Allan Appel Photo
Bad idea: distracted -pedestrian activity at the notorious MLK-York intersection.
State law changed to protect pedestrians. Streets got brighter. More work remains to convince drivers to slow down and pedestrians to cross the street more carefully.
Kirsten Bechtel offered that update Wednesday on a five-year campaign to save lives by making the streets around Yale’s medical district safer.
Bechtel, a doctor in Yale-New Haven Hospital’s children’s emergency department, heads the Yale Traffic Safety Committee, a citizen group that formed in 2011 out of activism sparked by the 2008 deaths of medical-student pedestrian Mila Rainoff and 11-year-old Gabrielle Lee.
Speaking on WNHH’s “SeeClickFix Radio” Bechtel said her group has worked with United Illuminating, city officials and Yale to install brighter lighting on roads with low visibility in the dark. After ranking dangerous intersections, it has checked in with police on traffic enforcement concerns. City development and traffic officials work with the group regularly, including on the Downtown Crossing/Route 34 project. The group has also worked on public education for both drivers — who don’t always know they’re supposed to wait for pedestrians to cross the street before turning right on road — and pedestrians, too many of whom concentrate on mobile phones or try to “beat the light” when crossing the street.
“If you see ‘Don’t walk,’ don’t walk! Even if traffic is stopped,” Bechtel said.
Bechtel’s group joined the successful lobbying effort to convince the state to pass a “vulnerable users” law protecting pedestrians and cyclists, among others. Since then, her group has worked alongside local police, who she said have made several arrests under the law. “I’m pretty impressed with how sensitive and deliberative they are” in weighing factors in crash investigations, she said.
Click on or download the above audio file to listen to the full episode of WNHH’s “SeeClickFix Radio,” in which Bechtel and hosts Nadine Herring and Caroline Smith follow up on individual traffic-safety concerns registered recently at problem intersections like the Elm-Broadway-York convergence.
This episode was made possible in part thanks to support from Yale-New Haven Hospital.