It was dusk on a warm New Year’s Eve. Anne Goldstein was folding laundry upstairs in her home when she heard a loud bang from outside of her open window. Running out to the street, she saw matching pairs of Converse, and two unmoving figures lying on the road.
An SUV had struck two girls, 13- and 14-year-old students at Phillips Middle School, just across the street. Within minutes, Goldstein’s 911 call was answered, and ambulances rushed the teenagers to the hospital. Both were seriously injured.
“Not a Secret”
Goldstein already knew well the dangers of the Estes Drive crosswalk despite only moving in five months ago. As both the homeowner at the end of the crosswalk and a mom who sends her children to school across the crosswalk every day, she said she had already encountered many close incidents herself.
Pedestrian safety along one of the busiest East-West transit corridors in Chapel Hill has been a point of contention among neighbors for decades.
“Oh, I felt disgusted,” said Geoff Green, an urban planner involved with NEXT, an organization that advocates for community design built around biking and walking rather than car traffic. “It’s clearly a terrible road, clearly very unsafe. There are two schools right there. The sidewalk is very narrow. When there’s not a lot of traffic, cars have a tendency to go too fast. I mean, it’s an accident waiting to happen.”
“The tragic thing about this, and what is a little bit emblematic, is it’s not a secret that Estes Drive is terrible.”
Geoff Green
Green continued: “The tragic thing about this, and what is a little bit emblematic, is it’s not a secret that Estes Drive is terrible, and it’s not a secret that there are schools along there, and it’s a dangerous environment for adults and for children trying to get up and down the corridor.”
The day after the accident, Goldstein spent six hours walking around her neighborhood and speaking with community members about the accident and their own experiences with the crosswalk. The conversations left her more concerned than ever about the safety of her community.
Goldstein said neighbors told her about almost getting hit themselves at the specific Caswell crosswalk. It has been officially identified as unsafe by community members and town staff in planning meetings since at least 2013, but has received complaints for much longer.
“People have been trying to get something done about this crosswalk for like 30 years,” Goldstein said. “They don’t care about my neighbor, Lenore, who has been writing to [the government] for 30 years. They don’t care about my neighbor, Katherine, who said she’s written 25 emails in the last six years about it. This is a problem that ‘s continuing to get ignored.”
A Number of Town Plans Develop
According to the Town, from 2014 to 2019, there were 139 pedestrian-involved crashes in Chapel Hill. In response, Chapel Hill has enacted several policy measures to improve safety.
One such policy, adopted in September 2021, is Vision Zero, a plan to commit to zero deaths or serious injuries. The plan calls for physical policy changes including roundabouts and automated speed enforcement.
In addition, the Town originally adopted the Pedestrian Plan in 2017, which includes provisions for safer and better-connected avenues for walking or biking. A 2020 update implemented a Complete Streets policy which says that Chapel Hill will “ensure pedestrian, bicycle, transit and evolving transportation technology options” on all state-owned roads.
More specific to the area surrounding Phillips, the Central West Plan outlined density and walkability goals along with proposals for neighborhood preservation and reducing traffic impacts in the area around Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Estes Drive.
These plans have led to one of the most relevant projects to the accident, the Estes Drive Connectivity Project, a plan that was already developed and ready to go by the Town in 2014, aimed at improving pedestrian and cyclist transit on Estes Drive. It includes the addition of flashing crosswalk lights, a raised bike lane, a sidewalk on one side of the road and a multi-use path on the other. However, while it was scheduled to begin in the summer of 2021, it was delayed until the spring of 2022 due to concerns of disrupting unforeseen gas lines.
Even with all of the efforts channeled by the Town into these concrete plans, there are many barriers that restrict the effectiveness of the policies, from funding to staff capacity.
“There have been pedestrian accidents all over town and those are all upsetting, but particularly just the one that was involving school kids… one of the child’s parents is a teacher at Estes [Hills Elementary]. About every upsetting thing you can imagine. I’ve always known, and everybody who lives near us who drives knows that it’s been a dangerous road and it’s [an] incredible number of cars a day,” said Julie McClintock, a long-time neighborhood member and advocate. “Because I’ve been in the community for so many years, I’ve seen a lot of good intentions about plans to make it safer. And so far, those have not been realized.”
Green says that much of the obstacle to enacting corrections lies in backwards statewide priorities for funding and workers, not lack of effort from the Town.
“Part of the reason it takes so long… is there is very little funding that comes through from the federal government that the Town can use on these sorts of projects,” Green said. “I think the Town has done a nice job so far on it, but it’s just that the Town has to do more than it should have to.”
The Barrier of the State and “Correctable Collisions”
A key difficulty in adopting changes on Estes Dr. is that the road is not owned by the Town, but rather by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT). Any changes have to be approved at a state-level. Green says that though there are great engineers and individuals who work there, the nature of the NCDOT as a system is to protect car travel, which is a main factor in the slow rate of adaptability to residents’ concerns.
“NCDOT’s primary concern is moving people in cars from point A to point B,” Green said. “Every decision they make is looked at through that prism. So, if you want to make a pedestrian improvement, or do anything pedestrian or bike related, the fundamental thing is they will not let it happen if it’s going to negatively impact traffic.”
Projects like the Estes Drive Connectivity Project which are focused on improving road safety for non-automobile users are not prioritized by the NCDOT, according to Green.
“I find it darkly humorous that the widening of I-40, which was scheduled to start on May 7th, is going to start now. That is a project that could pay for 60 Estes Drive Connectivity Projects.”
Geoff Green
“I find it darkly humorous that the widening of I-40, which was scheduled to start on May 7th, is going to start now. That is a project that could pay for 60 Estes Drive Connectivity Projects,” Green said. “But again, the state prioritizes facilities like that. The focus is not on getting projects like the Estes Drive Connectivity Project done.”
Green pointed to one example of a pedestrian crossing that could be easily improved by the NCDOT. At the intersection of Willow Drive and Fordham Boulevard in Chapel Hill, there is a crosswalk and a cycled pedestrian light; however, traffic turning left into the crosswalk path does not have a red light when pedestrians are crossing—the light is flashing yellow. This leads to potentially dangerous situations when cars may only check for oncoming traffic ahead and not a person walking where they are turning. Green wrote to the Town to ask for a programming change, which he says would likely take an engineer 30 minutes to fix, in the signal to allow for a completely-protected pedestrian crossing cycle.
“The answer I was told was that NCDOT will not allow an exclusive pedestrian cycle without, and this is the exact language, ‘a pattern of correctable collisions,’” Green said.
According to NCDOT’s website, one of the main qualifiers for a specific location improvement is a “number of correctable collisions.” This means that close calls, or instances where pedestrians or motorists used their own judgments to avoid a dangerous situation, do not count.
“There is such a high bar to get any improvement for pedestrian safety on these state roads,” Green said. “And that is sort of the status quo. The status quo is you’re welcome to have pedestrian facilities to help out, you’re welcome to have these things, but we’re not going to do it if it’s going to hurt car traffic.”
“There is a culture here”
One factor in pedestrian accidents that is less directly linked to government policies is drivers’ lack of caution toward non-drivers on the road.
Paula Hemmer stood with a sign on the corner of Caswell and Estes, at the Jan. 7 protest she helped to organize. Her daughter is also a student at Phillips who has to cross Estes everyday to return home. Hemmer described her daughter walking to the other entrance with a light instead of crossing at Caswell, and said that even with the programmed crossing light, her daughter experienced drivers yelling at her or refusing to yield.
“The anger is especially interesting,” Hemmer said. “That they’re mad. That a child is crossing from a school to go home, interrupting their day for 30 seconds.”
The apparent lack of regard for pedestrians in Chapel Hill was shocking to Goldstein, who moved here from Kirkland, Wash. She said that while sending her children to school in the mornings, they frequently had to wait many minutes for traffic to allow them to pass, and she bought her own flags for children to wave at oncoming cars.
“There is a culture here of not yielding to pedestrians, and that needs to change,” Goldstein said. “I don’t know why that has occurred.”
What’s next?
One week after the accident, dozens of neighbors, students and teachers gathered at the Estes and Caswell Drive crosswalk, demanding change. They held signs saying, “Yield” and “Drive Slow.” Many know the girls. As of Jan. 26, one girl has been released after surgery. The other still remains in the hospital.
“My reaction was like, I was really sad, and I thought that there should have been more done,” said Milan Young, a student at Phillips and a friend of the girls. “Because it’s a really busy street, and especially considering the schools on and off, it’s supporting two schools, even little kids going to Estes [Hills Elementary]. There should have been, in the first place, more stuff done to make sure this didn’t happen.”
Despite the difficulties with getting through to the NCDOT, some people are hopeful that change will eventually be enacted.
McClintock and other community members are writing a letter to the district engineer from NCDOT, Chuck Edwards. Particularly addressing Estes Drive, they are requesting multiple safety improvements, including lowering the speed limit to 25 miles per hour permanently and installing speed radar signs as well as lights at crosswalks.
“A lot of people say, ‘It’s a state road, there’s nothing you can do,’” McClintock said. “Well, I’ll argue with that any day because I never like to say that you can’t do something in local government. The DOT does have the final say, but they often work with local governments.”
In a Jan. 11 letter, several organizations including Bike Chapel Hill and NEXT asked the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization (DCHCMPO) to use its regional authority to work with the NCDOT and local governments to prioritize projects like the Estes Drive Connectivity Project. While impossible to determine hypotheticals, some community members wonder what would have happened had the Project’s improvements run on time.
Many Chapel Hillians, from Phillips students to city planners, agree that a proactive approach will be necessary in the future, even though it will likely take systemic changes at the NCDOT.
“We need to correct issues like this before they become the next tragedy,” Green said. “So that you’re not closing the barn door after the horses are out. Business as usual is not working. We need to do something different.”
Photos by Caroline Chen/The ECHO.
