Taking a closer look at streets
Uptick in pedestrian fatalities downtown elicits response from safety experts
WOONSOCKET — After an uptick in pedestrian fatalities, a multidisciplinary team of road safety experts began taking a hard look at the downtown area yesterday with an eye toward reducing traffic-related casualties in the future.
The Rhode Island Department of Transportation Road Safety Assessment was initiated at the request of Police Chief Thomas F. Oates after the recent fatalities of two pedestrians who were struck by motor vehicles, one in a crosswalk on Main Street and another on Clinton Street.
Wearing bright yellow safety vests, members of the RSA team embarked on a walking tour of the problem zones yesterday after discussing casualty statistics with members of the Woonsocket Police Department and the Planning Department at City Hall. Members of the RSA team said a report with recommended safety improvements could be completed in about two months, with some guidance for the city on how to obtain funding for improvements as early as next year.
“We don’t want to wait for more fatalities to happen,” said Peter Pavao of the consulting firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin. “We want to be proactive. We like to be ahead of the game to try to make some changes before another one happens.”
The RSA team consists of about a dozen members, including representatives of the Rhode Island Department
of Transportation and Vanasse Hangen Brustlin – one of its consulting firms.
With a high concentration of pedestrians and motor vehicles criss-crossing the main downtown thoroughfares, Oates said strict enforcement of traffic laws is part of the solution to reducing risk in the area, but it’s not enough. He says more enforcement must be coupled with supportive infrastructure improvements.
After the recent pedestrian fatalities, Oates said he reached out to RIDOT to see if any resources to assist the city were available, and the agency offered to do a Road Safety Assessment.
“Hopefully they’re going to come back with some suggestions and some funding to do some improvements on the roads, anything from signage to crosswalk locations,” said Oates. “They’re going to look at what they believe is causing these accidents and look and see what’s best out there now, technology-wise, to eradicate that type of problem.”
As a point of departure for the study, the RSA team assembled all the crash data for the study zone from 20132018. During that time, members said there were over 500 motor vehicle accidents, including 108 that resulted in a personal injury.
There were nine accidents involving bicyclists and 19 involving pedestrians.
The statistics weren’t culled from the entire city – just the study zone, which includes Clinton and Social streets, the Truman Bypass, Court Street and a short stretch of Hamlet Avenue.
Among all the pedestrian accidents, the only fatalities in the five-year period were the two that occurred last fall. Jamie “Bubby” Gilbert, 23, was in a wheelchair when he was struck by a car in a crosswalk in front of City Hall, 169 Main St., on Dec. 4, passing away several days later at Rhode Island Hospital.
Less than a month earlier, Marian Morrow, 64, was using a walker to cross the street in front of her apartment at Kennedy Manor, 547 Clinton St., when she fell into the road and was hit by a car. She, too, died a few days later in the hospital.
RSA team member Sean Raymond, a managing engineer with RIDOT, said the number of overall road accidents in the downtown area warrants review.
“Yes, especially in a downtown area like this, similar to Providence or Newport, where you get a lot of pedestrians, it is significant,” he said. “That’s why we want to take a broader look and see what improvements we can make...”
RSAs aren’t all that uncommon, said Raymond. RIDOT has performed 50-60 of them during the last couple of years. Many are initiated upon the request of a public safety official such as Oates, but others are launched internally if a highrisk area comes to the attention of the state transportation agency.
While some funding might be readily available for lowcost improvements such as signage and striping, work that requires a construction contract would probably not go out to bid before 2020, according to RSA team members.
But Raymond said other cities and towns have used RSA studies as research documents to support applications for funding from a variety of sources in order to finance safety improvements to their roads.
“That’s what’s great about having the document in place,” he said. “The city can say, ‘Look, this was done. Can we get additional funding for this?’ You’ve done your due diligence.”