The Sensitivity That Killed Frank Radaker
Our first Crash Analysis Studio session is now complete. We are pioneering something new, creating a model for others wanting to change the way their streets are designed, constructed, and maintained. I knew I would learn things through this process, but there is one thing I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t realize it would make me so sad.
I knew the crash itself was a tragedy and that discussing it would be difficult. We are all overwhelmed with fatality statistics—42,000 dead last year, over 115 each day—but reading the police report and trying to reconstruct what happened in a particular situation really personalized things for me.
A cyclist waits at the intersection of a major trail and a standard stroad. The light turns and the cyclist proceeds. A vehicle runs through the red light, striking the cyclist. That cyclist dies as a result. The facts are very simple, clear, and tragically mundane.
The cyclist, Frank Radaker, was a man who, in my estimation, made a small but understandable misjudgment while riding a bike on his commute. He died as a result. I spent a lot of time pondering the connection between those two simple facts. How many times have I watched the light and not the traffic? How many times have I assumed all the fallible humans would do what the signals told them to do? Most misjudgments have no consequence, but others, quite randomly, cost the ultimate price.
I don’t know the name of the driver; it wasn’t important to the analysis and I didn’t seek to learn it. They are the easy villain in the auto–bike mismatch and comments made in various places sought to affirm that sentiment. I’ve now studied this intersection intently. I would not cast the first stone, and certainly not in their direction.
The speed limit entering this intersection is 35 mph. That is 51.3 feet per second. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) has determined that the perception and reaction time for a driver is 2.5 seconds. That means a driver, fully compliant with the law, is going to travel 128 feet when the signal turns from green to yellow before even beginning to apply the brake.
At that point, it is going to take another 100 to 120 feet to come to a complete stop. That’s close to 250 feet of necessary stopping distance if all the humans in the system are operating as they are theoretically imagined to (a reckless assumption). Here’s an image from Google Earth showing the intersection from 250 feet away. Note how tiny and inconspicuous these signals are at that distance. They are barely visible, and that assumes perfect perception and reaction (no margin for error).
Quite a bit was made in the session about the inadequacy of these signals.They have a we’ll-get-back-to-it-later kind of feel to them. No mast arm. No backing. No high-intensity bulbs. No advance warning flasher. It’s just very slapdash. They seem like they were temporarily strewn across the stroad of East 86th Street, likely at the point someone determined the volume of traffic and the intensity of development had reached a combined level where something had to be done.
I’m assuming that there actually was intent to get back to it at some point. Lord, please let that be the case. If this was the permanent plan, the people responsible for giving such little thought to the consequences of placing a major trail crossing on such a stroad should be brought in front of a tribunal. I can’t believe this is anything more than a temporary, rushed solution.
Even so, it is worth noting where the sensitivities in Indianapolis are with respect to this corridor. East 86th Street is a high-speed, high-volume stroad accessed through a random collection of approaches, with a major trail crossing near one intersection. All of those things should freak out the people responsible for this and prompt them to slow traffic, limit access connections, or get really serious about intersection design. Yet, they don’t seem to be sensitive to any of those things.
They do seem to be very sensitive to the notion that trail users might try to cross somewhere other than the (slapdash) signalized intersection. Here’s another Google image, this one showing the point where the Monon trail reaches East 86th Street. Note the time and effort they have expended putting up fences and plantings to discourage people from crossing here. I see this and I note what they are sensitive to: people interfering with the traffic stream by crossing where they’re not supposed to.
The Crash Analysis Studio approach is designed to change what we are sensitive to. I looked at the police report for the collision that killed Frank Radaker. I read the news report and local dialogue about this fatal crash. It was very easy to blame the driver for recklessly running a red light, then blame the deceased for being too eager to cross. We clean up the mess, wring our hands for a couple of days, then go on our way. It’s way too easy. We are desensitized to these kinds of incidents.
It’s also too easy to do the opposite, to be over-sensitized. A trap many activists get caught in is to demand the ultimate fix in the wake of every tragedy. In this case, that supposed fix is a multi-million dollar tunnel under the stroad. Would that be nice? Maybe. Is that going to happen? Not likely, despite Indianapolis spending tens of millions of dollars each year on transportation projects. In our report on this crash, we do not recommend a tunnel. Insisting on it actually blinds us to the many prudent and more immediate options available to us.
Ultimately, it all comes back to transportation spending. For cities like Indianapolis, it is easier to get $37 million for transportation at the former GM stamping plant, or $28 million to add more lanes to the South County Line Road, or even $5 million for the Michigan Street Road Diet project, than it is to mobilize the comparable pittance of resources necessary to eliminate the kind of crashes that killed Frank Radaker.
That’s obvious, but why is it so? Because the big project is the thing politicians ran for office to do, the thing professionals went to college and rose in the bureaucracy to work on, the thing federal and state governments created multiple funding streams for, the kind of thing that comes with ribbon cuttings, newspaper articles, and celebrations. It is hard for an enterprise like the city of Indianapolis to not be sensitive to that kind of thing.
Yet, as we all know, and as the Crash Analysis Studio for this intersection in Indianapolis demonstrated, it is the little things that matter. We can fix these signal lights with changes of bulbs and some inexpensive back plating. We can use paint and cones, and ultimately modest changes to the curbs, to slow the speed of traffic through this intersection. We can make drivers more aware of the trail crossing with signs and flashers. These are the small things we can do right now. They will have a huge impact.
We need to become more sensitive to the value of basic maintenance. We need to become more sensitive to how we squeeze value out of what we’ve already built. And we need to be more sensitive to where people are struggling to use the system as it has been delivered to them.
We have to change what we are sensitive to. Once we do, all kinds of amazing things become possible, including saving people’s lives.
You can read the full report on the Indianapolis session on the Strong Towns Action Lab. If you would like to sponsor a session of the Crash Analysis Studio, please reach out to Chris Allen, our Sponsorships and Partnerships Coordinator, at chris@strongtowns.org. Later this spring, we will be rolling out a training program for people interested in starting their own studio. In the meantime, you can nominate a crash in your community for a team to review.
Charles Marohn—known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues—is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and civil engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.
Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America.