Michael Thomas jaywalks out of necessity.
He regularly crosses five lanes of speeding traffic on Buford Highway to reach his bus stop. He never uses the crosswalk up the street, at the intersection with Jimmy Carter Boulevard, because that would require a seven-minute detour. He needs to be on time for his job at a sub sandwich shop.
“You have a choice,” said Thomas, 28, of Norcross. “You cross the street or you miss the bus.”
Jaywalkers have migrated to the suburbs. They venture across four- to eight-lane roads, often not using crosswalks, pausing on the raised medians or the middle “suicide lanes” to look for a break in traffic as cars whiz by. Sometimes the crossings end tragically, as it did last month for a young mother who watched her 4-year-old son killed in the road.
“My son was a wonderful little kid and I wish I’d gotten to keep him,” Raquel Nelson said.
Transportation for America, which advocates against sprawl and in favor of walking and mass transit, ranks Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta as the 10th-most dangerous metro area for pedestrians. (Orlando was No. 1.)
Sally Flocks, of the pedestrian advocacy group PEDS, thinks many roads in suburban Atlanta are more dangerous for pedestrians than city streets — where drivers expect pedestrians. Away from the cities, cars travel at higher speeds on wider roads. Pedestrians don’t have many marked spots to cross.
“There are often whole miles without a crossing,” she said. “If you look at the roads in the suburbs, they don’t treat them [pedestrians] as equals.”
Buford Highway in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties is the most dangerous road for pedestrians, Flocks said. Others are Tara Boulevard in Clayton, Old National Highway and Fulton Industrial Boulevard in Fulton, Six Flags Drive in Cobb and Candler Road in DeKalb.
Accident magnets
Bus stops in the metro area are accident magnets, according to a recent Atlanta Regional Commission study. It said 21 to 25 percent of pedestrian crashes occurred within 100 feet of bus stops and 41 to 48 percent happened within 300 feet. (The percentage range was caused by discrepancy about the location of some accidents.)
Suburban pedestrians know the danger.
“I’m scared,” said Monica Hughley, 19, of Marietta, who was waiting at a bus stop on Austell Road. She rides to her job at Burger King in Austell. “I wish they could get some lights out here. I get off at 10, 11 and cars don’t stop.”
But pedestrians don’t get much sympathy from drivers or the public. In fact, they’re sometimes blamed for their own accident, as illustrated by two heart-wrenching pedestrian accidents in Cobb County.
On Nov. 17, 2008, a mother crossed South Cobb Drive outside a crosswalk with four children in tow. A driver struck and killed the woman’s 4-year-old daughter. The driver wasn’t charged but -- in an unusual prosecution -- the mother was. Altamesa Walker of Marietta is scheduled to face trial on involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct charges later this month.
“I don’t know why in this particular case they chose to charge her,” said Victor Reynolds, Walker’s lawyer. “To some extent it’s compounding a tragedy. This lady lost a child, literally. She was holding her hand when the vehicle struck.”
Cobb County Solicitor Barry Morgan said he couldn’t discuss details of the case before the trial, but, he said, “There are rules about where you cross the street, and you want to make sure people follow the rules so tragic things don’t happen.”
A similar incident occurred April 10, when Raquel Nelson crossed five-lane Austell Road with her three children. A car struck and killed her 4-year-old son, A.J. Nelson. The driver was charged with hit-and-run driving and other offenses. Nelson was not charged.
How it happened
The public has been unsympathetic to both women, especially in the blogosphere.
“Crosswalk or not, it is her responsibility to cross only when traffic is far enough away that she and her children can cross safely,” said an anonymous poster on a WXIA television blog after the April accident.
Nelson said she’s read the blogs and wishes people knew what happened that night.
On April 10, she and her three children — Tyler, 9, A.J., 4, and Lauryn, 3 — went shopping because the next day was Nelson’s birthday. They had pizza, went to Wal-Mart and missed a bus, putting them an hour late getting home. Nelson, a student at Kennesaw State University, said she never expected to be out after dark, especially with the children.
When the Cobb County Transit bus finally stopped directly across from Somerpoint Apartments, night had fallen. She and the children crossed two lanes and waited with other passengers on the raised median for a break in traffic. The nearest crosswalks were three-tenths of a mile in either direction, and Nelson wanted to get her children inside as soon as possible. A.J. carried a plastic bag holding a goldfish they’d purchased.
“One girl ran across the street,” Nelson said. “For some odd reason, I guess he saw the girl and decided to run out behind her. I said, ‘Stop, A.J.,’ and he was in the middle of the street so I said keep going. That’s when we all got hit.”
Improvement plans
Flocks said people should be angry at the designers of the roads, not the mothers, because safety features were scarce and crosswalks were so far away.
“You have to recognize human behavior,” Flocks said. “People won’t walk half a mile” to reach a crosswalk.
But local governments say human behavior is the unpredictable element that makes stopping pedestrian crashes virtually impossible.
Gwinnett County, for instance, has committed more than $105 million from the 2001, 2005 and 2009 SPLOST programs to pedestrian improvements, such as new sidewalks, improved crosswalk signals and public education. That may be a factor in the drop in Gwinnett’s pedestrian fatalities since 2006. But Gwinnett has 3,000 miles of roads to be watched.
“If they want to do it, there’s nothing you can do to stop it,” Gwinnett police Cpl. Ed Ritter said.
Flocks said the quickest and cheapest way to make streets safer for pedestrians is installing more refuge islands. That would allow pedestrians to be patient while looking for a gap in traffic.
A number of these islands have been built in recent years in Roswell and the DeKalb section of Buford Highway.
Other safety measures could include more crosswalks and different kinds of warning lights, such as HAWK (High-Intensity Activated crossWalK) beacons. HAWK beacons can be found in Suwanee and a few other spots in the metro area. Lights over the crosswalk flash when a pedestrian pushes a button.
Mark McKinnon, a Georgia Department of Transportation spokesman, said DOT works with the ARC to identify a range of pedestrian safety projects, including new sidewalks, pedestrian countdown timers and HAWK beacons on state roads.
More than a month has passed since Nelson’s son died. She struggles to control her emotions when she passes the stuffed animals piled near the bus stop as a tribute to A.J. Nelson’s still riding the bus because she has no car.
“If nothing good comes out of this, I’d at least like to see a crosswalk here,” she said.
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