I got this through the e-mail from my sister:
Hey,
This is not to make light of your accident, but I thought you might find this New York Times' story amusing.
Sophia
Lesson for Newark’s Streets: Look Left, Right, Left Again
By KAREEM FAHIM
Published: April 5, 2007
NEWARK, April 2 — In this city where traffic signals are sometimes mockingly called suggestions, scores of children, walking or playing, have been hit by cars over the past few years, many of them within sight of their homes.
Kyle Cross, 13, was struck by a car as he crossed West Kinney Street early one morning last June, sending him to the asphalt with a concussion. Kyle fared better than his sister Maxine, 18, who was hit two years earlier, on Springfield Avenue.
“It knocked her in the air and broke her arm,” said their grandmother Elena Whitaker.
As Dr. David Livingston, the chief of trauma at University Hospital, put it: “We were admitting kids left and right.”
Compared with some children hit by cars, the Crosses were lucky: From 2000 to 2005, the hospital recorded 12 fatalities out of the hundreds of young pedestrians it admitted who were seriously injured by cars.
In 2005, 6,723 pedestrians in New Jersey were struck by cars, a year in which the state ranked eighth in the nation in pedestrian fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency. That year, 644 of the state’s pedestrian injuries, nearly 10 percent, took place in Newark, according to the state’s Department of Transportation.
But Dr. Livingston said the stream of pedestrians injured by cars energized a local coalition including representatives from the mayor’s office, the Police Department and the schools. “We thought, what could we do to try and fix it?” he said.
Part of the answer was simple: teach Newark’s children to look both ways. Dr. Livingston developed the curriculum based on a model created at the University of Miami. On Friday, in the auditorium of the New Horizons Community Charter School here, he sat in the bleachers and watched the results.
A first-grade class lined up by a make-believe curb made of blue paper tape. A woman holding pictures of a sport utility vehicle hurtled —ambled, rather — down a “road” in front the children. When the menace had passed, the students checked for oncoming “traffic,” and when it was safe, skipped across the road. There Sharon Clancy, a health educator from University Hospital, waited for them with a sticker and a wide smile.
“We love you,” Ms. Clancy told the assembly. “So we never want to see you at the hospital.”
Dr. Livingston and his colleagues who developed the program hope to introduce it to schools throughout Newark and surrounding towns. There is a classroom component, in which children are encouraged to use drawing, spelling and reading to learn about walking safely. And the Miami curriculum was modified in one important way: snow was added to the lesson.
“We believe that children, especially in elementary school ages, don’t understand how big a car is and what it can do to them,” said Dr.Livingston. “Kids have to walk to school, they take public transport. They’re out in the street. That’s real.”
Leigh Ann Von Hagen, a project director at the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University, said that “people think it’s easy to walk around urban areas,” but that streets and sidewalks are often in disrepair.
In cities like Newark, pedestrians negotiating six-lane thoroughfares are vulnerable to cars, especially where crosswalks are faded or nonexistent. Speeding cars are common, pedestrian safety advocates say, and stolen cars move even faster.
Sometimes, there is no telling where the danger will come from. Justin Walcott, a soccer-loving 10-year-old, was being robbed, his mother said, when a Jeep plowed into him and at least two other people on a sidewalk in Irvington in June 2006. Justin lost his right leg just below the knee.
Along with University Hospital’s school program, a $74 million statewide project administered by the Department of Transportation to re-engineer intersections is getting its start in Newark’s downtown and in the Ironbound district.
In addition, the Essex County prosecutor’s office is expecting a state grant that would help send police officers into Newark’s streets to enforce the law against drivers who do not yield to pedestrians.
At New Horizons, Ms. Clancy asked the children questions. “How many of you have known someone who was hit by a car?”
Almost everyone raised their hands.
She also took questions. “No, never run into the street after the ball,” she said. “Let the ball hit the car.”
Had they seen anyone run through a stop sign before?
“My mom did,” a girl in the front row said. “Because she had to go to work.”
