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In the United States
over the last decade
sixty thousand pedestrians died under the wheels of an automobile.
One million pedestrians were injured.
Join us for the next half hour as we take a look at Perils For Pedestrians.
On this episode, we travel to Lakewood, Ohio, for Walk To School Day.
Nearby Brooklyn, Ohio, restricts using cell phones while driving.
Pedestrians create their own path to the library in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
We visit the Alaska Injury Prevention Center in Anchorage.
The East Coast Greenway trail will link Maine to Florida.
And finally,
Amtrak will soon allow bicycles on board their east coast trains.
Stay tuned.
We're on Waterbury Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio, talking with
Wendy Lazor.
What happened here on April 26th?
My son was walking
with his child care provider, his sister, and two other children to the store.
They were playing red light, green light.
My son was
right over there, standing waiting at a red light.
While they were playing, walking up to the store, a driver came down in a
truck
and pulled into the driveway across the street,
during the rush hour time when it was very busy, backed up
went about ten miles an hour into this driveway, which is his, struck my child
killing him instantly.
Driver said he never saw him.
What did you do
after the tragedy? Well,
for a long time we did a lot of searching and reading, and
trying to find ways to
cope with it, and I kinda stumbled upon this International Walk Your Child To
School Day.
Was able to get the city council, the school board,
area leaders together to put together a kind of a
community wide blitz on that day on pedestrian safety awareness.
Today was Walk To School Day.
What,
what happened this morning? Well, this morning
at six o'clock in the morning, we all met together, and we were
able to get doughnuts donated.
We had balloons. We had a variety of different types of safety things that got
dispersed to ten elementary schools and two parochial schools in the community.
We sent home a walkability checklist last week and asked
parents to turn it in,
so that we can begin to review what our problems in our community are, to make it
safer.
We had school board reps. We had school employees. We had
city officials at each of the elementary schools today talking with
parents about being safe, driving safe.
And we really tried to create a general
community awareness of pedestrian safety.
What message were you trying to give the kids, what message were you trying to give the parents?
Well, we were trying to give kids messages on being safe,
walking safely, don't run in the street,
look both ways, just basic
safety for kids. But what we're really trying to target is the drivers. What we
would encourage parents to do is to obey the safety rules of driving. You
know, on a residential street, go the speed limit. When you're in a school zone, go the twenty
miles an hour. If a person's in a crosswalk, wait till they've crossed. If
children are walking up the street, wait till they've completed their walk before
you pull in or pull out of your driveway.
You know, obey traffic signals. Make sure that, you know, when it's a red light you're
not going through it.
Basic safety things
that, I think, could have prevented this accident.
What you see in front of you here is our Franklin Safety Patrol, which obviously play a large role in safety of children every day in our school.
Our commemoration of this day is to have these students plant bulbs in the garden behind us here, in hopes that
in early spring,
in the month of the young child, they will start to bloom,
and then remind us once again of
all of our good
safety habits and our safety rules.
We can never remind them enough
of all of these good safety habits. And we appreciate every day their efforts
in trying to keep
the younger children safe as they do their jobs at the corners of our crosswalks and also at our buildings.
Today, while it is about remembering that tragedy and the great loss of that young child, we as a
community, and Wendy Lazor and her family, have come together to talk about these children, and to
in many ways, establish the community a living memorial to her child.
So, today we are as a community coming together
to talk about the safety of these children, and children throughout this community.
And this was a collaborative effort. It began because of the courage of one woman, who in
dealing with her pain, came forward and extended her hand to this community in her pain.
And today is a result of the community reaching out, as well, to her family.
And so on behalf of the State of Ohio, I'd like to present Wendy with the resolution. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but basically just one part,
that says, everyone should make a plan to make
immediate changes
to increase the safety of our children for walking in our communities. To compile a
list of suggestions for improvements that can be made.
We're in Brooklyn, Ohio, talking with Richard Hovan.
What did Brooklyn do,
first-in-the-nation,
in 1966?
Well, John,
the little city of Brooklyn, Ohio, was the first in the United States to pass the seat belt ordinance.
We were the very first in the nation to do that.
What did people think
back in '66
to have a law like that?
The way I understand it, I wasn't a policeman then,
back in 1966 the people were saying, well
Brooklyn, Ohio, you're only four square miles.
Why should I have to wear it because you decided to do this? No one else
is doing this law.
And now everybody in the United States, every city
in the United States, has the law on the seat belts.
So we led the nation back then on that one.
March '99, you're first
in the nation again. What did you do this time?
That's right. Our mayor at the time, John M. Coyne, he elected to enact an ordinance
against the use of hand-held cell phones while driving on a roadway.
Lots of complaints came into the chief's office and to the mayor's office
in regard to
how dangerous these hand-held cell phones have become while driving.
He elected to
make an ordinance.
It was passed in March of, 22, 1999.
And our ordinance reads that you're not allowed to use a hand-held cell phone while
operating a motor vehicle on a roadway.
You're not allowed to answer, listen, talk,
or dial.
There's three exceptions to this:
if you're calling on 911,
if you're
using a hands-free device,
and that's
separate microphone
and earpiece,
or if you pull over to the side of the road and you put your vehicle in park.
Then we have no problem with that.
Our ordinance is a,
it's a
three dollar fine, first offense.
There's no court cost.
There's no points
on your driver's license.
Simply you mail it in.
It costs the City of Brooklyn
more money
to actually do all the paperwork than it does for our fine.
And the reason of all this is that we elected to make this such a soft
ordinance
is that we wanted to
show everybody that
we're not against the use of hand-held cell phones, we're not trying to punish anybody
for this.
We're just trying to make it a national
awareness of how dangerous these things have become on the roadway.
And we want people be safe out there.
And that's why we elected and
directed our way of doing it this way.
When you stop someone that you observed and you're writing them up a ticket,
what do you tell them?
How do you inform them of
the danger they are creating?
John, to tell you the truth it,
I took a real
cause for this because
one of my best friends was almost run over while he was
try to change a tire on the roadway.
A lady came by using a cell phone, went off the roadway, and he had to pin himself up against
his car
to
allow himself not to be run down.
The real sad thing about this is the lady kept on going.
She either elected
not to stop because she was afraid of what she had done,
or she didn't even realize it 'cause she was on a cell phone.
His family, three small boys, were with him, and at the time I thought,
I can't think of anything worse than seeing your Dad run down
and killed in front of you.
Those boys would have had lived with that for the rest of their lives.
We enacted this ordinance,
I went and took initiative and went out there, and I write more tickets than anybody else in the
department.
I was invited onto the Oprah Winfrey Show on February 15th of
2000 here.
I met Rob and Patti Pena, from
Perkasie, Pennsylvania.
They told their story about how
Patti Pena
and their litle daugher, who was two and a half years old at the time,
Morgan Lee Pena.
They were traveling over to family in
Hilltown Township, Pennsylvania, when a man on a cell phone
inadvertently went through a stop sign, broadsiding their vehicle,
ultimately killing Morgan Lee.
When they told that story in front of me, their
story really touched my heart.
After the show, Patti Pena,
she came up and hugged me, and thanked me
for all I was doing.
At the time, all I was doing was giving out some
tickets for cell phone violators.
I elected at that time, when i came back, and said I have to do something for this family.
After they told their story, and
because the laws in Pennsylvania,
that driver was only fined fifty dollars.
Kinda left an empty feeling in them.
The Penas, I think, felt that the law enforcement wasn't doing anything for
them,
that no one kind of cared for the little people.
And this tragedy happening to them,
losing their only child, two and a half years old at the time.
When I came back,
I thought about this,
and
everytime I write one of these cellphone tickets, at the bottom of the
ticket where I put my signature, I put
the initials MLP and I circle it.
It stands for Morgan Lee Pena.
I give out a three page informational sheet to people, showing
Morgan Lee's picture, telling of the tragedy that happened to them,
and
for most people, it hits home with them.
I really consider that there's two victims out of all these
cellphone accidents.
One victim being the person that
dies from this or was injured by it.
And the other victim is the person that caused it.
Most people, all people are out there, they make a real nice package, wireless does.
It's available for everybody.
So everybody has cell phones.
They're a great tool,
if you use them the proper way.
But
if you cause the death of another, or injure another person you become a victim, too.
And I don't want to see that happen to anybody.
And I stress that to everybody. I take more time
talking to people
explaning to them about the dangers of cell phones,
over a three dollar ticket, than I do of
anything else.
But it's become a real important issue to me,
and over this period of time I've become
close friends with the Penas
and I always let them know that they got somebody fighting for their cause
in Brooklyn, Ohio.
We're in North Potomac in Maryland, talking with Alan Migdall,
next to the Quince Orchard Library.
What's the hole in this fence behind us?
This is a hole that connects this library with the
shopping center that's adjacent to it, as well as neighboring communities
that are around the corner.
And it's an obvious connection
that was supposed to be part of the plan when this was presented to the public
by the architectural firm that built this,
and then it was built
and there was no hole in the fence.
And now we have
the result of
that omission. We have problems with
them replacing boards
of a repeated hole.
Why would people go through all the trouble of punching a hole in the fence?
What would you have to do to walk to this library without it?
Well, if you're coming from that direction,
to get to this library
front entrance you have to walk all the way around the block.
This building is situated
facing away from the road,
so the front
door faces its parking lot in the back here,
and it adds somewhere between a quarter to a third of a mile to your walk
to come from neighborhoods over there. So,
if you're walking that's, that's a big deal.
People have known how to put
gates in fences,
you mentioned the architect had even had it in the plans,
why isn't it there? What are the obstacles?
Well, I've been given a number of reasons for why
it can't possibly be done. It seems like the biggest sticking point is dealing
with the management of this adjacent shopping center, who
seems to want
the county to assume all liability for
anything that happens, even on their own property, and the county says, we won't do
that and seems to have just dropped the ball.
There's nothing more to negotiate.
i would think a lot of these library patrons walking by their stories
would be a,
a valuable source of potential customers.
Why is the shopping center so resistant to that idea, of potential
customers going by their store?
I assume it's just ignorance. They've also agreed that
they think it would be a great thing to have,
but apparently
whoever is in charge of making a decision
has got a problem with,
an imagined problem with liability that they're not willing to get over.
We're in Anchorage, Alaska, talking with Diana Hudson, who is programs manager for the Alaska
Injury Prevention Center.
What is the Center?
The Center's a nonprofit institute working with partners in the community to
improve safety for the people of Alaska.
You're preventing injuries, what sort of injuries are common?
Well, first and foremost in Anchorage, especially, which is our biggest city in
the state, we're looking at motor vehicle injuries and falls. Both of those are bad
news to pedestrians who try to use our sidewalks twelve months of the year.
A lot of those twelve months,
you have kinda long winters here,
what are some of the problems that winter brings? Well, in Anchorage we are located in a
part of Alaska that receives a great deal of snowfall every year. So
beginning at the end of September we start to get some pretty heavy weather.
What happens is because our community is so new we really lack the
infrastructure to maintain our roadways, and repeated snowfalls start to pack
down on our sidewalks.
Because we need a place to put all the snow from the road, we also get extra
snow packed onto the sidewalks from the snowplow removals.
So we end up about six months of the year with no sidewalks to speak of.
Pedestrians often have to use busy roadways that are already slick and icy,
and share them with
heavy cars and machinery.
Long winters here,
you also have long nights . . .
Long, dark nights. The shortest
day of the year for Anchorage is about December 21st,
to December
20th, 21st, where we have
probably five hours of daylight.
But even the hours where the sun is supposed to shine, we tend to
spend in some overcast and some pretty gray skies.
When you couple that with the fact that most of our neighborhoods lack sidewalks,
and often are
not well lit,
what it means is that pedestrians are out walking in the dark, and often out,
as we've said, in the middle of the road.
What can you do to
make pedestrians more visible to drivers, who
might not be
paying as much attention as should, but even if they are in this dark environment?
Well, the pedestrians are the party that's obviously most vulnerable in any
collision between human being and motor vehicle, so the best
way to
take care of pedestrian injuries is to prevent them. One of the things that
we've been experimenting with is increasing visibility of pedestrians as
they're walking back and forth in the dark. We think reflectorization is an
innovative approached to pedestrian safety that could be used in any
community where there's a lot of snow, or a lot of dark, or unlit streetways.
We've tried to increase
visibility through a number of means. We've given away hats with reflective
strips around the crown so that pedestrians are visible from all
directions.
We've given low-income children backpacks where the straps are visible,
so as they wait in the bus stop during dark winter mornings,
drivers going back and forth can see them.
We've given away shoes strips
because they tend to show up real nicely against the dark.
And we've done a lot of coat giveaways with reflectorized strips ironed on them.
I think, one of the projects
that we've had the most fun with, and also have experienced the greatest
community
feedback for, is our coat giveaway.
Beginning in August, we work with community partners, most notably
Southcentral Foundation here in town, to
accept donations of good quality used winter coats. As we get these coats we
begin to iron on strips, and then we distribute them to homeless shelters and
distribute the coats also to schools in areas where there are
low-income kids.
In Alaska, if a kid loses his coat, it's not just an inconvenience, it's a
disaster.
If a kid does lose his coat in some of the, our local schools, the school
nurse has a nice cache of winter clothing that she can give to the kids.
The fact that the coats are reflectorized is, is just incidental to the child, but
it's actually a crucial injury prevention
outreach project that we can do for just pennies a coat.
If we were to walk around Anchorage in the wintertime,
would we see a lot of these reflectors? You know, you would.
And you'd notice that you were seeing them, and that's the point. The hats,
especially, really
stand out against the dark.
Kids take care of their backpacks because that's what they put their
homework and their mittens in, and so the kids where their backpacks
back-and-forth to school.
You see the kids in the backpacks.
You're starting to see runners clubs now. We do run year round here in
Anchorage, and we're starting to see runners clubs adopt this reflectorized
clothing. We're seeing people walking in the streets now wearing the glow-in-the-dark
vests that show up great.
I think, slowly but surely our community is starting to get the idea
that being seen really does count
toward injury prevention.
We're in Washington, DC, talking with Patricia King, who's chair of the board of the East Coast
Greenway Alliance.
What is the Alliance?
The Alliance is a group that's developing a trail, that's an off-road
trail, that's going to go from Calais, Maine, to Key West, Florida,
through all the major cities on the East Coast.
We're an urban trail, and lots of people have characterized us as the urban Appalachian
Trail.
Where'd the idea come from?
Well, you know, we had a bicycle conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1991,
in the fall,
and a workshop there was called long-distance trails.
And there were about, I guess, nine people who came to that workshop, including myself.
And we started talking about why aren't there more long distance trails and
particularly why aren't there more trails that go through cities,
because most of our long distance trails are, are very rural.
And we all decided that we wanted to do something,
by the way, we were all train people, all public transportation advocates.
And we decided at that time, we needed to do something on the East Coast, that it
was the most densely populated part of the country,
that the city's were not well serviced,
and we just decided to do it on the East Coast, and we called it the East Coast
Greenway.
That's how the whole thing got started.
Now how does it work? How does a trail become part of the Greenway?
Every state has a committee,
an East Coast Greenway state committee.
The board of trustees determined the corridor from Calais to Key West, and
which cities we must go through.
Then we turn to our state committees and say, okay you have to tell us where
within this corridor
the specific trail is going to go.
So it's up to each state committee.
We work from the ground up to
find out what's already existing that's in that corridor,
what's in, in, on the drawing boards that is going to be finished,
and then where there are no works going on, and then we try and develop something
within those missing pieces with the state committee,
and ultimately that whole piece that's going to be put together
will be owned by other groups. They will be names of other trails. But they will
all connect, that's really our job is to connect,
to make this one long corridor.
And, of course, it's up to us to make sure that when they come to the borders they meet
and they don't come at different, at different angles, so
that's, that's our main job.
You haven't been around very long. How much have you gotten done so far?
We've got about two hundred miles actually designated. Our designation
is
road bike-able for the final trail,
and that is primarily because we want wheelchairs to be able to use it. So we say
road bike-able.
And then we have several other criteria, but
in the end we hope to be finished by 2010, and with each year
the number of miles designated has accelerated because
more and more the state committees are beginning to put that together and
come in with pieces that are finished or being developed.
So this year we're going to add a hundred more, so we'll actually
double once again what we've got already,
just, just because of that exponential increase each year.
The map behind us shows the close parallel between the East Coast Greenway and
Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.
How will you be able to take advantage of that?
Well, you know, it's really fantastic. Over the years, and i don't know if you bike,
but
all the cyclists out there, who are your viewers,
who want to be able to go, let's say between Baltimore and Washington, DC, on a
regular basis and bike, or roller blade,
should be able to
bike or blade to the train, get on the train without any trouble, get off the train,
put on their bike,
get on their bike or put on their blades, and go to wherever they're going to go. And
do that without any trouble.
We would like to see that happening all up and down, and of course all of these
Amtrak stations that are on this board from Portland down to Miami,
people should be able to do that.
We are also, by the way, hoping,
let's say you're a French family.
Two kids mother and dad, right.
You decide you want to come to the U.S. You want to tour. You
come into BWI Airport. East Coast Greenway goes around BWI Airport, and
there is a train station at BWI Airport.
You have a choice.
You take your bike off the plane and bike to Washington, DC, or Annapolis,
Maryland.
Or you can take the train to Washington, DC, with your bicycles, tour around
Washington by bike.
So the.
the flexibility now for traveling without getting in a car, or even flying,
is just going to be so much greater. So that's really what we see in this partnership with
Amtrak,
giving people much better flexibility,
and a much more environmentally sensitive way to travel.
We're talking with Stan Bagley, who's president of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.
What's been going on here today?
Well, it's been a very exciting day because we've announced a partnership between
the East Coast Greenway Alliance and Amtrak, and
we're going to carry
bicycles and happy passengers on our trains, which we don't do a lot of today.
We're developing that service in
a partnership, as I mentioned,
a joint effort with Greenway.
What are the difficulties in taking a bicycle on a train?
Well, I think, you know, the first thing you have to be concerned about is, you
know, safety of all the passengers and of course safety of the,
of the equipment, of the bicycle.
And then you need to develop a way to have easy access that's convenient and
seamless for the person who wants to do that, which,
you know, is different than crating something up and putting it in a baggage car.
Is this sort of partnership something new for Amtrak?
Yes, it is, it is new, and, you know, not only do we have a partnership with Greenway,
but we have partnerships with states and other companies
all over the United States. And, you know, it's, it's really about doing the
right thing in giving customers what they want, but also growing our business.
How's this going to work? How long before,
you have a lot of trains, it's going to take a while to get on to all of them. What's, what happens first?
Well, our initial relationship we've established is over a
ten-year period.
But we will offer this service today.
We're going to offer some new service after the first of the year and throughout next
year, and we're going to continue on until we have the entire trail covered from
Calais, Maine, to Key West, Florida.
Visit us on the Internet at www dot pedestrians dot org.