The good news: there were not more pedestrian deaths in June than any other month this year.

The bad news: there continued to be pedestrian deaths in Connecticut — two definitely, and possibly a third, the exact details of which we are likely to never hear about. Children were the victims in two of these three scenarios.

CHESHIRE 

Maybe they don’t teach this is driver’s ed anymore, but if you see a ball in the street or an ice cream truck, you must expect kids to come running out. Ice cream trucks are even painted with reminders for drivers to watch out for children.

On June 12, a bright and sunny day, a boy purchased a treat from an ice cream truck. Instead of slowing down to assess the situation, a teen driver passed the truck. The child, Tristan Barhorst, was ten.

According to his obituary, “He was a junior black belt and a member of the SWAT team at Leadership Martial Arts dedicated to becoming a black belt. […] Tristan, above all, was the most kind-hearted gentle and sweet spirit. He was compassionate, caring, thoughtful, funny, intelligent, and unbelievably appreciative and grateful for everything—right down to the simplest things, such as being allowed to have chicken nuggets for breakfast, 10 extra minutes on his IPad, or extra ice cream for dessert. He worried about everyone else around him—to a fault. He was a young man with a heart of GOLD. Tristan filled our home and our life with his infectious smile, witty humor, and unconditional love. Tristan was loved, as well as liked, by all he encountered—leaving a lasting impression of his kind heart, compassion, and wisdom. We will miss everything he embodied. He was truly an old soul.”

ENFIELD  

Whether or not the victim was a pedestrian remains a matter of definition, but nonetheless, a 4-year old child is dead as the result of being injured by a vehicle. The child, who has not been named, died after being hit by a pickup truck driven at a private residence — in the yard or driveway. The child was apparently riding in the truck’s bed when its driver, his mother’s boyfriend, “felt a bump.” If the driver or the child’s mother have been charged with anything, that has not yet been reported.

This is the scene of the fatal motor vehicle crash on Hudson Street. There are no skid marks. (June 25, 2020)

HARTFORD

Hartford is not looking so great this year when it comes to motorists causing their own or other people’s deaths. To date, there have been 10 motor vehicle fatalities in the city in 2020 based on available data; two of those killed were pedestrians. Motorcycles have been involved in at least four of those ten fatal collisions. It does not appear that the news ever reported on two of these ten fatalities.

In June alone, there were three motor vehicle fatalities in Hartford. One of these crashes took the life of Liza Ramos, a passenger in a stolen vehicle. Its driver somehow managed to achieve speeds that resulted in the car being torn in half when he crashed it into a pole by Flatbush Avenue and Brookfield Street in the early evening. Ramos was thrown from the vehicle. The driver, rather than stay on the scene to provide assistance or show respect to Ramos by remaining with her body, ran off like a coward. Miguel Burgos was found and charged with charged with second-degree manslaughter, reckless endangerment, driving without a license, and third-degree larceny, among other things.

Less than one week later at 3:20 AM, Carlos Alexis Rivera of South Windsor crashed his motorcycle into a pole on Hudson Street. This happened within two blocks of Hartford Hospital, by the hospital’s garage. Hudson Street was built and expanded over the years with LOS in mind (more on that later). His passenger, as of publication, has survived the collision. There were no skidmarks visible at the scene.

The first street fatality in Hartford this month, however, was Reginald Greene. At 8:20 PM on June 7, Greene, age 60, was walking across Main Street by Seyms Street when he was struck by a motorcycle. Its operator, age 26, was transported to the hospital. There has been no information about what, if any, charges the motorcycle operator will face. This section of Main Street has a paltry median, is overly wide, and does not have a marked crosswalk at the intersection with Seyms Street. Most of Main Street is exceptionally straight, giving drivers both the ability to see far down the road and the capacity to reach unsafe speeds.

Level of Service (LOS)

Maybe if we create shrines to Level of Service we can essentually visionboard our way to better street design…because our endless Complete Streets meetings and surveys don’t seem to be doing anything.

Level of Service is engineer shorthand for moving motor vehicles as quickly as possible, aesthetics and safety be damned. There are those who think that avoiding congestion should be the top priority, and if you doubt me for a second, ask why in Hartford we have to fight so hard to get bicycle lanes on Main Street. Every time the conversation re-emerges, it gets knocked down by someone clutching their pearls at the thought of motorists being slightly inconvenienced for the sake of other road users’ safety.

While streets designed to treat people (using motor vehicles only) like widgets are not responsible for all of the fatalities we’ve seen over the years, it’s undeniable that they have played a role in many of the pedestrian and motorist fatalities.

Google Map screenshot of the portion of Hudson Street where a motorcycle operator was killed in June. If it’s this wide open during the day, imagine what it’s like at night.

How have our streets changed such that they permit vehicles to reach speeds that can cleave cars in half? We can blame much of this on those “experts” from days of yore who created problems for which they also had the so-called cure to sell.

For brevity, we’ll look at just Hudson Street.

Over 250 crashes have taken place on Hudson Street in the last five years. Three were fatal.

A bit over 100 years ago, there was fuss about congested streets.  This is an excerpt from a long piece from Mayor Frank Hagarty, published in the Courant in 1916:

How congestion was defined or measured is not known, but that did not stop the planners and experts from manufacturing urgency about this issue would allegedly sink Hartford.

A 1926 headline in the Hartford Courant read: “Expert Urges Spending Millions to Overcome City Traffic Problems: $960,000 a Year Lost By Hartford Because of Delays in Transportation Possible to Avoid.” This expert provided no explanation for how delays cost the city, exactly, which should have been enough to raise eyebrows.

At that time he pushed for 14 different projects, many of which involved widening roads. Hudson Street was one he wanted to see wider and “straightened” near Jefferson Street, so that it more neatly aligned with the segment by Buckingham Street.

Hartford did not take all of “traffic expert” Herbert S. Swan’s suggestions, of which there were many. Blaming “glacial erosion” for our alleged “traffic problem,” Swan claimed our traffic volumes would be doubling and tripling in short order. These predictions were based on flimsy calculations, steeped in assumptions about the city’s population growth and expansion of car ownership. What was never accounted for, perhaps intentionally, was how increasing level of service would be in part responsible for the draining of Hartford’s population into the suburbs and exurbs.

What’s troubling is that our leaders and residents of the time did not laugh Swan out of the room entirely. Beyond demonizing geology, Swan was callous toward what most people value as assets or consider sacred: schools, parks, and cemeteries. In his failed quest to widen and extend Park Street, he pitched demolishing St. Peter’s school: “no building now erected is important enough to justify Park Street being left as it is at present, terminating in Main Street.”

Also in 1926, Swan went on record as urging the City of Hartford to disregard the value of parks by installing through roads in them. The Courant described him as finding Keney Park an obstruction to flow of traffic. If I ever get the privilege of time travel, I know who I need to go visit. What goes on in a person when his only interest is straight lines and moving cars through a city as rapidly as possible?

Our history is not behind us, though. As you can see, many of Hartford’s streets function more like gashes than arteries, and they continue to wound to this day.

Cover image is a Google maps screenshot of Main Street in the area where Reginald Greene was struck and killed in June. From the image, you can see pedestrians attempting to cross the street, apparently having just come from the store. There are no marked crosswalks at either intersection near this plaza.