The Town of Chapel Hill will hold an educational campaign throughout the month of March focusing on efforts to keep pedestrians safe.
The campaign starts Friday with “Phone Free Friday,” in which the town is asking everyone who travels to do so without looking at their phone in order to see how much they may miss while using that device.
This comes after two pedestrians were struck and killed on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and a third pedestrian was struck near University Place mall in January and February.
“With more people walking and biking around our beautiful community, and in light of recent events, we recognize the importance of drawing more attention to travel safety,” police chief and executive director for community safety Chris Blue said in a release. “We’re taking this opportunity to further educate our residents and visitors on best practices for safely traveling through our community. We’ll be doing so in addition to our normal enforcement practices throughout town.”
The town is taking other measures to prevent further accidents such as adding a new traffic light at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Longview Street and holding weekly Bike/Ped Team meetings to discuss improving pedestrian safety.
“We have received an outpouring of concern for safety for the pedestrians in our community and—with that concern—many requests for improvements,” said town manager Roger Stancil. “A group of town staff members representing many of our departments meet once a week to discuss ways to improve travel throughout our community and will be discussing these requests and other ways to continue improving travel safety in our community.”
More information on the safety campaign will be shared through the Chapel Hill Police Department’s social media channels.
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I have written several emails to the town council about this situation, and have actually appeared before the council recently predicting that accidents like this will happen sooner or later. I guess “sooner” happened.
Until the persons in charge take the courage to admit that well-meaning but mis-guided efforts to IMPROVE pedestrian safety are actually backfiring and REDUCING pedestrian safety, preventable incidents like this will continue to happen.
I learned to look both ways before crossing the street when I was a child, and this has worked well in my 67 years. Until you remove all feel-good efforts to improve pedestrian safety, which in reality causes pedestrians to assume that crosswalks and flashing lights at locations other than intersections will “protect” them, injuries and fatalities will occur.
The only “pedestrian safety improvement” tof any benefit has been the concrete medians in the middle of 5 lane roads. I don’t know anyone who can’t cross two lanes of traffic in safety, and the concrete medians provide a refuge between each half of the road. But get rid of the flashing lights and pedestrian crosswalks at all locations except intersections. I have seen too many close calls regarding a pedestrian crossing in front of a stopped car in the right lane, only to almost get hit by a car in the left lane thinking the pedestrian has crossed. Several rear end collisions have occurred for this very reason.
Yes, the driver is usually always at fault, but that will be little consolation to the victim and their family. Not to mention the driver who will endure guilt for the rest of his or her life. I regularly have pedestrians walk right in front of me without looking, thinking that a crosswalk will protect them. You can conduct all the safety campaigns that you want in order to try to rectify the mess that has been made, but you can’t position a policeman at every crosswalk, and you can’t change human nature. Until you go back to the “good old days” and make pedestrians 100% responsible for their safety, and not rely on fancy colored crosswalks and flashing lights to protect them, more accidents will become a regular occurence.
None of this helps if speed limits are not enforced by the weak Chapel Hill police. Cameras need to be installed on MLK to photograph speeders and police has to patrol and stop and ticket speeders relentlessly. I commute on MLK everyday, and drivers coming from I-40 routinely drive 50-60 mph even in rain. No wonder pedestrians get hit. I rarely see police on MLK and if I do, speeders don’t care much. I know you need to get to work, how about getting up 10 minutes earlier and spare the lives of your fellow citizens ?