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McFarland said.

The bridge that will weave over Beltway ramps and under the overpass will cost more than $5 million, said county transportation engineer Mitra Pedoeem. The county will foot half the bill, with the state covering the rest.

At current fiscal estimates, Pedoeem said, the project is expected for completion 2003.

The only remaining details are how to fund the project, and to get pedestrians to use the bridge. Engineers said last week that they plan to encourage walkers and bikers to use the bridge.

McFarland said sometimes it takes a psychological change, too.

"It'll still take time to change people's minds," she said.

The New Republic
WASHINGTON DIARIST
Street Sign
by Gregg Easterbrook

Issue date 03.26.01

My kids attend public school in the suburbs, so, like any other parent, I cringed upon hearing about the two high school murders last week in Santee, California. But though school shootings are a shock and an outrage, I don't stay up at night worried that they endanger my kids: Overall, school violence has been declining for a decade, and homicide by adolescents has been falling for nearly as long. When I worry about my kids' safety, I think about far more likely threats: drugs, driving young--or getting hit by a car while crossing the street.

In 1999, the year of the Columbine massacre, 28 students nationwide were killed in schools, while 840 kids under age 20 were killed when struck by cars as they walked, often to school. But, although school shootings spark a national outcry and huge government spending, street-crossing deaths draw no notice and no action. Pedestrian deaths are deemed, well, pedestrian.

For the past two years Montgomery County, Maryland, the Washington suburb where I live, has seen more pedestrians killed by cars than homicides. Nationally, cars and trucks kill about 5,000 American pedestrians per year--about one-quarter the number of murders. Pedestrian deaths, though not intentional, have much in common with homicides: An innocent person is suddenly cut down by someone wielding a dangerous weapon. But, while Americans devote enormous attention to murder (as we should), our 5,000 dead pedestrians largely escape public consciousness. And government consciousness: The Surface Transportation Policy Project, a nonpartisan group, estimates that the government spends roughly 150 times as much on highways as on pedestrian safety.

Could it be that we hear so little about pedestrian deaths because many of the victims are poor or immigrants? In the "safe" suburbs-- where pedestrian deaths increasingly occur--the affluent typically move exclusively in cars, and the only ones trying to cross busy streets are students or the poor. In Fairfax County, Virginia, another Washington suburb, 23 percent of pedestrians killed between 1993 and 1998 were Hispanics, though Hispanics constituted just eight percent of the county's population. Studies in California and other states have also shown that pedestrian deaths occur disproportionately among Hispanics and the poor.

Another reason we ignore these deaths is that it's easy to blame the victim. Two-thirds of pedestrian fatalities happen in darkness, and those struck are often wearing dark garments. Many others occur when someone tries to dash across a busy boulevard rather than cross at a traffic light. Dashing across is a particular problem among immigrants, who often come from small villages where everyone dashes across the street but where there aren't anywhere near as many vehicles moving anywhere near as fast.

But pedestrian deaths aren't mostly the fault of pedestrians; they're mostly the fault of drivers. One major factor is speed. According to a Department of Transportation study, raising average traffic speed limits from 35 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour doubled the pedestrian death rate. As anyone who regularly drives in the suburbs knows, traffic increasingly moves at breakneck speed even on residential streets, partly because traffic backups cause frustrated drivers to nail the throttle whenever the road is clear and partly because those enormous SUVs make people feel invincible. So even if you're wearing hot pink and dutifully cross at a stoplight, you're still taking your life into your hands.

My local menace is Montgomery County's eight-lane, car-clogged Rockville Pike, which bisects a ten-mile shopping colossus. It contains lengthy stretches where no one can cross safely because continuous torrents of priority-left or right-on-red traffic are surging into the crosswalk even when the "walk" light is illuminated. One person was killed this year at the intersection of Rockville Pike and Tuckerman Lane. The victim had been crossing with the right-of-way and was mowed down by a driver madly gunning to beat the light.

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