If you nearly get swiped by a turning car while walking across a street in Fairfax County, there’s a good chance that you or another community member has had a similar experience in that same spot before, newly released survey data indicates.
The inaugural “Near Miss/Dangerous Location” summary report from the Fairfax chapter of Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets (NOVA FSS) found that 90% of the incidents recorded by pedestrians and cyclists since 2020 were recurring events — a higher rate than in Arlington (82%) or Alexandria (74%), the two other jurisdictions analyzed by the volunteer-run nonprofit.
The amount of incidents flagged as recurring suggests a feeling of “constant danger” in locations where people have reported safety concerns, Mike Doyle, a founding member of NOVA FSS, told FFXnow.
“What we’re finding is that there are pockets of real concern about dangerous locations, and they don’t [always] correlate, thank god, with the TREDS data where people have been killed or seriously injured,” Doyle said, referring to the crash data collected by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. “But what we’re starting to detect is that if things don’t change, it’s just a matter of time before a crash happens and somebody gets seriously injured or killed.”
Published this week, the study analyzes incidents reported to NOVA FSS through June 24 via its Near Miss and Dangerous Locations Survey. The pedestrian safety advocacy group began compiling data with the help of some Virginia Tech graduate students in 2020 before launching the online survey and dashboard in June 2021.
So far, the Fairfax chapter has gotten a total of 455 reports across over 100 different streets of a pedestrian or bicyclist almost getting hit by a driver, including 151 incidents since Jan. 1, 2023.
In 58% of cases, the person making the report said the driver failed to yield, and 45% of cases allegedly involved speeding, according to NOVA FSS. Those issues were also seen in Arlington and Alexandria, with failure to yield especially emerging as a risk in Arlington.
The streets with the most near-miss incidents
The Fairfax County study, which included incidents in the cities of Fairfax and Falls Church as well as the towns of Vienna and Herndon, identified Beulah Road, Fairfax County Parkway and Blake Lane as the “most problematic roads” based on the number of reported incidents, NOVA FSS said in a press release.
On Beulah Road, the Abbotsford Drive and Talisman Drive intersections in Wolf Trap particularly stood out. At Abbotsford, people reported drivers “frequently” failing to yield for pedestrians in the crosswalks, while at Talisman, at least one person reported parents often blocking a crosswalk when dropping their kids off at nearby Wolftrap Elementary School.
The 17 near-miss reports on Fairfax County Parkway were clustered around Lake Newport Road in Reston. Red light violations were cited as the “primary concern,” though drivers failing to yield when turning right also came up as an issue.
Blake Lane was also the subject of 17 reports, but they’re more spread out along the corridor, stretching from Borge Street to Five Oaks Road — the intersection where two Oakton High School students were killed in 2022.
“Speeding [and] failure to yield were probably the two primary [concerns] in Blake Lane,” Doyle said.
Fairfax County and state transportation officials completed a road safety audit of Blake Lane this spring that recommended improvements, including a redesign of the Sutton Road intersection and new signal timing at Five Oaks that would give pedestrians a head start.
More awareness needed in some communities
Doyle noted that the near-miss report, which breaks down incidents by magisterial district, shouldn’t be seen as comprehensive, since the data is inevitably skewed by how aware different communities are of his organization’s reporting survey.
NOVA FSS has gotten “pretty good representation” from the Hunter Mill District, which includes Reston and some of the Herndon and Tysons areas, he says. However, making inroads in the Franconia and Mount Vernon Districts — specifically along the Richmond Highway corridor, where there was a fatal pedestrian crash just yesterday (Thursday) — has proven more challenging.
“We have deficiencies in our ability to be able to communicate in many of those communities, and we’re trying to rectify that,” Doyle said, citing the Culmore and Bailey’s Crossroads section of Route 7 (Leesburg Pike) as another underrepresented area.
To boost its outreach efforts in those communities, NOVA FSS is hopeful that it can get a grant from the DMV that will enable to contract multilingual language services and work with people who are already well-connected to local residents.
The funds would also be used to further develop educational programs that the nonprofit has introduced to middle schools in Arlington and Alexandria. It plans to expand to Fairfax County and add a high school-level program.
“That’s an aspiration, and we hope to be able to get into Fairfax, at least in middle schools, if not a couple of the high schools,” Doyle said.
The nonprofit has already qualified for the grant and is now filing paperwork to obtain it. It should know whether it’s successful by mid-October, according to Doyle.
Compiled by graduate students pursuing degrees in data science, the near-miss reports are intended to inform not just the public, but also local police, transportation officials and lawmakers, as NOVA FSS advocates for safety improvements like speed cameras and lower speed limits.
Going forward, the organization hopes to release reports summarizing the data it’s collected on a regular basis, possibly every year or even every six months.
“We want to make sure that the transportation [departments] and the police see these comments, and then they can decide how they’re going to allocate their resources,” Doyle said. “It will give them a new sense of what people are saying that are literally…walking or biking on our streets.”
