With more than a month to go this year, Maine has already passed a sad milestone, with a record number of pedestrians killed on the state’s streets and roadways. So far this year, 18 pedestrians have been killed by motorists, up from 17 last year, which was a record high since 1994. Two additional pedestrian deaths are currently under investigation in Portland and Augusta and aren’t yet included in the tally.
Even worse, November and December are the worst months for such fatalities because of the limited daylight, so the fatality numbers will likely rise. Eight out of last year’s 17 fatalities occurred in the last two months of the year.
The deaths spur little outrage or calls for change. They should. But as a task force created by the Maine Department of Transportation recently reported, the problem can only be fixed through a mixture of solutions that range from changes in driver behavior, such as reductions in speeding and distracted driving, to changes in road design.
Changing human behavior is the least expensive, but the most challenging, part of the solution. Take distracted driving. In a 2015 AAA survey, 80 percent of respondents said distracted driving was a bigger problem than it was three years ago. Yet, 70 percent of these people report using a cell phone while driving, 42 percent said they read texts or email while driving, and 32 percent said they send texts and emails while driving.
Not all distractions are technological. Last week, an Aroostook County woman crashed her car into a school bus after her cat peed on her lap. Luckily, none of the students on the bus were seriously injured. The cat died.
In the same AAA survey, nearly half of drivers admit to going 15 miles per hour over the speed limit on a highway in the past month. Forty-five percent say they have driven 10 mph over the speed limit on a residential street. Only 20 percent of people struck by a car doing 25 mph are killed. But that rate jumps to 80 percent when a car is doing 45 mph, speeds more common in rural areas.
Pedestrians often wear dark clothing when crossing or walking along roads, making it hard for drivers to see them. A bill to require pedestrians to wear reflective clothing after sunset was mocked and quickly rejected by lawmakers this year, but it had a serious point — to spark more conversation about pedestrian deaths in Maine.
The combination of irresponsible driver and pedestrian behavior are increasingly deadly. Portland police last week found the body of Edward Blumenthal, who had been missing for more than two months. He was found in woods at the edge of outer Congress Street. The medical examiner determined that his fatal injuries were consistent with being hit by a vehicle.
As the Department of Transportation task force recommended, infrastructure changes to increase bicyclist and pedestrian safety, such as walking and biking lanes with barriers to separate them from automobile traffic and road designs that reduce speeding, must also be part of the solution. But such changes can be hard to justify in sparsely populated rural Maine.
There’s another low-cost solution: Get more people to walk and ride bikes. Peter Jacobsen, a public health consultant from California, wrote in the journal Injury Prevention that if more people walk and ride their bikes, drivers will be more alert to these activities when they are behind the wheel.
“This result is unexpected,” he wrote. “It appears that motorists adjust their behavior in the presence of people walking and bicycling.”
Safety messages and roadway improvements are important parts of the solution. But the biggest needed change is for drivers to be more attentive and responsible.
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