Arlington “Street Smart” Initiative Underway

The Arlington County Police Department has started to step up its “education” and enforcement efforts at Arlington’s most problematic intersections. This period of concentrated enforcement is part of the DC metro area Street Smart campaign, and is aimed at improving pedestrian safety. According to the BikeWashington listserv, they were already handing out warnings (to cyclists, of course) at the Lynn St. crossing on Lee Highway.  I sat through a presentation about this program last week (at a meeting of the Arlington Bicycle Advisory Committee (ABAC)), and thought I’d pass along some of what I learned.

As I understand it, the campaign is scheduled to run from March 3rd through 29th. A 2-3 man ACPD team is going to spend the month moving amongst various Arlington locations, issuing warnings and (presumably) some tickets. The presenting officer emphasized that it was primarily an education campaign, and that increasing the number of tickets written was not a goal of the campaign. Police will be handing out “Safety Tips” cards (available here in English and Spanish, among other languages) and generally reminding citizens of the right-of-way rules governing pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles. The officer also indicated that they’d be running “crosswalk stings” (tho’ he did seem to immediately regret that phrasing, in light of his earlier claim that it wasn’t about ticketing).  Apparently the plan is to set out an orange cone in the roadway, and if a car fails to stop for a pedestrian who has started out in the roadway *before* the car passed the orange cone, a ticket will be issued. We’ll see how that goes. Trivia: an Arlington jaywalking ticket will cost you $5. Plus $61 in court costs, if you contest it and lose.

The presentation also included a portion on the most dangerous intersections in Arlington County. I’m going to try and get a copy of those slides and post them there, as they confirm what most of us in Arlington already know – that you ought to be extra careful in the area around Ballston Mall, crossing Glebe Rd through Buckingham, and in the Rosslyn circle.  And  be extra careful crossing Jeff Davis in Crystal City.  Specifically, from 2005 to 2007, the seven most dangerous pedestrian intersections in Arlington County were:

2300 Jefferson Davis Hwy – 5 accidents
900 S Glebe Rd – 3 accidents
1500 S George Mason Dr – 3 accidents
500 N Glebe Rd – 3 accidents
600 N Glebe Rd- 3 accidents
4200 Wilson Blvd – 3 accidents
1800 N Moore St – 3 accidents

Other Arlington stats of interest included the number of cycling-related accidents and injuries over the past three years:

2005 38 accidents, 34 injuries
2006 43 accidents, 49 injuries
2007 38 accidents, 37 injuries

The last cycling-related fatality was in 2005. Accidents, as one might expect, occur more frequently during rush hour(s) traffic.  The rest of the presentation appeared to have been modified from the same one DC’s MPD put together (preserving some of the same bits of wisdom like characterizing cyclists as “anti-authoritarian”).  All in all, I did get the idea that ACPD is genuinely trying to improve the state of affairs for Arlington’s pedestrians and cyclists, and I applaud them for that.  So in that spirit, I’ll leave my concerns for another entry on what I learned at the ABAC meeting.