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On Jan. 25, another University of Oregon student was killed on a bike by a driver going too fast on a poorly designed street. The death of Erick Munene Njue, a student living at university family housing at Patterson Street and 22nd Avenue, follows the death a few months ago of Elizabeth Cardenas Figueroa, who was killed while crossing East Sixth Avenue where it meets East Eighth Avenue at the old Eugene Water & Electric Board storage yard downtown.
Erick and Elizabeth died in similar circumstances: In both instances, they were crossing a one-way street with two car lanes; the students waited for the road to clear to cross, where one driver stopped to allow the student to cross, but a second driver a bit farther back in the other lane failed to stop as required by law, and ultimately struck and killed the student.
The investigation of the crash that killed Elizabeth concluded the driver could have been traveling as fast as 40 mph on a 25 mph street; the final investigation report in the crash that killed Erick is still forthcoming.
In the case of Elizabeth, the Eugene district attorney declined to punish the driver for killing another person — not even a speeding ticket was issued! — stating that any reasonable person would have made the same decision as that driver. This dangerous interpretation of what is “reasonable” and who is a “reasonable person” is offensive and unconscionable, and reflects a deep implicit bias toward car driving as the primary user of the public street. Time will only tell if the same decision will be made in the case of the killing of Erick.
Of course, any of us who do drive around town could imagine the situation and wonder what we might do. Driving is generally so predictable and comfortable, with our climate-controlled, customized playlist environment, that it is easy to forget that we have been given public license to responsibly operate a large, powerful, heavy machine safely in the public realm. For those of us who also navigate our city by foot or bike (or wheelchair, stroller, walker, etc.), the situation that killed both Erick and Elizabeth is a common hazard many of us see regularly, not to mention a plethora of other daily, common, life-endangering situations caused by drivers being unaware of other users of the road.
One way to improve the safety situation for all road users is to follow best-practice street design that gives all of us the behavioral cues to act safely. Some evidence-based, commonly used examples include narrowing or reducing the number of driving lanes, shortening crossing distances, including protected bikeways on most major streets and using street design to reduce speeding. Sadly Eugene, like many communities, is still woefully out of date in how it designs its streets, despite many improvements in recent years.
It is well known that street design, not posted speed limits, is what most influences the speed of car travel. For example, as Patterson’s street design changes, so do the cues drivers see. North of 19th Avenue, vehicle parking lanes on both sides narrow the drive lanes, adding “friction” that brings speeds down. South of 19th Avenue, Patterson opens up to a wider street design giving drivers “permission” to speed up even though the street remains legally limited to 20 mph. Anyone driving on Patterson can feel the difference — going 20 mph in the hemmed in area seems fine, if not a bit nerve-wracking, and going 20 in the open area feels like a recipe to get yelled at.
This is a good example of the difference between the posted speed and the design speed. To create safe transportation networks, those two speed indicators must be aligned, but unfortunately most streets do not accomplish that goal. On Sixth Avenue, where Elizabeth was hit and killed in a marked crosswalk, the posted speed limit is 25 mph, however the street was designed for vehicles traveling much higher — thus the possibility that the driver was comfortably traveling up to 40 mph.
Patterson Street is only 1 mile long. Yet along that mile from north to south is private and university-run student housing, a middle school, a high school, university family housing and the Eugene Family YMCA — so many places where our youth are trying to live their lives.
Eugene City Council — years ago — supported two policies extremely relevant to the deaths of Erick and Elizabeth that seemingly have been ignored: to triple the percent of trips Eugene residents take by modes other than a car, and to reach zero deaths on the roadway in any mode of travel, an initiative called Vision Zero.
Since these goals have been adopted, our non-car utilization has barely moved and our roadway deaths have increased. We know there are proven ways to meet these goals, yet we are failing, which makes us wonder what our city leadership is planning to do? These deaths were avoidable, and it is up to our city leadership, engineers and planners to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
