times more likely to be killed than the general population. The same is true for Hispanic men.”

The author digs into the reasons for those deaths — it’s right in her book title — so I will instead of repeating all that urge you to grab a copy (available at Hartford Public Library) and read for yourselves, but the next time you hear someone say “I didn’t see them” when referring to a pedestrian collision, take a moment to deconstruct what the driver is admitting.

Back in March 2020, the media picked up on how despite a pandemic shutdown, pedestrians were still getting killed at an alarming rate. At the time, there were 15 pedestrians dead in Connecticut. Now, at the end of September, there are at least 48 pedestrians and cyclists dead in Connecticut, just this year. The rate has not slowed since March. Many of the traffic violence victims were never named by the media.

Schmitt continues: “If we analyze these patterns, they tell us clearly that pedestrian deaths are not just random acts of God or bad luck. . .. Pedestrian deaths are part of a systemic problem with systemic causes.”

To put it another way, you could blame our slow shift in seasonal light for traffic deaths, but you would be wrong.

To put it yet another way, it’s the infrastructure, stupid.

On September 24, Erwin Reich, 72, was struck and killed by a 62-year old driver who claimed she did not see him.

A reflective vest was found near his body.

He should have been very visible to a driver with (1) no vision impairment who was (2) looking at the road and whose (3) vehicle’s lights were clean and functional. With (4) adequate street lighting, Reich absolutely should have been visible to a driver.

Every morning Reich took a four mile walk near his home, where he lived for the last 42 years. He did this loop every morning at age 72. He would have known the area exceptionally well and had a sense for where to walk, where to cross. There are no sidewalks on one side of this Stamford road, though there are bike lanes. The media accounts describe him as walking adjacent to the travel lane, which implies he was using a bike lane where there had been no sidewalk. Because paint does not protect, there was nothing physical to prevent a driver from going into a place that cars are supposed to stay out of. 

He was struck and killed at 5:52 AM. 

The driver remained on the scene and was not charged because we all know by now that the police balk at arresting people for killing others when the act is done with a car if the driver remains on the scene and is not obviously under the influence of drugs or alcohol. 

It’s worth repeating. The driver claimed she could not see him. 

 

This brings the running total to 44 people killed while walking and four killed while cycling in Connecticut this year. Many of those deaths are clustered in and around New Haven. 

You may have done the math and wondered how this comes to 44 dead pedestrians, rather than 43. Here’s how: Around 1:45 AM on October 1, 2020, the intersection of Park Street and Washington Street in Hartford became a crime scene. A coward who was driving under the influence rammed into a man and woman, then fled. The woman died. Within hours the murderer was tracked down and arrested. There is a high rate of pedestrian crashes at this intersection – at least three with injuries in 2018 — yet the City of Hartford has taken no meaningful measures to reduce crashes through redesign.

As Schmitt puts it, “[p]edestrians and cyclists now account for about one in five traffic deaths in the United States. But these modes receive just about 1.5 percent of federal transportation funding, or about $2.65 per American per year” and “pedestrian deaths . . . are a design problem. Certain streets are designed to kill.” 

If you ignored the suggestion the first time, really, look at the map above and take a street/road view on another map to get a glimpse of the deadly crash sites with which you are unfamiliar. Most fit the definition of a street designed to kill. 

Schmitt’s book gets a mention here because she manages to do what others in her field have failed at: Schmitt describes how anti-pedestrian attitudes have been built into the system, how car culture, sprawl, low gas prices, and vanity trucks all contribute to what is a preventable health crisis, but she does all this in terms the average non-transportation policy wonk/non-engineer can understand. She’s writing to be understood by the people who are most likely to be traffic violence victims. 

Perhaps her book should be required reading for those in driver’s ed, those with more than one moving violation, journalists, city engineers, and every single police officer who handles crashes and traffic enforcement.  

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt is available to borrow from the Hartford Public Library as a regular book and an e-book.