Traffic deaths in Montgomery County are on the rise from 2021 despite the Vision Zero plan to eliminate serious and fatal collisions in the next 10 years.
“Almost every day someone gets hit, and every week, someone’s been killed,” Council member Evan Glass said to a panel of officials at a Montgomery County Council meeting. “And every time my phone pings with the department of transportation or the police department updates, my heart sinks.”
In 2022, 28 people were killed in crashes from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, according to data submitted to the County Council meeting on Sept. 20. In 2021, 18 fatalities were recorded in the same time frame.
“We all join these Vision Zero briefings to talk about safety and getting to zero,” said Kristy Daphnis of the county’s Pedestrian, Bicycle and Traffic Safety Advisory Committee.
“This is what Vision Zero looks like in Montgomery County,” she said before listing the names of people who died in crashes this year. “I could sit here in this seat, and say: ‘Everything’s great. We’re doing an amazing job…if I were to say this, I’d be lying. The truth is our neighbors are dying,” she said.
Daphnis pointed the challenges that school children face crossing streets to get to school, recalling that one of her own daughter’s classmates was recently hit by a car.
Wade Holland, the county’s Vision Zero coordinator briefed attendees on rising traffic incident statistics and safety measures to enhance protections for pedestrians and bicyclists. He told the council that 72% of fatal crashes were happening in daylight hours. “Typically in the past years, it’s only 40%,” he said.
Representatives from the Maryland State Highway Administration, the Planning Department and the Pedestrian, Bicycle and Traffic Safety Advisory Board served on the panel.
Upon asking the panel why it takes so long for traffic improvements to be made in known dangerous locations, Council President Gabe Albornoz said that “It is maddening that after a collision occurs, we know what needs to be done, and we wait months, and in some cases years.”
Council member Andrew Friedson, who represents Bethesda, called for design changes along Old Georgetown Road where two teenage cyclists were killed in collisions just three years apart.
Friedson recalled the deaths of Jake Cassell, a 17-year-old who was killed in 2019 after being struck by a car, and Enzo Alvarenga, an 18-year-old who was killed along the same stretch of road in June.
“Pylons were added after Enzo died, the original bike lane happened after Jake died,” Friedson said. “We have to get to a situation where we’re making some of these changes before somebody dies.”
Holland mentioned some of the bureaucratic obstacles and funding issues in making improvements. “We have 800 signalized locations in the county,” he said. “We have 5,000 lane miles of roads. We have a lot of things we know that need attention that need it now.”
