A casualty on our streets

A couple of Saturdays ago in the late afternoon, Bud Patton of West Cedar Street was heading home from the Common at the intersection of Beacon and Charles. As he crossed Beacon, a car turning right from Charles Street South hit him.

Bud, a highly decorated veteran of the Korean War, has been in a scrape or two in his life, but he didn’t expect to find danger in his own neighborhood.

“I was just walking home, and my wife was expecting me for dinner,” he said. “Instead I was at Mass General until 2 a.m.”

Bud is fine now, although he said he is a little black and blue, and his elbow still hurts. Since he had a walk signal, he thinks the driver must have been on his phone talking or texting and not have seen Bud or the red light. With phone records those things are easy to prove. The driver was from Arizona in a rental car, so he may also have been unfamiliar with Boston street patterns.

If the talking or texting while driving is true, it is the downside of modern technology. But technology also has an upside.

Because Bud was tossed onto the hood of the car and landed in the street, he was out cold for a few moments. When he came to, he said he saw about five or six young people standing over him with their cell phones going, calling the police and an ambulance. He was in the ambulance within a short time because of their attention and their phones.

The incident reminded Bud of a piece of legislation that state Representative Marty Walz has co-sponsored. House bill 3643 would reduce the speed limit on secondary streets in urban districts to 25 miles per hour. The legislation would give police a lower base line for enforcement, and enforcement would be key to making such a law work. A flashing sign measuring speed on selected streets would be helpful too in creating awareness of the lower speed limit.

But would a lower speed limit have helped Bud? It is not likely. For one thing, Charles, Beacon, and Cambridge streets would not be considered “secondary” streets, according to Jim Gillooly of the Boston Transportation Department, so the 25 mile-per-hour speed limit wouldn’t apply. Neither would it apply to Commonwealth, Rutherford and Atlantic avenues, nor Main and Chelsea streets in Charlestown.

Moreover, the car was going relatively slowly as it was. The right turn onto Beacon is cramped into two tight lanes by the triangular traffic island in the intersection’s center, and tight turn lanes are important in slowing cars down. Those that don’t slow down usually end up plowing into the island, upending the bollards and taking out a plant or two.

If the street were being redesigned, Gillooly said the city could look at creating a bump-out for pedestrians, which would further tighten the turns, but he also said that such measures “cause frustrations for drivers going through the intersection.” This is a point on which Jim and I differ, since I am perfectly happy to cause frustration to drivers and decrease pedestrians’ frustrations in “America’s Walking City.”

Remarkably, since this intersection is a busy one for pedestrians and has a fair amount of vehicle traffic, records show that people are safer here than elsewhere. As Beacon Street climbs the hill next to the Common, the danger is greater at Joy, Park and on down at Tremont Street, according to city records of the intersections most likely to have seen accidents between 2001 and 2007. More dangerous in downtown Boston were Kenmore Square, Tremont Street at Stuart and Boylston, and Cambridge Street at New Chardon and Staniford streets. Otherwise it was the outlying streets that saw the greatest number of accidents. And the news wasn’t all bad. The number of pedestrians who were transported by ambulance after being struck by a car declined in those years by 16 percent, which is better than the numbers going up.

With walk signals that are not intuitive and different from every other city in America, Boston pedestrians, unlike Bud Patten, are likely to cross without paying much attention to the walk light. Maybe it is a miracle, or perhaps there is some hidden logic in our behavior that keeps most of us from being hit by a car.