In April, the Northampton City Council accepted an offer from Smith College to fund a corridor safety study on West Street and Route 9. When it was introduced on March 30, Councilor Alex Jarrett reasonably asked if Smith can essentially jump the line of safety priorities; in his words, “Can any entity choose to buy a safety study?” I would like to broaden his question to ask if the community is comfortable with having a significant waitlist of potentially life-threatening problems to fix. My interest in this is personal; I was the pedestrian victim of the Dec. 7, 2022 accident on West Street that partially motivated Smith’s request.

As the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety noted in 2022, published accident reports play a critical role in helping the public advocate for safer infrastructure. Because the Gazette missed my accident, right now the only public record is DPW Director LaScaleia’s description of it at the March City Council meeting (“sort of a near miss, it was almost an accident with a tragic outcome in a crosswalk on West Street”) and her description at the Transportation and Parking Commission meeting on June 20 (“an unfortunate incident with a pedestrian vs. car.”)

In fact the accident was not a “near miss;” it was a direct hit in the crosswalk on West Street by the Smith parking garage. While I am not looking for sympathy, I think it is important to understand how serious this accident was. I suffered five different fractures and a concussion. I was very lucky; research suggests that roughly 10-20% of pedestrians my age are killed in similar accidents.

When Smith’s offer was discussed at the June 20 Transportation and Parking Commission meeting, West Street was characterized as having “heavy traffic volumes and speeding” and being the subject of “multiple traffic calming requests.” In fact the commission discussed a traffic calming request for a nearby area on West Street on Dec. 20, 2022, less than two weeks after I was hit, but no mention was made then that a pedestrian had just been seriously injured nearby. Councilor Jarrett himself noted on March 30 that portions of West Street are Priority #8 in the April 2022 Complete Streets Project Prioritization Plan.

Whatever frustration I feel about getting hit somewhere that was already a known problem is nothing compared to how awful it feels to read the Gazette’s headline about the high school student seriously injured in the crosswalk outside NHS last year, “Another pedestrian hit by car as city awaits study on safety improvements,” [Gazette, Nov. 25, 2022]. After Pallav Parakh was killed in a crosswalk on South Street in 2012, the Gazette interviewed residents who had their own close calls there and reported that there were four non-fatal pedestrian accidents there in the preceding 10 years. In 2017, cyclist Alan Porter was killed by a vehicle on Nonotuck Street; according to the Gazette, ”A day after the crash, the city’s Transportation and Parking Commission approved improvements [speed bumps] … that were in the works for more than a year.”

I know financial and human resources are major obstacles to making safety improvements. But I also wonder, given the examples above and my own experience, if the process of identifying and enacting solutions is somewhat broken.

The site of my accident should not take priority over other problem sites. But as Northampton considers potential projects, here are a couple questions. First, do we always need the results of a (new) full study before any improvements can be made? When Elena Lucore was killed in a crosswalk in 2021 at UMass, the university had pedestrian-activated safety beacons installed there while they awaited the results of a comprehensive traffic study. There is a long list of local and regional colleges and universities (including Amherst and Mount Holyoke) that have dealt with crossings similar to West Street — can’t Smith (and Northampton) proactively apply some of what those institutions have learned? I do appreciate that in May, city officials visited West Street with representatives from Smith and placed signs in the crosswalks, but I suspect we can do more.

Second, how does the city collect data outside of traffic calming requests? Several people have shared with me accounts of near misses on West Street, similar to what people reported about South Street in 2012. How does the city collect those data and, critically, make them available to the various bodies that play a role in moving safety projects forward?

Traffic problems around Smith shouldn’t get special treatment just because Smith offers to pay for them, but those problems, too, are community problems. I am not a Northampton resident, but the driver who hit me, like many other people who work at the second-largest employer in Northampton, is. When I lay unresponsive on West Street before the NPD arrived, I was helped by a Northampton resident who heard the impact and called the police, the Smith College Campus Safety officer who arrived first on the scene, and a Westhampton resident who was the primary witness to the accident and also rushed to provide medical assistance. I am so incredibly grateful to all of those people, who represent the best of our Pioneer Valley community. I don’t think this is a community that wants to see more of our members injured and killed while we await safety improvements that everyone seems to know we need.

Kate Queeney lives in Amherst.

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