Monitoring the Monitors: Maryland Man Scrutinizes State DOT Crash Reports
The State of Maryland’s Vision Zero program requires the DOT to do an infrastructure review of every crash that causes the death of a pedestrian or cyclist on state highways. One Maryland resident is skeptical of the State Highway Administration checking their own work—so he’s running his own studies, and often coming to different conclusions.
When Maryland legislators passed their version of the Vision Zero Implementation Act in 2022, they realized they had to make changes to the traditional way the state DOT analyzed and responded to fatal crashes. Rather than merely assess blame to one or more of the participants, the legislation called for an infrastructure review of every crash that causes the death of a pedestrian or cyclist on state highways.
The state set up a website and interactive map. Each crash comes with a detailed incident report, including a checklist of possible contributing factors. There’s even a StreetView link to see the crash site at ground level. The Zero Deaths Maryland program says “fatal crashes are preventable” and “evaluations following pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities are displayed for the purpose of communicating MDOT’s efforts to reduce fatal crashes.”
The state set up a website and interactive map. Each crash comes with a detailed incident report, including a checklist of possible contributing factors. There’s even a StreetView link to see the crash site at ground level. The Zero Deaths Maryland program says “fatal crashes are preventable” and “evaluations following pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities are displayed for the purpose of communicating MDOT’s efforts to reduce fatal crashes.”
There’s just one apparent issue. Almost all the crashes show this conclusion:
Category: No Deficiency
Recommendation: No Deficiencies Found
Of the handful of reports that generate a recommendation, the course of action falls short of redesigning or reconfiguring dangerous roads and intersections. Examples include “Enforcement: Speeding,” “Highway Maintenance: Signing and Pavement Markings,” and “Education: Various.”
Enter Henry Cook, a member of the Strong Towns Baltimore Local Conversation. Declaring, “I am naturally suspicious of allowing the State Highway Administration to check their own work and I am deeply concerned about only examining cases after someone has died,” Cook started his own website, Maryland’s Lethal Highways, to monitor the state’s monitoring.
After evaluating the official reports, Cook does additional research and often comes to differing conclusions. The official report for a 2023 fatal pedestrian crash in Waldorf, Maryland, concludes that an intoxicated pedestrian was struck by a vehicle in the roadway, and the surrounding crash site has no “deficiency.” Cook’s analysis finds that “this stretch of suburban highway has no sidewalk. It was dark (per news reporting of crash time) and there are no street lights or other sources of light present (per the infrastructure report). So any pedestrian has to weigh the risk of stumbling and injuring themselves on the dark, uneven grass against the risk of being hit while walking in the roadway.”
He adds that, although the pedestrian was intoxicated, “this information has nothing to do with an infrastructure review,” and notes the state has no laws against pedestrians having the victim’s blood alcohol level.
Cook’s efforts align with the methodology of the Strong Towns Crash Analysis Studio, which launched in 2022 with the goal of bringing the best practices of a medical inquest to crash investigations. Current methods of crash investigations exist mainly to ascribe blame, and too often ignore design and infrastructure factors that could actually be fixed. Cook’s analysis of the crash investigation’s focus on an intoxicated pedestrian is similar to a previous Crash Analysis Studio session on a separate Maryland crash.
Cook’s most recent report documents a crash close to home that he was motivated to write the day it happened. Two runners were struck by a truck on a road he commonly cycles on, and he describes the hazards in the landscape, including wide lanes that contribute to high driving speeds and an inadequate crosswalk.
Like many Strong Towns members and allies across North America, Cook writes that he’s doing this extra work because he cares. “I’m just a private citizen who cares about making my state safer for all road users. I’m an avid cyclist, an occasional runner and the father of 3 children who I hope are one day able to live less car-dependent lifestyles than their parents.”
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Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.