On July 26, 2001, 79-year-old Sid Bild was crossing State at Van Buren with his friend Marjorie Feren when he noticed that the pedestrian signal had started flashing. He remembers warning Feren, who was a few steps behind him, that the light was about to change. Then he felt a nudge and an intense pain in his right arm. He dropped to his knees before he could reach the curb. “My arm looked pretty mangled,” he says. “It was dripping blood and grossly torn.” When he realized he’d been clipped by a vehicle he turned to look for Feren. She was lying motionless on the street about 30 feet south. The driver eventually agreed to settle out of court with both Bild and Feren, but Feren suffered permanent neurological damage. She no longer knows Bild’s name.
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Bild, Feren, and Spears all happened to belong to Metro Seniors in Action, an advocacy group with 100 members ranging in age from their 50s to their 90s, and after the three were run down the group made pedestrian safety one of its top issues. “We tapped into a national problem,” says executive director Amanda Solon. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, a pedestrian gets hurt in a traffic accident every eight minutes. Old folks are the most at risk. According to the insurance industry, in 2004, the last year for which there are statistics, the death rate for pedestrians 70 and up was twice that for younger pedestrians. Metro Seniors tried to find out how many accidents in Chicago involve pedestrians, but the police statistics were outdated, and they couldn’t find anyone else who kept such numbers.
Metro Seniors gathered info on how to improve safety, but they had a hard time figuring out which city official to ask to make changes. That’s not surprising, since three city departments–Transportation, Streets and Sanitation, and the Office of Emergency Management and Communications–control different components of intersections: the lights, street signs, pavement markings, signal timing, pedestrian signals. And each department has subdivisions–the Traffic Management Authority, the Bureau of Electricity–that control pieces of those components.
Metro Seniors hopes the city will start assessing all of the city’s intersections. “It should not be the responsibility of not-for-profit groups to rally the community to get the changes that our elected officials and city-appointed employees are supposed to be taking care of,” says McGary. “It is their responsibility.”
