A roadside memorial for 5-year-old Allison Hart, who was hit and killed by a van while riding her bicycle. (David Van Horn)

Regarding Theresa Vargas’s Sept. 19 Metro column, “At crosswalk where girl was killed, cars keep blowing through”:

A car driver kills a little girl riding a bike while crossing a D.C. street and, as we must be, we are heartbroken. We complain to the D.C. government, write editorials and such, and maybe officials put in crosswalk bumpers, warning signs and maybe a new traffic camera at this particular intersection. This 5-year-old will be added to statistics for Vision Zero, D.C.’s plan to cut traffic deaths. But what if the child was just one of some 500 people — pedestrians and bicyclists — badly injured in traffic-related accidents and picked up by ambulances and treated at D.C.’s trauma centers in a single year? That is what the D.C. Department of Health found in 2016 and 2017 trauma center reports. The D.C.’s government solution: Don’t do the reports again.

As I wrote in a 2020 opinion piece, we need to end our reliance on inadequate police reports and data from the District Department of Transportation to measure D.C. transportation safety. If the accident is big enough, officials follow up; if not, too bad. We need to overhaul our transportation system and end the body-bag approach to gauging pedestrian and bicyclist safety in our city.

Jeff Johnson, Washington

The writer is a member of the D.C.

Bicycle Advisory Council.

How will the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) respond to the death of Allison Hart, the 5-year-old girl killed in a crosswalk while riding her bike? Don’t expect more than the usual piecemeal approach because DDOT simply does not know how many intersections in this city need a safety upgrade. Without such a list, DDOT only promises to find 20 intersections each year that need a safety upgrade. But is this 20 out of 100 that need an upgrade or 20 out of 1,500? No one knows. The same can be said of streets with no sidewalk on either side of the street. In our small Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) area, we’ve inventoried 63 such blocks without any sidewalk. On these blocks, everyone must walk in the street. Yet DDOT’s budget for the whole District allows for the building of only a few blocks of new sidewalks each year. With no inventory of blocks desperately needing sidewalks to reach schools parks and transportation, we are once again left with DDOT’s piecemeal approach.   

I hope more voices will join our ANC in asking the mayor to do these inventories of intersections and blocks without sidewalks that are unsafe so that a budget can be written that meets D.C.’s needs.

Chuck Elkins, Washington

The writer is the 3D01 advisory

neighborhood commissioner.