The next time someone refers to a sidewalk as a too-expensive “amenity,” think about Powell Calhoun and Donna Williams.

Right: the crash site, where Powell Calhoun and Donna Williams traveled on Friday, March 30. (16 WAPT News)

They were hit by a car as they walked and rolled along a frontage road in Jackson, Mississippi two weeks ago. Ms. Williams uses a wheelchair and Mr. Calhoun helped push her around the streets of Jackson. He died at the scene; she died a few days later of her injuries. The deaths were all the more painful because three years ago, another man using a wheelchair was killed as he traveled in the breakdown lane of another Jackson road without an accessible sidewalk.

Dr. Scott Crawford, a longtime supporter of Complete Streets and a member of Jackson’s ADA advisory council, was friends with Ms. Williams. He blames a failure to build Complete Streets for the deaths.

“Many may wonder: ‘Why were they in the street with a wheelchair?’ ” says Crawford. “The answer is simple. Our society hasn’t yet decided to build and maintain roadways that are safe for ALL its users, including vulnerable ones like bicyclists and pedestrians, and especially those with disabilities.”

Right: Donna Williams, exiting a bus. (Photo: Dr. Scott Crawford)

Dr. Crawford says Williams had spoken to ADA Council members about the need for ADA compliance, and the fact that when she encountered a road without a sidewalk, she didn’t have the option of walking in the grass.

The man driving the car that has not yet been charged, and police made a sympathetic comment that the couple may have been in his ‘blind spot’ – an attitude that recalls the case of Raquel Nelson in Georgia.

From our perspective, even more glaring is the fact that the public right of way had no safe place for Calhoun and Williams to travel. I’d guess that right now hundreds of people who use wheelchairs are out in the street across the United States, because there is no sidewalk, or an obstructed sidewalk, or no accessible curb ramp between their home and their destination.

At this point, I could quote statistics about pedestrian deaths from Dangerous by Design. But right now, I’m not thinking about statistics. I’m thinking about Powell Calhoun and his wife, Donna Williams, and their friends and families.

Let’s build Complete Streets for them.

T4 Editors note: Today, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger published an op-ed by Dr. Crawford about this incident and the larger issue of making streets safer for everyone. Read that in full here.

Lest readers think these are simply isolated incidents, consider the fact that in the first decade of the 21st century, there were more than 47,700 pedestrian deaths on America’s roadways, the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every month for an entire decade. Media attention for disasters like this would be intense, and the public outcry would be enormous.

Are not pedestrian deaths on our streets at least as avoidable as plane crashes? Aren’t those individuals on bicycles, walking, and riding wheelchairs at least as valuable as those driving automobiles or flying?

Last Friday, I spent some time driving around the sprawling Atlanta, Georgia metroplex photographing some well-known trouble spots for pedestrian safety. Though some improvements have been made in places, there are still so many unsafe streets, corridors and intersections for pedestrians, finding streets that are “dangerous by design” is about as easy as blindly putting your finger down on a map.

The Atlanta Regional Commission has helped address some of these problems through their popular and oversubscribed Livable Centers Initiative that gives metro communities small grants to help make a dangerous street safer, improve MARTA access, add new crosswalks or streetscaping, or other small improvements to the built environment that help improve quality of life for residents. And T4 America partner PEDS has had their boots on the ground for years now, working hard to make metro Atlanta more walkable. But we need far more of these kinds of efforts — and similar efforts from others in cities across the country — to make the kinds of improvements we need to save lives and end the 4,000-plus deaths that happen to people walking each year.

Many of these deaths occur simply because the design of a road just hasn’t adapted to the changing needs of all the people who use it.

Consider: at one point, Old National Highway in South Fulton County was probably a sleepy state highway through a relatively unpopulated area on one’s way south out of Atlanta. Now, it’s teeming with retail on both sides of the street just south of Interstate 85. Add in the fact that it’s a relatively low-income area (read: people more likely to walk or take transit) with apartment complexes on both sides of the main highway and you’ve got a street that no longer meets the needs of everyone who uses it, and certainly not for the people who live there.

Though the first few miles away from Interstate 85 have sidewalks and there are a handful of signalized intersections with crosswalks, sidewalks soon end completely and there are many stretches where there are no safe places to cross for hundreds or thousands of feet — all in an area with MARTA bus stops on both sides of the highway. The sidewalks may end, but the walking doesn’t, as the “desire paths” through the grass indicate.

Of course, the most well-known road in Atlanta that’s dangerous for walking and biking is certainly Buford Highway. This stretch near Clairmont Road is a whopping 7 lanes across, with crosswalks often so far apart as to be merely dots on the horizon.

This corridor is lined with more affordable apartments and has also been a popular landing place for Latino and Asian immigrants for years, and many portions of the street are filled with small ethnic shops catering to the local clientele — many of whom are likely to be walking. According to the data in our map, in just the few miles from I-285 south down to 400, 20 pedestrians were killed from 1999-2009. There are stretches with no sidewalks on either side of the street and no safe crosswalks almost as far as the eye can see.

In this picture alone, not only are there no sidewalks but there are nine separate curb cuts where this man could be easily struck by a right-turning car before reaching the next safe crosswalk at the intersection.

Some key improvements have been made on Buford Highway in recent years, though, which have helped to increase safety. Thanks to recent efforts by Dekalb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation, a busy stretch of Buford Highway south of Doraville with high density of retail on both sides of the street received several new signalized intersections as well as new pedestrian-only mid-block crossings that use a special light called a HAWK signal. This is a light that stays dark until a pedestrian pushes a button, activating a light that flashes before turning red for cars. These crossings also include a refuge to shorten crossing distances and give people a safe place to wait while crossing.

And then there’s southern Cobb County, the northern Atlanta suburb where Raquel Nelson was walking when her son was killed and she found herself prosecuted after the fact. Some busy corridors have sidewalks and some don’t — though walking isn’t very pleasant next to seven lanes of traffic — and crosswalks can be interminably far apart.

This photo below bears some similarities to the conditions on the street where Raquel Nelson’s son A.J. was killed, which isn’t too far from here.

Note the bus stop on the other side of the street with a Cobb County bus approaching. See a marked crosswalk anywhere? Perhaps this man is trying to catch the bus? What happens when the bus drops you off and you need to reach a destination across the street? Should we really expect people to walk half a mile out of the frame to find a safer place to cross, and then walk half a mile back?

And some streets around here just have zero accommodation for pedestrians, including a busy street that serves two major universities and the county’s biggest employer (Dobbins AFB/Lockheed) right in the center of the county.

Keep in mind that these pictures represent just one busy American metropolis — there are hundreds more cities and thousands of places with similar conditions that need urgent attention. We have a long way to go to retrofit these streets to help make them safer for everyone that needs to use them. The complete streets provision in the Senate’s MAP-21 bill would be a step in the right direction, as would be the flexible funding that local governments can use to help address some of these dangerous areas under the Senate bill.

With 67 percent of all pedestrian fatalities happening on federal-aid roads — many of which that were designed in this unsafe way because of federal design guidelines and standards — there’s a clear role for the federal government to play in improving them.

So what would happen in our communities if we started by looking at our map of pedestrian fatalities to see where the worst trouble areas are and devoted a small slice of transportation money into small, tangible improvements like new sidewalks, new crosswalks, and new signals for making walking safer and more convenient? What if we made it a clear priority to make every day National Safe Walking Day?

Wouldn’t we be saving lives immediately? And for a small price?

Watch the full slideshow here, or click to watch full-size in a new window.

A new academic study looking at the numbers of pedestrians killed while wearing headphones ignores the overwhelming majority of pedestrian deaths, providing a healthy dose of blaming the victim while turning a blind eye to the actual problem.

At first glance, the numbers sound incredible. “The number of headphone-wearing pedestrians seriously injured or killed near roadways and railways has tripled in six years…” Wow, they’ve tripled? That must be a lot, right?

When you examine the numbers closely, though, it’s clear that this study is examining a share of pedestrian fatalities so small as to be almost statistically insignificant when compared to the problem of pedestrian deaths writ large.

The study has been highly successful at winning credulous news coverage and shifting blame to the victims, but by focusing on a tiny sliver of fatalities it does more to obscure the true causes than explain what is happening.

“Oh, they’re all wearing headphones now. That’s why pedestrians are getting killed.”

Let’s stop for a minute and acknowledge that being distracted is never a good idea, whether driving or walking. Especially if you’re navigating busy streets, you need all available senses at your disposal to make sure you arrive at your destination safely. That means not texting and keeping your eyes on the road while driving, and making sure that you can hear and see when walking.

From 2000-2009 47,700 people were killed while walking in the U.S. This University of Maryland study found 116 deaths in 8 years where headphones were said to be involved, or about 0.3% of all pedestrian deaths during the study period.

Spending our time focused intently on this tiny aspect of pedestrian deaths is like coming across a person who’s been stabbed in the chest, and worrying about finding the band-aid you need to patch the scrape on his elbow.

Which further proves just how loony the headline is in this story. (“Study: You are more likely to die walking with headphones”) This study doesn’t prove that you’re more likely to die while walking and wearing headphones, it just shows that those deaths have been increasing.

You want to know how you are more likely to die while walking? By walking along or trying to cross a busy arterial, state highway or other bigger/busier road eligible to receive federal funding, where fully two-thirds of all pedestrian fatalities from 2000-2009 took place.

Are headphones the primary problem living and walking along here?

The primary reasons for the other 35,885 or so pedestrian deaths in the last 10 years hasn’t changed with the rise of smartphones, iPods and ubiquitous white earbuds. That song remains the same: millions of people live on or near streets and roads that aren’t safe for walking; streets without sidewalks, streets without safe crossings, streets that force far too many people to brave unsafe conditions on foot simply to get from A to B.

Are we concerned about making these roads safer? Are we studying smart solutions and ways to use federal funds to retrofit these dangerous corridors to make them safer for everyone — an appropriate decision, since federal funds and design guidelines helped create many of these dangerous corridors in the first place.

Nope, we’re studying what may (or may not have) contributed to the death of 0.3% of all people killed while walking in the last 8 years. And using the numbers for even more ammunition in the never ending quest to blame the victim

Admittedly, with problems so big that any solution will be complex and layered, there’s a tendency to look for a simpler explanation and try to find a more manageable problem that we can solve. Just like coming across a person with the sucking chest wound and having no medical experience under our belt, sometimes we’re just overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem. So we focus on the elbow scrape we can fix that just needs a band-aid.

But this problem demands and deserves our immediate attention. Instead of spending our time concerned with why the 0.3% were killed, how about we stop and have a serious look at the larger, and much more serious problem of the 99.7%?

Every year we don’t, another 4,000-plus people die preventable deaths.

“The child, along with an adult and other children, were attempting to cross the street and they had crossed the northbound lanes and were standing in the middle turn lane when, according to the adult, the boy pulled away. He was then hit by a car traveling in the southbound lane,” DeKalb Police spokeswoman Mekka Parish said.

Just like Raquel Nelson’s story, the nearest crosswalk wasn’t “near” at all. The family could have walked either 0.4 miles roundtrip to the south, or 1.2 miles roundtrip to the north — a long trip which also would’ve taken them across the narrow bridge over I-285 where, incidentally, two other pedestrians have been killed in the last 10 years.

Image from our Dangerous by Design interactive map

Now, this point of this post isn’t to say that this driver was in the wrong — the preliminary reports indicate that the child pulled away from his stepfather and stepped out into the southbound lanes and the driver probably couldn’t have stopped. Though they’d done it dozens of times, perhaps the father made a poor judgement to try and cross the street there. But just like Raquel Nelson, this story does illustrate the insanity of how we fund and plan our transportation network in urbanized (and urbanizing) places like this.

Look closely at this graphic of the area.

This short section of Flat Shoals south of I-285 has no fewer than three relatively high-density apartment complexes, as well as a handful of restaurants, stores and other retail offerings fronting the roadway, ostensibly hoping to serve the nearby residents, at least in part. The street does have sidewalks on both sides, yet the two nearest crosswalks on Flat Shoals in either direction are at least .8 miles apart. Federal dollars (or at least federal design guidelines) were likely used when this road was widened to 5 lanes. The city or county approved high-density apartment complexes and retail on both sides of the road in a corridor without making any attempts to ensure those residents would be able to walk in the area safely, save for the tacked-on sidewalks on each side.

The planning and design of this corridor and the land use around it hasn’t kept up with the needs of the people living in it.

Should we legitimately expect residents of the apartment complexes on one side of Flat Shoals to walk nearly half a mile to reach the Jamaican restaurant across the street? According to several other media reports on the incident, the family wasn’t alone in trying to cross there that evening, and some residents have been asking for improvements to make a safe crossing there for a long time.

The family told CBS Atlanta that the street in front of their apartment complex has always been dangerous. There is heavy traffic and no stoplight or crosswalk. ”It’s very dangerous, very dangerous,” said Isaac.  “You would think they would have a crosswalk if you have a plaza right across the street and apartments right here.

There isn’t a crosswalk, even though dozens of people cross the street in this very spot each day. How many other streets like this are there in Atlanta? In Georgia? In the United States?

Will the stepfather will be charged in the child’s death, as Raquel Nelson was? Probably not, since the incident didn’t happen in Cobb County, where the prosecutor is prone to bringing such charges. Perhaps Dekalb County officials remember her recent trial and subsequent national media attention shining an angry spotlight on their neighboring metro county.

Beyond that, one would hope that local officials have learned the more important lesson about providing safer streets for people to get around on — no matter whether they’re on foot, bike or in a car. Local and state officials have great power in making some of those decisions.

While needed, that’s a piecemeal approach to a problem that is truly federal in scope. Two-thirds of all pedestrian fatalities in the last 10 years occurred on roads just like this one — state highways and busy arterials built with federal funds and federal design guidelines. Shouldn’t the federal transportation program be used to help fix these dangerous mistakes that it created in the first place? What we really need is a transportation bill that makes the safety of everyone on our roads a priority, so stories like this one — and Raquel Nelson’s among thousands of others — can become a distant memory.

No family in an urbanized area should have to choose between crossing a dangerous street or walking half a mile out of their way just to cross the street to their house. We can do better.

Updated (1/12/12): PEDS, a partner of ours that recently helped us deliver a petition in Atlanta on behalf of Raquel Nelson, submitted an op-ed to the AJC that ran last week.

Pedestrian facilities are often seen as a local issue. The proposed project list adopted by the regional roundtable, for example, dedicates just one-third of 1 percent of the regional funds to pedestrian and bicycle projects.

Yet the Atlanta Regional Commission’s 2010 on-board transit survey confirmed that nearly three-fourths of transit trips begin with walking trips. Research by the ARC also suggests that people who walk to transit are among the region’s most vulnerable road users. From 2004 to 2008, one-fourth of all pedestrian crashes occurred within 100 feet of transit stops.

With the help of a terrific partner group in Atlanta called PEDS, we had the petition delivered to the Solicitor’s office. Sally Flocks, the executive director, and Liz Coyle with PEDS were kind enough to take a trip out to Cobb County to deliver your names in person.

Unfortunately, Solicitor General Barry Morgan refused to take a few moments to meet with PEDS, a well-respected group in Atlanta, to accept the petition and hear a little more about the underlying problem of streets that aren’t safe for people on foot or bike.

Here is a few notable thoughts from Sally Flocks and PEDS about delivering the petition.

Solicitor General Barry Morgan’s refusal to meet with representatives of PEDS to accept the Transportation for America petition disappointed us. By meeting with us, Morgan could have learned why members of Transportation for America – as well as over 5,000 petitioners, believe Raquel Nelson should be pardoned of all charges. When we arrived in Marietta, the receptionist would not allow us to enter Morgan’s office to hand the petition to his assistant. Instead, she came to the receptionist’s desk to pick up the petition we had handed him.

On our way to the Solicitor General’s office, we drove by the Marietta [bus] Transfer Center (pictured below), where fences block access to the street for over ¼ mile. The closest signalized intersections are over a half mile apart. Victory Drive intersects South Marietta Parkway between the signalized intersections, which means it’s legal for pedestrians to cross anywhere they want. Yet “no pedestrian” signs have been installed to discourage pedestrians from crossing a high-speed five-lane street.

If I could wave a magic wand, the Solicitor General would have joined me for a bus ride to visit the location where Raquel Nelson and her family had attempted to cross the street.  To catch a bus back to his office, we would have had to cross the street.  Perhaps then the Solicitor General would understood why Cobb County needs to stop treating pedestrians as second class citizens.

Well said, Sally. We especially want to recognize all of you who added your names to this petition. Though we wish we could have gotten that meeting and bus ride with the Solicitor General and put your names directly in his hand, you can be sure that the calls and emails and petitions that have flooded into that office in the last few months have made a significant difference in this case, and helped to publicize the larger issues at hand nationally.

We can’t thank you enough for your support. We’ll continue to keep tabs on this story in the coming weeks.

UPDATED 10/24/11 2:30 p.m.: The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that her second trial is starting tomorrow. It also includes that apt nugget to describe her situation:

With interviews on ABC’s Good Morning America and news outlets CNN, Reuters and the BBC covering her initial trial and sentencing, Nelson became the face of public transit users and perpetual pedestrians whom a sprawling suburbia has left behind.

Here is a sampling of some of what we’ve received so far.

Bladensburg-22 Originally uploaded by wtrecat to Flickr.

MD 450 just west of junction with MD 202. Very busy road with no pedestrian crossing at this spot across from El Primo international market, 5403 Annapolis Rd.

Note that this photo from Maryland just outside D.C. is taken at a Metro bus stop. And there appears to be no safe crossing immediately nearby.

Incomplete Street Originally uploaded by Boenau to Flickr.

No sidewalks? No problem!

There’s no sidewalk at all along this road. And the overgrowth forces anyone trying to walk out into the roadway. If there is a crosswalk at the light up ahead, pedestrians have to cross at least 8 lanes of traffic and a median to make it across.

Incomplete Street Originally uploaded by Boenau to Flickr.

As if walking on the goat path isn’t bad enough, rainfall drains and collects on the grass, forcing pedestrians into the street.

Just because there aren’t any sidewalks doesn’t mean that people won’t or aren’t walking. It has to be terrifying to walk on this narrow strip of grass next to 3 straight lanes of high speed traffic. And once again, if there is a crosswalk 200-400 yards down behind this pedestrian, people on foot will have to cross at least 6 lanes of traffic and a median in one light cycle.

elkton_rd3 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Submitted photo by Frank Warnock of Bike Delaware. www.bikede.org/ (Please credit photographer, not T4 America.)

Smooth, graduated turning radii like this are especially dangerous to pedestrians. Turns are engineered like this so traffic can make a right turn while only having to barely slow their speed, making it extremely hazardous for people on foot to cross from the island back to the side of the road.

IMG_6603 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Bee Caves Rd/RM 2244 west of Walsh Tarlton Lane in Austin, Texas. Roadway under TxDOT jurisdiction. Submitted photo by Joan Hudson, P.E., of the Texas Transportation Institute. (Please credit photographer, not T4 America.)

The photos we got from this supporter in Texas were all taken on roads managed by the Texas DOT. Pedestrians here have to walk in a ditch with nowhere to escape to if a car veers slightly out of the lane.

Photos like these could be taken in almost any place in the country. These conditions are far too common and much too accepted by the people who plan and design our streets and roads. Two-thirds of all pedestrian fatalities in the last 10 years occurred on roads much like these — high-speed arterials designed first and foremost for moving speeding traffic as fast as possible with little consideration for the needs or safety of people on foot or bike. Federal dollars and design guidelines have helped create these dangerous situations across the country, and the federal government shouldn’t be able to walk away and pin the problem on the states.

Simple policy changes and priorities for spending at the federal level can help save lives immediately.

We’re not finished collecting these photos — we want to see yours! When you send them in (click here for instructions), feel free to include location information as well and we’ll plot and share the location. And bonus points for photos that show people in them.

Thank you so much to the dozens of people who sent us photos or submitted them to our Flickr group. Keep it up!

First, the New York measure — known as “Brittany’s Law” in honor of 14-year old girl struck by a car in a crosswalk on her way to school — sailed through the legislature with unanimous votes and broad-based support earlier this summer. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a T4 partner, played a pivotal role in passage of the bill, along with the New York chapter of AARP. Republican Senator Charles J. Fuschillo, chairman of the transportation committee in the upper house, was the original sponsor.

Complete streets policies aim to make new and reconstructed roadways safe and accessible for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, wheelchair users and transit riders, as well as motorists. Sadly, the status-quo for most users around the country is woefully unsafe and insufficient, perhaps nowhere more so than in Florida.

“As any pedestrian in Florida knows, walking in this car-obsessed state can be as tranquil as golfing in a lightning storm,” wrote the Times’ Lizette Alvarez yesterday, continuing:

Sidewalks are viewed as perks, not necessities. Crosswalks are disliked and dishonored. And many drivers maniacally speed up when they see someone crossing the street.

Then there are the long, ever widening arterial roads — those major thoroughfares lined with strip malls built to move cars in and out of sprawling suburbs.

New York Times photo from the story by Chip Litherland.Send us your photos of similar unsafe streets designed for speeding traffic

Alvarez, who spoke with T4 America for the piece, noted that four metropolitan areas in the state were ranked as the worst in the nation for pedestrians in our Dangerous by Design study, with Orlando at number one. And, as her reporting demonstrated, these statistics are borne out by real people everyday:

Just down the street, the same scene played out repeatedly, only pedestrians raced across the road (where there was no median) to a neighborhood supermarket. One group included a child in a stroller. The road, like so many others, was built for cars and not people.

Fortunately, Orlando officials are starting to see the situation with the urgency it demands. They are building miles of new sidewalks, putting in audible pedestrian signals and instituting measures to slow traffic. Frank Consoli, traffic operations engineer for the city of Orlando, told Alvarez the goal was “to change the culture and this thinking that is car-centric.”

But local efforts alone will not suffice. As the article points out, many roads fall under multiple jurisdictions with conflicting priorities. That’s why actions like those of Governor Cuomo and New York State legislators are crucial — to ensure the kind of uniformity and safety that pedestrians everywhere deserve.

As we pointed out in Dangerous by Design, two-thirds of the 47,700 pedestrian fatalities from 2000-2009 occurred on roads eligible for federal funds or with federal guidelines for design. Since federal transportation dollars have helped build these unsafe streets that treat pedestrians as an afterthought, the federal government must play a role in fixing the problem.

In the House, Democrat Doris Matsui of California and Republican Steve LaTourette of Ohio have introduced national complete streets legislation, and Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is sponsoring a companion piece.

Portions of the Orlando metropolitan area, incidentally, are represented in Congress by John Mica, the powerful chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Will Mica respond to the needs of his constituents by making safe and complete streets a priority in the next transportation bill?

We’re gathering pictures of unsafe conditions for pedestrians to show online and in meetings with members of Congress here in D.C. Share the conditions near you by sending in photos. Details here.

Many of you were shocked by the story of Raquel Nelson, the single mom in Atlanta charged with vehicular homicide when her son was killed while crossing an unsafe street with her. While shocking, head-scratching stories like hers are thankfully rare, it’s emblematic of the road design in many places that we live, and we want to make sure that Congress gets that picture loud and clear.

We want to show them that roads like Austell Road by Raquel Nelson’s apartment — 4 lane speedways with few considerations for pedestrians — are far too common.

So send us your photos of dangerous, unsafe and poorly planned streets out there across America.

We want to see what streets look like out there for people trying to walk. We want to see the missing crosswalks, the 1/2 mile treks to the nearest crosswalk along a 50 mph highway, and dangerous roads designed for speeding traffic rather than safe walking. More than 47,000 people were killed while walking from 2000-2009, and a large majority of them occurred on roads fitting these descriptions.

A few details about how to send in photos or video:

• Email: You can email photos to us at photos@t4america.org. When you send them, please let us know if we can upload these to our Flickr account (with your credit information in caption like this one.) Anywhere we use your photos, we’ll always give you credit.
• Flickr: Add photos to the T4 America Flickr group, and tag them with “dangerous by design” so we’re sure to see them. If you have photos but don’t want to add them to the group, you can just add the tag “dangerous by design”. We always prefer photos licensed with Creative Commons, so we can use these photos in meetings with Congress or on the blog with credit given to the source.
• Video: You can upload videos directly to our Facebook page, but Youtube or other video sharing sites are fine. Send us a link. If you send in videos directly to the email address, they need to be under 10 mb.
• If you’ve got another way to show us your photos other than these, drop us a line at photos@t4america.org

Over the next few weeks we’ll highlight some of the most heinous conditions and worst design here on the blog.

Poorly designed streets — often built or designed with federal dollars — endanger pedestrians, cyclists and drivers alike. Too many people are walking in these places where they’re likely to become the next statistic because of streets that are dangerous by design. Show Congress what this looks like and help us paint a compelling picture of why we need to invest in safer streets in the next transportation bill.

Your photos will help us in our meetings with Congress and other transportation officials as we press for policies and funding in a transportation bill that will help make walking and biking safer on streets around the country.

Here are some examples of the dangerous and inconvenient conditions pedestrians face in our cities and communities every day.

The New York Times photo by Chip Litherland

New York Times photo by Chip Litherland

Sidewalk Infill_ 82nd 022 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Credit to April Bertelsen Pedestrian Coordinator Portland Bureau of Transportation

image003 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

(Please credit photos to Dr. Scott Crawford. Posted here with his permission)

Walking & Roads Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Credit to Stephen Lee Davis/Transportation for America

Walking in the ditch Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Photograph by Stephen Lee Davis/Transportation for America.

The judge yesterday declined to give her jail time, and instead granted her the right to a new trial, which Ms. Nelson has said she intends to pursue in order to clear her name. Our view, of course, is that a grieving mother who didn’t even own a car should never have been charged with vehicular homicide in the first place. We would hope the Georgia board of pardons and paroles and/or Governor Nathan Deal would see fit to spare her the agony of a retrial and simply absolve her — and by extension the other pedestrians and bus riders who are put in a similarly dangerous situation every day.

Sign this petition urging her full pardon, or a refusal to try her again in a retrial.

That would be one positive outcome of this troubling case. One of the worst would be if the deadly conditions that confront people like Raquel Nelson, in Cobb County and across the nation, are allowed to persist. Over at Grist, Sarah Goodyear writes hopefully that the case could be a turning point for pedestrian rights.

We hope that’s the case. Absent sustained public pressure, however, there seems to be a very real possibility that nothing will be done to address the dangerous conditions in Cobb County and elsewhere.

Austell Road looking north and south at the scene of the incident. From Green Building Chronicle video by Ken Edelstein.

Yesterday we called the director of the Cobb County department of transportation, Faye DiMassimo, to ask whether there were plans to review the situation. She replied that she could not talk about that bus stop or any other because the county attorney had warned of the “possibility of pending litigation.”

The county appears to be in a Catch-22 at this point: To fix this, or similar, problems would be a tacit acknowledgment of negligence in the placement of the bus stop and the lack of a safe crossing. To leave conditions as they are would be to invite further tragedy and the possibility of yet more “pending litigation.”

The latter course is exactly what Cobb County and the Georgia DOT took the last time a Cobb prosecutor convicted a grieving mother in the death of her own child as they crossed a road between a bus stop and home. In 2008, Altamesa Walker was charged with involuntary manslaughter because a driver hit her and her children, and her four-year-old daughter died. She took a plea deal and never went to trial, which is why her case is less famous than that of Ms. Nelson. That tragic case should have triggered a review of bus stop placement and the provisions for safe crossings, but the Nelson case is vivid evidence that did not happen.

One would hope that the Raquel Nelson story – and the outpouring of outrage and anguish it engendered across the country – would prompt transportation officials everywhere to conduct such reviews of their roadways, and to view them through new eyes – the eyes of the pedestrian.

Indeed, vast swaths of the landscape we inhabit were designed by, and for, people who have little or no experience other than as motorists.

Most have not been forced to walk along roaring arterial roads where the “walkway” is an eroded rut occasionally blocked by utility polls or vegetation. They haven’t waited for public transportation alongside these speedways, and they haven’t been asked to walk half a mile or more out of their way to traverse one of them after being let off a bus. They haven’t experienced the skinny sidewalks with no planting strips or parked cars to buffer a person from 50-mph traffic. They haven’t experienced traffic signals timed so that a child or an elderly person can’t make it all the way across five, six, eight lanes before the light changes.

All six of the jurors in the Nelson case appeared to fit this description, and that is no doubt one reason for the draconian outcome of the first trial. Interviewed on Fox and Friends this morning, Raquel Nelson spoke with charity and understanding of those who convicted her, saying she could see how, “If you haven’t been there and haven’t experienced it up close and personal it’s hard to understand.” (Streetsblog Capitol Hill pointed out yesterday that the jury pool comes entirely from people holding drivers’ licenses.)

Thanks to her bravery and willingness to stand up and speak out, millions of Americans have had the chance to view these roads that are dangerous by design “up close and personal”, through her eyes. If she must face another trial, we can only hope that the next jury pool will include citizens endowed with the insights gained from the intensity of the reaction around this first trial.

Support her innocence by signing this petition urging her full pardon.