Safety improvements planned for one in ten Richmond intersections, but is it enough?

Tired of living along a road without a shoulder let alone a sidewalk, Jenny Cox and her husband relocated into Richmond from suburban Chesterfield County to live in the Arts District — a dense, walkable downtown neighborhood. Just a couple weeks after making the move, however, a driver hit Cox while she was in a crosswalk.

“I don’t think it’s safe to be a pedestrian in Richmond,” she said. “The way our roads are built encourages speed. People always say ‘make eye contact,’ but as a pedestrian you don’t always have the opportunity to make eye contact with drivers. You’re depending on them to see you, and many drivers are paying attention to their phones or their GPS instead of the road.”

Last year, the City of Richmond witnessed a 150% increase in the number of pedestrian fatalities on its roadways. Total deaths from traffic violence also shot up 115%.

Aware of the carnage on the city’s corridors, Richmond’s Vision Zero coordinator Mike Sawyer unveiled a plan to improve 500 intersections using funds from the Virginia Highway Safety Improvement Program. Any progress is promising, but residents worry the upgrades may prove too little too late.

Planned improvements

With $8.9 million in state funding, the Department of Public Works plans to touch one in ten Richmond intersections.

290 intersections will receive flashing yellow arrow right turn lights with reflective borders designed to warn a driver that pedestrians may be crossing better than the standard green light. Another 200 intersections should receive stop control devices, engineering jargon for stop signs. The final 10 intersections of the 500 will get new left turn hardening barriers which have been shown to reduce the number of close calls between drivers and pedestrians by 70%.

Such infrastructure upgrades are the latest phase of the city’s five-year-plus effort to improve pedestrian safety in Virginia’s capital. The bulk of the intersections to be addressed are on Richmond’s High Injury Network where the majority of crashes, injuries, and fatalities occur. Roughly 80% of resident calls and concerns regarding dangerous roadways are not on the High Injury Network, creating a push and pull of where the Department of Public Works should concentrate its efforts, according to Sawyer.

“We want to make sure we are focused on where the Vision Zero Action Plan is telling us to go and where the data is telling us to go,” he said. “We have a pretty good backbone of 580 or so miles of streets that don’t have any problems at all. It’s just 58 miles that have 62% of the deaths and serious injuries, so that’s where we need to be.”

As the $8.9 million in funding for the upgrades is coming out of VDOT’s Six-Year Improvement Plan which governs all highway spending in the commonwealth, the 500 intersection upgrades will be slow to materialize. Because this pedestrian safety project is listed for fiscal years 2025, 2026, and 2027, and DPW won’t begin work until most of the money is available, the improvements could take through the end of 2026.

Both local and national advocates have called out how Richmond’s roadways are dangerous by design and demanded the city rapidly install speed humps and other pedestrian safety infrastructure, as DPW did following the deaths of VCU students Marokh Khan and Shawn Soares earlier this year.

“I would like to see more pedestrian focus on the use of Highway Safety Improvement Program dollars because of the significant increase in pedestrian deaths last year, but these measures are effective in a more general traffic safety sense,” said Bike Walk RVA executive director Brantley Tyndall. “Flashing yellow arrows and high visibility backplates should provide a significant pedestrian safety benefit at intersections due to increased driver awareness. They won’t be as effective as raised crosswalks or lane narrowing, but we will take what we can get.”

Calls for quick build

The slow pace of upgrades is not good enough for Cox, herself a victim of the city’s inadequate road safety infrastructure.

“People are put in danger every day until we can get improvements put in place,” she said. “I would like to see a more pedestrian-friendly city because we have so much cool stuff that is easy to walk and bike to. Anything that can slow drivers down would help, like lower speed limits and safer infrastructure, like tighter curb radii, raising crosswalks, and narrowing lanes.”

We just need so much MORE infrastructure, we are so far behind, it’s tough listening to public works pat themselves on the back for getting on the right track. The urgency and needs are overwhelming.

— Jenny C. (@jubbco21) April 19, 2023

William Thompson, a partner at the Fancy Biscuit and Shyndigz dessert bar, feels similarly after years spent witnessing drivers carelessly careen down Cary Street through the Fan where both businesses are located.

“It’s very concerning for customers trying to get to our stores with the heavy traffic,” he said. “There’s a stop light 100 feet away from the store, but it’s almost like it doesn’t exist. I see cars fly past pedestrians trying to cross the street often. The cars are often a blur they are going so fast.”

In 2018, a driver actually crashed into a customer on the sidewalk leaving Shyndigz before plowing into the brick-and-mortar building. The danger drivers pose on Cary Street has proven a concern as owners Nicole and Bryon Jessee plan a boutique hotel at the site and relocate their popular bakery across the street.

“The City has painted crosswalks in the last few years and put in the stop for pedestrian signs, but this will be the fourth one up in this intersection and they just keep getting hit by poor drivers,” said Thompson. “At this point we really need something like a stop light or a speed hump to slow down the vehicles through this area.”

Sawyer, Richmon’s Vision Zero coordinator, similarly feels the flimsy stop for pedestrian signs around town have been a waste of time.

“If I were to stop and focus on doing something with temporary materials that doesn’t last very long — we’ve seen what happens with the stop for pedestrian signs, we could go around chasing those forever and never get around to the funding that makes a difference.”

Sawyer also called out the need for a slew of state- and national-level changes which could reduce the carnage on our roads, including speed limiting technology and the need to tax vehicles by height and weight. Until higher level officials and lawmakers provide policy support to the Vision Zero movement, Sawyer will continue to do what he can to make Richmond’s roads safer.

“You have to believe that all of the work coming together will make a difference and get us to our 2030 goal of achieving zero [deaths],” he said. “We know what needs to be done. Is the political will there to make those changes a reality? That’s a different question.”