A month of fatal pedestrian crashes — and a month to prevent more
10-ish questions with Chris French, president of Fairfax Families for Safe Streets
In two September weeks in Fairfax County, six drivers fatally struck six pedestrians from Hybla Valley to Centreville. The string of incidents made last month the county’s deadliest of the year for pedestrians — and it made Chris French, once again, reflect.
“I think people have sort of numbed themselves to it: ‘Oh, it’s a shame that person got hit, but they were walking across the street,’” French, president of the Fairfax chapter of Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets, said late last week. “Almost as if they were asking for it, when these are people just trying to live their lives.”
It’s the advocacy group’s mission not to let people get numb to the numbers. NoVA FSS, a volunteer-run organization founded in 2017, hosts street-safety presentations in schools, lobbies lawmakers for changes to infrastructure and law, and collects reports from residents on local hot spots for near-collisions; it published its latest Fairfax County findings last month.
French, 54, has spent 25 years as a bike and public-transit commuter and experienced “countless” close calls himself, he said, including one in his neighborhood in 2020 that propelled him into advocacy. He met up with The Machine for an interview at the Oakton Shopping Center, the site of one fatal September crash, to discuss Fairfax County’s streets, solving distracted driving, and the mission of October’s National Pedestrian Safety Month.
The month started with, perhaps, new promise: On Oct. 1, NoVA FSS announced a $17,000 grant from the DMV that it will use to connect with communities where crashes happen most. To help prevent more, French told The Machine, they will need more data.
The following conversation has been edited for length and a bit for clarity.
The Fairfax Machine: How do you assess Fairfax County’s infrastructure for biking, walking and running right now, and what would you like to see change?
Chris French: I think there’s a lot that can be changed. It’s improving, and it’s happening too slowly from where I sit, but I think it’s also happening in isolated pockets.
One of the things that we really need is more connectivity of the infrastructure that we do have. The county or [the Virginia Department of Transportation] takes opportunities to improve bicycle or pedestrian infrastructure as part of a development project, but it leaves gaps. And as a cyclist or pedestrian, those gaps, even if it’s only 10% of your commute or your walk, that might be the difference between you deciding, “That’s not safe. I’m going to get in my car.”
The other thing I would say is that while the county has tried to install some cycling infrastructure and pedestrian safety improvements, they don’t achieve a level of comfort for people. A stripe of paint between you and speeding cars for most people isn’t sufficient to feel like this is a safe road for me to be on. At recent county Transportation Committee meetings, they’ve begun to discuss something called “pedestrian level of comfort” and “cyclist level of stress” as metrics they can use in evaluating transportation projects. Those are really important, because without them we’re just going to keep building streets for cars and not for people.
The Machine: I know a lot of the work [that NoVA FSS does] is with VDOT. I don’t know that I understand how all the pieces fit together.
French: Yeah, so 95% of Fairfax County roads are owned and operated by VDOT. Because of that, even the Board of Supervisors, in many cases their hands are tied in terms of advocating to change the speed limit or implementing a change to an intersection to make it more safe. Those are, almost without exception, decisions that need to be reviewed and approved by VDOT and often funded by VDOT.
So, unfortunately, a lot of great ideas, we find, die at the door of VDOT. They just don’t have the capacity to handle all the requests they get [for] pedestrian and cyclist safety improvement, and I don’t frankly think they have the mandate to implement them.
The Machine: Right. The state is going to be less accountable to local advocacy groups than your county would be.
French: 100%. We were just in a meeting with James Walkinshaw, the supervisor from the Braddock district, and he was expressing this similar frustration, that he has an intersection in his district where a pedestrian was killed in 2022. He asked VDOT to do a traffic-signal warrant, which is a study to determine whether VDOT feels like it’s warranted to build a traffic signal there. It does, so he requested that it be put on the to-do list for VDOT. They have a highway safety initiative, and he got turned down because there just aren’t enough funds. And that’s a common thing we hear: “We know it needs to be done, but we don’t have the money.”
[Herndon’s mayor on downtown redevelopment and what the public doesn’t understand about her job]
Meanwhile, [Virginia is] spending millions if not billions of dollars on roadway expansions and other mega projects, while hundreds and hundreds of Virginians are getting killed and seriously injured because other projects aren’t being pursued. So, to us, it’s not a lack of funding. It’s a misallocation of priorities.
The Machine: From the middle to end of September, we saw a succession of deadly incidents of cars striking pedestrians and cyclists in the county. I know you all [at Fairfax FSS] just held your most recent chapter meeting. What have your discussions looked like?
French: Major [Scott] Colwell, the commander of the Fairfax County Police Department traffic division, came to our Monday meeting, and we had a 30-minute discussion where he talked us through the investigations of the five pedestrian crash fatalities that had occurred in the previous two weeks. You know, it’s difficult, because he can’t share too much information, and all the situations are so tragic, and of course it’s too late to help those people.
“I just don’t think as a culture we apply the correct level of responsibility to driving. You can do so much damage with your car, and yet I think it’s taken kind of lightly.”
We do try and learn from the crashes: Was the driver speeding? Was there alcohol involved? We look at the engineering aspects of the roadway. We hear a lot from the police department, “Well, the pedestrian wasn’t in a crosswalk.” And that may be correct, but where is the nearest crosswalk? It could be 3,000 feet away, and nobody’s going to walk that far to get across the street.
But one of the reasons we really are pushing this near-miss survey is that we’re trying to get transportation officials and the police department and our legislators in Richmond to be more proactive.1 So much that we see is reactive to fatalities.
The Machine: The latest Near-Miss Report came out right in the middle of that string of fatal incidents. What stood out to you most from the report, and what do you hope people take away from it?
French: We see a majority of reports are related to drivers failing to yield to pedestrians and crosswalks. I think there’s a basic lack of understanding about what a driver’s responsibility is with respect to someone in a crosswalk, and it’s a lot of concern about turning motions, like right turn on red [or] left turns on green and flashing yellows. Drivers are supposed to yield, but they’re often so focused on oncoming traffic that they’re not really looking where they’re supposed to.
And then we’re also just seeing repeated reportings: “This is still a problem. This is still a problem. This is still a problem.”
The Machine: Some of this, as you’re describing it, might call for infrastructure changes. But failures to yield and distracted driving sound more like driver education issues. What might be the solution there?
French: That’s hard to say. There definitely is a driver education issue there. I just don’t think as a culture we apply the correct level of responsibility to driving. You can do so much damage with your car, and yet I think it’s taken kind of lightly.
We do try and do some driver education. Trying to let people know about the extent to which their community is impacted by traffic violence is part of that. But it is hard to get through. There’s so many distractions as a driver now.
And I would say we also have some structural problems in terms of the way we prosecute these crashes. It’s extremely rare for someone who hits and kills a pedestrian to be even charged criminally. The case on Blake Lane, where the gentleman who hit and killed those girls got four years in prison, it’s an outlier.2 We’ve tried to advocate for a vulnerable road user bill, which would levy more serious charges against people who kill pedestrians, and it’s just not been successful so far.
The Machine: It strikes me that this must be deeply emotional work. I’m wondering what that’s like for you, to be doing this kind of advocacy.
French: It can be very emotional. I worry sometimes that [our culture gets] lost in the numbers and [forgets] that each of those numbers is a person, a family, a circle of people that have been impacted, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
The other part is that every time I hear about a pedestrian fatality in Fairfax County, you feel like you failed a little bit, right? You feel like you haven’t done enough. In the four or five years I’ve been doing this, I think I’ve learned to deal with that a little bit better, but that’s hard as an advocate, to feel like you could have done more, perhaps. But it also helps with your resolve.
The Machine: FCPD recently put out tips for drivers and then for pedestrians. Do you all [also] prioritize guidance in that way, of what pedestrians should do to keep themselves safe?
French: One thing we would say is while you might as a pedestrian feel like “I’m in the right here,” you know, the phrase is “You don’t want to be dead right.” I think you do have to understand that you are not the one with the power in the situation. You have to look out for No. 1, and you have to expect that a driver is not going to do the legal thing. I learned that over many years as a cyclist.
On one hand it makes me bristle a little bit when I hear people say, “Wear a safety vest and light yourself up like a Christmas tree” and all that kind of stuff, because I’m just trying to walk to the store or I’m riding my bike to work. Absolutely people need to do everything they can to protect themselves. But I do think ultimately drivers need to be responsible for their vehicles.
The Machine: It’s National Pedestrian Safety Month. What do you want that to mean for Fairfax County?
I would like for everyone to just reflect on their responsibilities as a driver, as a pedestrian and as a cyclist. The county has had a good message, a campaign called “Take a Moment.” The idea behind that is, as a driver, just slow down, whether that's literally your car speed or just [being] a little bit more patient in in all situations.
We all know that we behave differently behind the wheel of a car than ideally we would like ourselves to. I will admit to that myself. But you have so much capacity to do so much damage to other people that I think you really do need to calm yourself and slow down and give your full attention to the road. And for a pedestrian or a cyclist, you’re putting yourself at risk if you don’t do the same things.
So, my hope for the month is that people can take that moment to reflect and change their behavior somewhat, because ultimately, I think, that will do a tremendous amount of good.
Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets is hosting a screening of the documentary “The Street Project” on Friday, Nov. 8, at the Vienna Community Center. You can find more info about the event here.
FCPD on Monday started the fifth wave of its 2024 “Road Shark” campaign, a targeted escalation of its traffic-safety enforcement. The first four, it said, resulted in nearly 28,000 citations and warnings.
The Blake Lane crash, in which a driver killed two Oakton High teenagers and injured a third in June 2022, invigorated safe-streets advocacy in Fairfax, French said. It led him to get more deeply involved, too.