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01-19-04, 11:57 AM
A Walk on the Wild Side
Disappearing sidewalks, impassable crosswalks, unstoppable traffic, malevolent driving. Does it have to be such a jungle out there?
By Mary Battiata
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page W08
It's strange about the shoes. There are a lot of shoes out here, shoes without people attached. Ghost shoes: a flattened leather boot, a new black patent leather military dress shoe, a faded blue canvas sneaker. And it's always one shoe, half a pair. How do you lose one shoe?
Such are the mysteries of the lonely pedestrian. And I do mean lonely. I'm 24 miles and five days into a 50-mile hike west out of Washington, walking the commuter routes, the fastest roads from downtown to the suburbs. Except for a few people at bus stops here and there, I haven't seen a soul afoot. There's no one walking.
And no wonder. The cars on this stretch of Route 50 in Fairfax County are roaring past me at 55 mph, 10 miles over the posted speed limit. There's no sidewalk, so I'm proceeding down a narrow shoulder of gravel beside a painted white line, with my shoulders hunched and the strap to my kit bag tucked tight and out of reach of passing side-view mirrors. At the intersection up ahead, a right-turn-only lane lets cars take the corners without stopping. A maroon van rounds the corner on two wheels and nearly clips me. Just past the intersection, a blue asphalt footpath appears briefly -- a lifeline! -- but then dives under the grass without warning, like a sea serpent on an old map.
Every mile or so, I stumble across another shoe. How can there be so many shoes along the roadside when no one appears to be walking? And for that matter, how much longer am I going to be able to hold on to my own? I'm already gripping my reporter's notebook like a shield, hoping it makes me look vaguely official, like a county worker or someone with a legitimate right to be out here.
I can remember when -- in a suburban Washington childhood in the '60s and '70s -- walking was common, routine even. We walked to the shopping center, walked to school. I can even remember walking on the Beltway in suburban Maryland the night before the roadway opened.
But somewhere between then and now, walking as an option in suburban America seems to have virtually disappeared. The facts bear this out. Between 1980 and today, the number of children walking to school has fallen from 70 percent to less than 10 nationwide. Walking as a means of getting from here to there is 36 times more dangerous than driving, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a research and advocacy group. Nationally, only 5 percent of all trips are made on foot, but pedestrians account for more than 13 percent of all traffic fatalities.
Nationally, 78,000 pedestrians were struck and injured by cars in 2001, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; 4,882 were killed. By the late '90s in Montgomery County, pedestrian deaths were starting to outnumber homicides.
At a certain point, I began taking this situation personally. Crossing ever-widening suburban intersections had become an ordeal. I saw that older people and those with small children often couldn't make it across in time, stranded on the median, marooned as the light changed and traffic surged around them. They had a hunted quality, like people trying to cross Sniper Alley in Sarajevo. Every year streets and intersections seemed to get wider. Pedestrians were now sharing their space with right-turn-on-red traffic and left-turn-on-green.
It all seemed a very long way from the righteous path taken by metaphysicians of walking like Henry David Thoreau, who in his essay "Walking" praised going about on foot as an aid to clear thinking and good citizenship. Wasn't walking our American right, a virtue, in fact, that promoted hardy self-reliance and was as embedded in our history and character as freedom of speech? As in "Our Town," Thornton Wilder's play about life in fictional Grover's Corners, N.H., in the early 1900s, where people rely on their daily sidewalk encounters to take the measure of life itself.
What were we losing, locked in our cars while the streets became ever more unwalkable?
The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and local jurisdictions were spending tens of millions of dollars on studies and public awareness campaigns. But that was a Band-Aid on a larger problem that no one knew how to fix. In La Plata, one intersection had actually been outfitted with traffic kiosks equipped with orange flags. Pedestrians were encouraged to grab a pennant, bear it across the traffic lanes and leave it on the opposite side for use by the next hardy traveler. Was this progress?
So I decided to walk, which is always good for thinking. I would walk not on wooded bike trails or out-of-the-way hiking paths, but rather on the commuter roads, where I would act as if I had as much right to be out there as any car. I would howl on behalf of my fellow walkers, and venture out to see if there was any hope on the horizon.
My modus operandi would be to walk in chunks of four to six miles a day, mark my spot at the end of each day and resume from that point. Every step westward, therefore, would be made on foot. To get home each night and back to the next day's start point, I would rely on whatever worked -- Metro, bus, taxi, thumb.
As I began to map my route, however, misgivings mounted.
"You're walking out there?" a Fairfax County police officer said, incredulously. "I drive that way every morning from South Riding -- cars blow by me, and I'm in a marked car."
At the town library in Leesburg, where I'd driven to look at maps, the researchers blanched when I pointed to a thread-wide line that looked promising.
"Oh, God," a librarian said, shaking her head. "You can't walk on Route 15 -- it's too dangerous."
I drove to the roadside in question, and stepped out of the car to read a historical marker. I was promptly blown sideways by the gust of a flatbed trailer barreling by. The driver leaned on his horn for good measure, in warning or greeting or both.
"I'm surprised your editors are letting you do this," a national expert on pedestrian safety said soberly when apprised of my plan. "When we go out along those kinds of roads we wear reflective vests and hats."
My destination was Gilbert's Corner, a tiny dot on the map where Route 50 intersects Route 15. On paper, it looked rural, and the name had a pleasing echo of Thornton Wilder's fictional town. It was still well within the commuter zone, the suburban development that has overtaken eastern Loudoun County in the past decade. Still, I imagined a place where a walker might find a country store, or at the very least a Coke machine. A restroom would be nice, too.
I'd driven all over Northern Virginia as reporter and resident, but I'd never laid eyes on Gilbert's Corner, named for a Maryland man who built a stucco filling station there in the 1920s. William Gilbert sold Sinclair gasoline for 12 cents a gallon, but his establishment was most famous for its milk and ham sandwiches, which in the '30s and '40s were known to travelers from New York to Florida. "Be sure to stop at Gilbert's," the saying went.
I could already taste the ham sandwich. What I couldn't know as I set out was that Gilbert's Corner had also been very much on someone else's radar screen. Gilbert's Corner wouldn't solve the shoe mystery, but it would provide an unexpected answer to the larger question of what the future of walking could be.
But where to start? It had to be downtown Washington, the focus of so many commutes. It had to be along roads whose attractions had long been dulled by countless car trips. I wanted to find out what might arise from these roadsides if I took them at a slower pace.
I decided to begin on the Mall, the broad expanse of sandy gravel and grass sometimes called America's Front Porch. It is a walker's dream, and one of the most important examples of pedestrian-friendly urban planning in the United States. I took a cab down to Fourth and Jefferson, in the shadow of the Smithsonian, where, as coincidence would have it, an entire exhibit on the history of transportation in the United States -- trains, planes, trolleys and cars -- would soon be opening.
Waves of afternoon cars were already washing up against the traffic lights on Constitution Avenue. I wanted to cross the Potomac on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, which is part of Route 50, a historic highway that starts in Ocean City, Md., and goes all the way west to Sacramento. From the bridge I would head west to Fairfax City, dogleg southwest on Route 29, past Manassas National Battlefield Park, and from there head back up to 50, and west again, three more miles to Gilbert's Corner.
Road maps that offered detail down to the last pebble were opaque about sidewalks. It was impossible to tell whether the Roosevelt Bridge was walkable or not. I thought I remembered seeing pedestrians there. The map showed a mysterious line of faint dashes, but it was incomplete.
At Constitution Avenue I hit my first barrier, an orange striped sawhorse blocking my route entirely. So I turned right, headed for Key Bridge. Washington Circle, originally designed as a military defense, was an efficient and bucolic oasis of calm. Thousands of cars were moving through it at rush hour, but the center was quiet. There were benches to rest on. These would be the last benches I'd see on my entire trip. Most of them were occupied by people in varying states of mental distress.
Without the protective armor of my car, I felt as vulnerable as a hatchling.
I totter out of the Metro into the Tinkertoy skyline of Rosslyn, with its tall buildings made of '70s Christmas ornaments and drugstore sunglasses. I've driven through Rosslyn a thousand times, but things look different on foot. The land is big and you are small. The roiling aluminum sculpture at the corner of Wilson and North Oak looks, for the first time, like the traffic arrows the artist probably intended. At another corner, giant concrete balls seem eminently bowlable.
Beyond Rosslyn, Route 50 stretches out into real highway. The grass medians teem with wildflowers and jumping insects. They are tiny nature reserves. Crickets and cicadas chirp and rasp, long green grasses nod feathery heads at the afternoon sun, which lights up the ruby tangles of sumac. Except for the roar of the traffic, it's almost pleasant.
Westward ho. I'm just east of Seven Corners, where 50 meets Leesburg Pike meets Little River Turnpike meets Wilson Boulevard meets Sleepy Hollow meets Hillwood. Both sides of Route 50 have started to clog up with serious retail activity -- a Target, a Barnes & Noble, a Home Depot.
As I cross from Arlington County into Fairfax, I'm about to encounter one of the area's most pernicious myths about pedestrian accidents.
The myth is that Latino and other immigrants figure highly in pedestrian accident statistics because of their culture -- their limited grasp of English, their unfamiliarity with complicated roadways.
It is true that three of the most dangerous roadways for pedestrians in the Washington area have high immigrant populations -- the so-called "international corridor" at University Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue in Langley Park, Route 1-Richmond Highway in southern Fairfax County, and Seven Corners in eastern Fairfax. It is also true that, proportionately, immigrants are injured far more often. But language skills and familiarity with traffic signals are not the central problem. The problem is road design, or the lack thereof. These intersections are textbook examples of all the ways that roads designed for speed and maximum traffic flow are hazards for anybody who has to walk on them.
This is the case at Route 50 and Patrick Henry Drive. For traffic heading west, away from Washington, the traffic signal at Patrick Henry is the last chance to enter the sprawling Seven Corners shopping center. Miss it and you sail on out to Merrifield and the Beltway.
This stretch of Route 50 is lined with blocks and blocks of garden apartments and low-rise condominiums. Residents flock to the big-box discount stores on either side of the street. Bus stops set back from the main road serve routes that fan out to every major population center in Northern Virginia -- Rosslyn, Tysons Corner, Fairfax City, Ballston, the Pentagon. The roadside is busy with pedestrians at all hours, but especially during morning rush hour and afternoons, when school gets out. There are grandparents leading small children, young mothers pushing strollers toward the elementary school nearby, teenagers in groups of four and five, young couples. They all want to cross Route 50.
But the Route 50-Patrick Henry intersection is poorly designed for pedestrians. There is a crosswalk and a walk signal, but the walk-signal button on the westbound side of 50 is bolted to a pole that appears unconnected to the light itself. Pedestrians share the first part of the crosswalk with fast-moving, right-turn-only traffic shooting onto 50 from Patrick Henry. The signal gives people 22 seconds to cross eight lanes of traffic, including two right-turn merges whose traffic is not controlled by the light.
For pedestrians who don't want to cross here, the next legal option is half a mile away at Seven Corners itself, a route that requires hiking up a ramp to the top deck of the interchange, traversing a series of traffic islands and signals, hiking back down the ramp on the opposite side of the boulevard and retracing one's steps half a mile back to the shopping center and apartments.
Confronted with these choices, many people here opt for door No. 3. They walk up the road to a point about halfway between Patrick Henry and Seven Corners and sprint across when the traffic lulls. Any pedestrian struck by a car here -- and there have been several in the past year -- would appear in police and news reports as the guilty party, but the people who "ford" the road there are actually making a highly rational choice. At the intersections, the traffic is eight lanes or more and there are right- and left-turn lanes to contend with as well. In the middle, the traffic narrows to four lanes (plus service roads) and it's easier to eyeball. People sprint across the road there day and night, so many that footpaths have been worn into the grass, and the county has erected two small signs that say "Use Crosswalk," with little arrows pointing back toward Patrick Henry and Seven Corners. During one 10-minute stretch I watch more than a dozen people run across the road.
Back at Patrick Henry, 40-year-old Hilda Martinez, a housekeeper and recent emigre from Peru, waits, too, frowning with anxiety. Martinez recently learned the hard way that the signals cannot be one's only guide to crossing. She was nearly struck by a car in the crosswalk of the on-ramp from Patrick Henry to Route 50 in late October. She had the legal right of way, but the oncoming car was speeding and did not stop. She avoided injury only by leaping back onto the curb. A few weeks later she saw a woman hit at the same spot by a car that didn't stop. The woman was injured, not killed. Martinez was shaken. "I shook my fist."
If they're able, Martinez says, pedestrians struck by cars in this area often try to leave the scene, fearful of police contact because of their illegal immigrant status. Martinez, who is a legal resident and does not have a car, has to cross Route 50 here several times a day, walking her 4-year-old son, Rodrigo, to and from preschool. Her native city of Lima, Peru, is much more congested than Seven Corners, but that city's narrower streets force cars to drive slowly, and take more care around walkers. "Here there are so many lanes," she says. And the pedestrians are sometimes at fault, too. "Sometimes people don't pay attention; they walk across the road like they are walking in the apartment courtyard. They stop in the middle of the street."
Martinez shakes her head. "It's very dangerous here."
The seeds of all this were sown in the 1950s, and were part of a public safety plan. This was when the Northern Virginia suburbs began to boom, and Congress decided that an upgraded federal highway system would help evacuate American cities in case of nuclear attack. The idea was that when the bomb hit, we'd save our skins by piling into our Chevys and Nash Ramblers and speeding out of town; some of those highways were to be restricted to civil defense vehicles only. All across the country, states created bureaucracies to build and maintain these smooth, wide arterial wonders. These roads meant it was possible to live farther out from the city center, in subdivisions that offered the peace and pleasures of a quasi-rural lifestyle. Suddenly, there was no need to live within walking distance of a grocery store or a bank (which in many cases got into the act by installing handy drive-thru windows). It was a car party.
The hangover arrived in the 1980s, as commute times lengthened and once-idyllic subdivisions became islands surrounded by an ever-rising tide of cars. Acres of subdivisions and strip malls began to overtax road capacity. More roads were built, and those got crowded, too. Little provision was made for pedestrians. (In the 1990s, states were still spending $72 per person in federal transportation money on highways, and just 55 cents on pedestrian facilities.) A response to this problem has been slow to emerge, but it has arrived, in the form of a loose confederation of urban planners, pedestrian and bicycle advocates, road designers and others who have begun lobbying to roll back America's car-dominated landscape in favor of an America where people have as much right to public space as cars. Under the flag of "new urbanism," these design evangelicals have begun to spread their gospel, town by town, street by street, in small projects in communities across the country.
The new urbanists don't talk about doing away with the car -- they know it's too late for that. And they don't talk about pedestrians dominating the roadways, either. Their watchwords are sharing and common sense, and they promote a set of practical, low-tech design tools collectively known as "traffic calming." These are changes to road design that, for example, encourage cars to drive the posted speed limit, and give people a place to walk. The new urbanists argue that if communities want to encourage walking, they will need not only better sidewalks but other amenities like shade trees and benches. Road design will have to change, as well as the mentality of engineers who for decades have built highways and intersections with one criterion in mind, something called "level of service," a standard that measures how quickly and efficiently an intersection handles traffic. "Level of service" needs to provide for everyone, including walkers and cyclists, new urbanists say. To commuters who worry about the effect on commute time, they brandish timed traffic studies that show "traffic calming," if done correctly, decreases congestion and lengthens the average commute time by less than five minutes.
Disappearing sidewalks, impassable crosswalks, unstoppable traffic, malevolent driving. Does it have to be such a jungle out there?
By Mary Battiata
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page W08
It's strange about the shoes. There are a lot of shoes out here, shoes without people attached. Ghost shoes: a flattened leather boot, a new black patent leather military dress shoe, a faded blue canvas sneaker. And it's always one shoe, half a pair. How do you lose one shoe?
Such are the mysteries of the lonely pedestrian. And I do mean lonely. I'm 24 miles and five days into a 50-mile hike west out of Washington, walking the commuter routes, the fastest roads from downtown to the suburbs. Except for a few people at bus stops here and there, I haven't seen a soul afoot. There's no one walking.
And no wonder. The cars on this stretch of Route 50 in Fairfax County are roaring past me at 55 mph, 10 miles over the posted speed limit. There's no sidewalk, so I'm proceeding down a narrow shoulder of gravel beside a painted white line, with my shoulders hunched and the strap to my kit bag tucked tight and out of reach of passing side-view mirrors. At the intersection up ahead, a right-turn-only lane lets cars take the corners without stopping. A maroon van rounds the corner on two wheels and nearly clips me. Just past the intersection, a blue asphalt footpath appears briefly -- a lifeline! -- but then dives under the grass without warning, like a sea serpent on an old map.
Every mile or so, I stumble across another shoe. How can there be so many shoes along the roadside when no one appears to be walking? And for that matter, how much longer am I going to be able to hold on to my own? I'm already gripping my reporter's notebook like a shield, hoping it makes me look vaguely official, like a county worker or someone with a legitimate right to be out here.
I can remember when -- in a suburban Washington childhood in the '60s and '70s -- walking was common, routine even. We walked to the shopping center, walked to school. I can even remember walking on the Beltway in suburban Maryland the night before the roadway opened.
But somewhere between then and now, walking as an option in suburban America seems to have virtually disappeared. The facts bear this out. Between 1980 and today, the number of children walking to school has fallen from 70 percent to less than 10 nationwide. Walking as a means of getting from here to there is 36 times more dangerous than driving, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a research and advocacy group. Nationally, only 5 percent of all trips are made on foot, but pedestrians account for more than 13 percent of all traffic fatalities.
Nationally, 78,000 pedestrians were struck and injured by cars in 2001, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; 4,882 were killed. By the late '90s in Montgomery County, pedestrian deaths were starting to outnumber homicides.
At a certain point, I began taking this situation personally. Crossing ever-widening suburban intersections had become an ordeal. I saw that older people and those with small children often couldn't make it across in time, stranded on the median, marooned as the light changed and traffic surged around them. They had a hunted quality, like people trying to cross Sniper Alley in Sarajevo. Every year streets and intersections seemed to get wider. Pedestrians were now sharing their space with right-turn-on-red traffic and left-turn-on-green.
It all seemed a very long way from the righteous path taken by metaphysicians of walking like Henry David Thoreau, who in his essay "Walking" praised going about on foot as an aid to clear thinking and good citizenship. Wasn't walking our American right, a virtue, in fact, that promoted hardy self-reliance and was as embedded in our history and character as freedom of speech? As in "Our Town," Thornton Wilder's play about life in fictional Grover's Corners, N.H., in the early 1900s, where people rely on their daily sidewalk encounters to take the measure of life itself.
What were we losing, locked in our cars while the streets became ever more unwalkable?
The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and local jurisdictions were spending tens of millions of dollars on studies and public awareness campaigns. But that was a Band-Aid on a larger problem that no one knew how to fix. In La Plata, one intersection had actually been outfitted with traffic kiosks equipped with orange flags. Pedestrians were encouraged to grab a pennant, bear it across the traffic lanes and leave it on the opposite side for use by the next hardy traveler. Was this progress?
So I decided to walk, which is always good for thinking. I would walk not on wooded bike trails or out-of-the-way hiking paths, but rather on the commuter roads, where I would act as if I had as much right to be out there as any car. I would howl on behalf of my fellow walkers, and venture out to see if there was any hope on the horizon.
My modus operandi would be to walk in chunks of four to six miles a day, mark my spot at the end of each day and resume from that point. Every step westward, therefore, would be made on foot. To get home each night and back to the next day's start point, I would rely on whatever worked -- Metro, bus, taxi, thumb.
As I began to map my route, however, misgivings mounted.
"You're walking out there?" a Fairfax County police officer said, incredulously. "I drive that way every morning from South Riding -- cars blow by me, and I'm in a marked car."
At the town library in Leesburg, where I'd driven to look at maps, the researchers blanched when I pointed to a thread-wide line that looked promising.
"Oh, God," a librarian said, shaking her head. "You can't walk on Route 15 -- it's too dangerous."
I drove to the roadside in question, and stepped out of the car to read a historical marker. I was promptly blown sideways by the gust of a flatbed trailer barreling by. The driver leaned on his horn for good measure, in warning or greeting or both.
"I'm surprised your editors are letting you do this," a national expert on pedestrian safety said soberly when apprised of my plan. "When we go out along those kinds of roads we wear reflective vests and hats."
My destination was Gilbert's Corner, a tiny dot on the map where Route 50 intersects Route 15. On paper, it looked rural, and the name had a pleasing echo of Thornton Wilder's fictional town. It was still well within the commuter zone, the suburban development that has overtaken eastern Loudoun County in the past decade. Still, I imagined a place where a walker might find a country store, or at the very least a Coke machine. A restroom would be nice, too.
I'd driven all over Northern Virginia as reporter and resident, but I'd never laid eyes on Gilbert's Corner, named for a Maryland man who built a stucco filling station there in the 1920s. William Gilbert sold Sinclair gasoline for 12 cents a gallon, but his establishment was most famous for its milk and ham sandwiches, which in the '30s and '40s were known to travelers from New York to Florida. "Be sure to stop at Gilbert's," the saying went.
I could already taste the ham sandwich. What I couldn't know as I set out was that Gilbert's Corner had also been very much on someone else's radar screen. Gilbert's Corner wouldn't solve the shoe mystery, but it would provide an unexpected answer to the larger question of what the future of walking could be.
But where to start? It had to be downtown Washington, the focus of so many commutes. It had to be along roads whose attractions had long been dulled by countless car trips. I wanted to find out what might arise from these roadsides if I took them at a slower pace.
I decided to begin on the Mall, the broad expanse of sandy gravel and grass sometimes called America's Front Porch. It is a walker's dream, and one of the most important examples of pedestrian-friendly urban planning in the United States. I took a cab down to Fourth and Jefferson, in the shadow of the Smithsonian, where, as coincidence would have it, an entire exhibit on the history of transportation in the United States -- trains, planes, trolleys and cars -- would soon be opening.
Waves of afternoon cars were already washing up against the traffic lights on Constitution Avenue. I wanted to cross the Potomac on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, which is part of Route 50, a historic highway that starts in Ocean City, Md., and goes all the way west to Sacramento. From the bridge I would head west to Fairfax City, dogleg southwest on Route 29, past Manassas National Battlefield Park, and from there head back up to 50, and west again, three more miles to Gilbert's Corner.
Road maps that offered detail down to the last pebble were opaque about sidewalks. It was impossible to tell whether the Roosevelt Bridge was walkable or not. I thought I remembered seeing pedestrians there. The map showed a mysterious line of faint dashes, but it was incomplete.
At Constitution Avenue I hit my first barrier, an orange striped sawhorse blocking my route entirely. So I turned right, headed for Key Bridge. Washington Circle, originally designed as a military defense, was an efficient and bucolic oasis of calm. Thousands of cars were moving through it at rush hour, but the center was quiet. There were benches to rest on. These would be the last benches I'd see on my entire trip. Most of them were occupied by people in varying states of mental distress.
Without the protective armor of my car, I felt as vulnerable as a hatchling.
I totter out of the Metro into the Tinkertoy skyline of Rosslyn, with its tall buildings made of '70s Christmas ornaments and drugstore sunglasses. I've driven through Rosslyn a thousand times, but things look different on foot. The land is big and you are small. The roiling aluminum sculpture at the corner of Wilson and North Oak looks, for the first time, like the traffic arrows the artist probably intended. At another corner, giant concrete balls seem eminently bowlable.
Beyond Rosslyn, Route 50 stretches out into real highway. The grass medians teem with wildflowers and jumping insects. They are tiny nature reserves. Crickets and cicadas chirp and rasp, long green grasses nod feathery heads at the afternoon sun, which lights up the ruby tangles of sumac. Except for the roar of the traffic, it's almost pleasant.
Westward ho. I'm just east of Seven Corners, where 50 meets Leesburg Pike meets Little River Turnpike meets Wilson Boulevard meets Sleepy Hollow meets Hillwood. Both sides of Route 50 have started to clog up with serious retail activity -- a Target, a Barnes & Noble, a Home Depot.
As I cross from Arlington County into Fairfax, I'm about to encounter one of the area's most pernicious myths about pedestrian accidents.
The myth is that Latino and other immigrants figure highly in pedestrian accident statistics because of their culture -- their limited grasp of English, their unfamiliarity with complicated roadways.
It is true that three of the most dangerous roadways for pedestrians in the Washington area have high immigrant populations -- the so-called "international corridor" at University Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue in Langley Park, Route 1-Richmond Highway in southern Fairfax County, and Seven Corners in eastern Fairfax. It is also true that, proportionately, immigrants are injured far more often. But language skills and familiarity with traffic signals are not the central problem. The problem is road design, or the lack thereof. These intersections are textbook examples of all the ways that roads designed for speed and maximum traffic flow are hazards for anybody who has to walk on them.
This is the case at Route 50 and Patrick Henry Drive. For traffic heading west, away from Washington, the traffic signal at Patrick Henry is the last chance to enter the sprawling Seven Corners shopping center. Miss it and you sail on out to Merrifield and the Beltway.
This stretch of Route 50 is lined with blocks and blocks of garden apartments and low-rise condominiums. Residents flock to the big-box discount stores on either side of the street. Bus stops set back from the main road serve routes that fan out to every major population center in Northern Virginia -- Rosslyn, Tysons Corner, Fairfax City, Ballston, the Pentagon. The roadside is busy with pedestrians at all hours, but especially during morning rush hour and afternoons, when school gets out. There are grandparents leading small children, young mothers pushing strollers toward the elementary school nearby, teenagers in groups of four and five, young couples. They all want to cross Route 50.
But the Route 50-Patrick Henry intersection is poorly designed for pedestrians. There is a crosswalk and a walk signal, but the walk-signal button on the westbound side of 50 is bolted to a pole that appears unconnected to the light itself. Pedestrians share the first part of the crosswalk with fast-moving, right-turn-only traffic shooting onto 50 from Patrick Henry. The signal gives people 22 seconds to cross eight lanes of traffic, including two right-turn merges whose traffic is not controlled by the light.
For pedestrians who don't want to cross here, the next legal option is half a mile away at Seven Corners itself, a route that requires hiking up a ramp to the top deck of the interchange, traversing a series of traffic islands and signals, hiking back down the ramp on the opposite side of the boulevard and retracing one's steps half a mile back to the shopping center and apartments.
Confronted with these choices, many people here opt for door No. 3. They walk up the road to a point about halfway between Patrick Henry and Seven Corners and sprint across when the traffic lulls. Any pedestrian struck by a car here -- and there have been several in the past year -- would appear in police and news reports as the guilty party, but the people who "ford" the road there are actually making a highly rational choice. At the intersections, the traffic is eight lanes or more and there are right- and left-turn lanes to contend with as well. In the middle, the traffic narrows to four lanes (plus service roads) and it's easier to eyeball. People sprint across the road there day and night, so many that footpaths have been worn into the grass, and the county has erected two small signs that say "Use Crosswalk," with little arrows pointing back toward Patrick Henry and Seven Corners. During one 10-minute stretch I watch more than a dozen people run across the road.
Back at Patrick Henry, 40-year-old Hilda Martinez, a housekeeper and recent emigre from Peru, waits, too, frowning with anxiety. Martinez recently learned the hard way that the signals cannot be one's only guide to crossing. She was nearly struck by a car in the crosswalk of the on-ramp from Patrick Henry to Route 50 in late October. She had the legal right of way, but the oncoming car was speeding and did not stop. She avoided injury only by leaping back onto the curb. A few weeks later she saw a woman hit at the same spot by a car that didn't stop. The woman was injured, not killed. Martinez was shaken. "I shook my fist."
If they're able, Martinez says, pedestrians struck by cars in this area often try to leave the scene, fearful of police contact because of their illegal immigrant status. Martinez, who is a legal resident and does not have a car, has to cross Route 50 here several times a day, walking her 4-year-old son, Rodrigo, to and from preschool. Her native city of Lima, Peru, is much more congested than Seven Corners, but that city's narrower streets force cars to drive slowly, and take more care around walkers. "Here there are so many lanes," she says. And the pedestrians are sometimes at fault, too. "Sometimes people don't pay attention; they walk across the road like they are walking in the apartment courtyard. They stop in the middle of the street."
Martinez shakes her head. "It's very dangerous here."
The seeds of all this were sown in the 1950s, and were part of a public safety plan. This was when the Northern Virginia suburbs began to boom, and Congress decided that an upgraded federal highway system would help evacuate American cities in case of nuclear attack. The idea was that when the bomb hit, we'd save our skins by piling into our Chevys and Nash Ramblers and speeding out of town; some of those highways were to be restricted to civil defense vehicles only. All across the country, states created bureaucracies to build and maintain these smooth, wide arterial wonders. These roads meant it was possible to live farther out from the city center, in subdivisions that offered the peace and pleasures of a quasi-rural lifestyle. Suddenly, there was no need to live within walking distance of a grocery store or a bank (which in many cases got into the act by installing handy drive-thru windows). It was a car party.
The hangover arrived in the 1980s, as commute times lengthened and once-idyllic subdivisions became islands surrounded by an ever-rising tide of cars. Acres of subdivisions and strip malls began to overtax road capacity. More roads were built, and those got crowded, too. Little provision was made for pedestrians. (In the 1990s, states were still spending $72 per person in federal transportation money on highways, and just 55 cents on pedestrian facilities.) A response to this problem has been slow to emerge, but it has arrived, in the form of a loose confederation of urban planners, pedestrian and bicycle advocates, road designers and others who have begun lobbying to roll back America's car-dominated landscape in favor of an America where people have as much right to public space as cars. Under the flag of "new urbanism," these design evangelicals have begun to spread their gospel, town by town, street by street, in small projects in communities across the country.
The new urbanists don't talk about doing away with the car -- they know it's too late for that. And they don't talk about pedestrians dominating the roadways, either. Their watchwords are sharing and common sense, and they promote a set of practical, low-tech design tools collectively known as "traffic calming." These are changes to road design that, for example, encourage cars to drive the posted speed limit, and give people a place to walk. The new urbanists argue that if communities want to encourage walking, they will need not only better sidewalks but other amenities like shade trees and benches. Road design will have to change, as well as the mentality of engineers who for decades have built highways and intersections with one criterion in mind, something called "level of service," a standard that measures how quickly and efficiently an intersection handles traffic. "Level of service" needs to provide for everyone, including walkers and cyclists, new urbanists say. To commuters who worry about the effect on commute time, they brandish timed traffic studies that show "traffic calming," if done correctly, decreases congestion and lengthens the average commute time by less than five minutes.