Nicole Raz
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON (WMAL) — Two recent car crashes in the Bethesda area–one with a bicyclist and one with a pedestrian–are leading community leaders to take to the streets Tuesday with the goal of sending a clear message to everybody on the road: Pay attention.
Tuesday’s “Day of Action” will begin at the Little Falls Library (5501 Massachusetts Avenue in Bethesda) and continue at the corner of River Road and Springfield Drive, where a 95-year old woman was struck by a car Oct.22.
“We’ve had a couple of deaths recently that have really shook our community and just created a context in which all of us felt like we needed to do something positive and constructive, so we’re going to be standing outside to call attention to this issue,” says Montgomery County Councilmember Roger Berliner, who chairs the County Council’s Transportation, Infrastructure, Energy and Environment Committee.
He says it’s smart phones that have made everybody on the road more careless.
“People now–and the world in which we all live in–feel like every moment that they are connected and every moment that they don’t respond to something is a moment lost,” Berliner told WMAL. “There is a lot of distraction, and if you put your head down for a moment on our roads ugly things can happen, and ugly things have happened.”
Pedestrians are also at fault with “distracted walking,” but the burden is on drivers since they are the ones with the power to kill, he said.
“People need to slow down and they need to stop being distracted when they drive.”
Berliner says he’s pushing the state to narrow major roads and use brighter crosswalk paint.
Copyright 2015 WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Councilmember Roger Berliner)
