Pedestrian Injured in Crash on Fifth Avenue
The intersection of Fifth Avenue and Wilkins Avenue.
On June 30, at around 9:45 PM, there was a crash between a driver and a young woman on Fifth Avenue near Wilkins Avenue. Police report that the driver had the right of way, and that “the pedestrian walked out in front of the car.”
Fifth Avenue is an arterial road that connects several East End neighborhoods to Downtown. it’s surrounding land uses near Wilkins Avenue are primarily medium- and high-density residential, including lots of driveways. It has four 11-foot-wide lanes and a speed limit of 35 miles per hour. While estimates vary, one study finds that at that speed a pedestrian has between 50-75% chance of severe injury and 25-50% change of death. Despite a higher volume of pedestrian activity, the sidewalks on Fifth Avenue are only six feed wide, with no trees or other buffer to protect them from cars. Only two of the three legs have crosswalks. Both Fifth Avenue and Wilkins Avenue are on Pittsburgh’s High-Injury Network. While there are no funded plans for the intersection on the regional Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI) has lots of plans for the area, including a “Bike Connector” in the Bike(+) Master Plan, and bus rapid transit (BRT) and bike improvements in the long-range plan Envision 2070.
The police say that the pedestrian walked in front of the driver, but that isn’t something that a reasonable person does. It could be that they were unwell, or under the influence, or that they were trying to cross before the car got there and miscalculated, or that they just tripped. None of these are a good reason for someone to be severely injured, and the road should be changed to improve safety and better match its surrounding land uses.
Fifth Avenue is geometrically constrained. You can’t widen the right-of way, as some buildings come right up to the sidewalk. While you could play with lane widths, the 11-foot lanes aren’t egregiously over-wide, and you could only get about two feet more of sidewalk on either side: helpful, but not a complete solution. Given its residential function, frequent driveways, and heavier pedestrian use, the Institute for Road Safety Research might recommend reclassifying Fifth Avenue as an access road, or what we might more commonly call a local road in the US. This would mean lowering the speed limit, reducing the number of travel lanes, and widening sidewalks, somewhat like the developing road diet for Liberty Avenue. And that would work great, if it weren’t for this:
Future BRT projects (emphasis added). From Pittsburgh Regional Transit.
Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) is planning to eventually convert the 71B route, which runs along Fifth Avenue, to a BRT line. This will mean two dedicated bus lanes, and unless we’re willing to make it a bus-only street, two separate lanes for cars. We can’t really mess with the alignment without eliminating the opportunity for BRT. So what can we do to make Fifth Avenue safer?
If we return to the Institute for Road Safety Research, they broadly classify all non-highways into two categories: access roads (similar to US local roads), which are low-speed roads whose primary function is to allow access to the buildings around them; and distributor roads (similar to US arterials), whose primary function is traffic flow along segments, only prioritizing access functions at intersections. In general , access roads are one or two lanes, tend to mix car, bike, and transit traffic on the road, and have a speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour (about 20 miles per hour); while distributor roads may have as many as four lanes, tend to have separate facilities for bikes, and a speed limit of 50 kilometers per hour (between 30 and 35 miles per hour). Fifth Avenue’s residential functions and lack of separate bike facilities would make it an access road, but it’s four lanes would make it a distributor. So which one should it be?
20 mile-per-hour assessment scheme. Adapted from Kennisplatform CROW.
Kennisplatform CROW is a Dutch agency that develops recommendations for road design emphasizing safe multimodal travel. They recently developed a scheme for determining if roads with a traffic function, which would normally be classified as arterials, should have speed limits similar to a local road. If we follow this scheme for Fifth Avenue, we can determine that:
The road has a dual function;
That dual function cannot be solved by other choices at the network level without impacting the opportunity for BRT;
Traffic function is important for public transit; and
A 20-mile-per-hour limit could be set for livability and crossability reasons, and because the road cannot be designed as an arterial while safely accommodating bikes and pedestrians.
Given these, Fifth Avenue should keep its arterial function, but should have its speed limit reduced, as well as have changes made to ensure this lower speed limit is respected. This could include narrowing the car lanes, which might be needed anyway to accommodate wider dedicated BRT lanes, and traffic calming. While DOMI is very fond of speed humps for slowing traffic on long sections of road between intersections, given the needs of heavy BRT vehicles it might be more appropriate to go for wider speed tables, and raised intersections to make sure vehicles are traveling slowly where they are most likely to encounter pedestrians.
Fifth Avenue is owned by the City of Pittsburgh, while DOMI is responsible for its maintenance. Improvements would need to be either grant-funded or be set aside by the City Council in the city’s budget. DOMI manages request for traffic calming through this website. This stretch of Fifth Avenue is within the district of Councilperson Erika Strassburger, who can be contacted via telephone at 412-255-2133 or via email at district8@pittsburghpa.gov.