“Have the heart-rending stories of pedestrian-vehicle deaths and sobering stats finally registered with policymakers?” columnist Bob Lewis asks.
by Bob Lewis –
The headlines and the statistics underlying them tell the horrifying story. Richmond has the grim distinction of having more motor vehicle crashes involving pedestrians per capita than any locality in the commonwealth during the decade of the 2020s, with an especially grisly 2025.
One particularly sobering, headline-grabbing moment for the state’s capital city came after a motor vehicle hit and mortally wounded Bill Martin, the director of the city’s venerated Valentine Museum. He was crossing Broad Street in a marked pedestrian walkway in the shadow of Capitol Square and Richmond’s City Hall on Dec. 27. To date, no charges have been filed.
Martin’s high-profile death was the coup de grâce to a bloody 2025 when 13 pedestrians perished on Richmond roads. That was the most of any Virginia locality — one more than Fairfax County with a population five times that of Richmond — and accounted for a tenth of the commonwealth’s 136 pedestrian fatalities last year.
The carnage continues, too.
On Jan. 3, Kristin Tolbert, 26, was struck down by a hit-and-run driver just across the James River from downtown Richmond as she walked her dog on Semmes Avenue. Police on Feb. 17 arrested a 35-year-old man on felony charges in her death
Last week, Hope Cartwright, 23, died of injuries she suffered when a pickup truck struck her in a crosswalk at the intersection of Second and Cary streets in downtown Richmond on the evening of Feb. 16.
She was steps from the offices of Virginia Living magazine where she was an editor. Police said the driver left before officers arrived. According to news reports, officers identified the vehicle from security camera data and arrested its owner shortly afterward on a felony hit-and-run charge.
Since the start of 2020, there have been 810 incidents in which cars struck one or more pedestrians on Richmond streets, according to data from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s a state-high 35 vehicular incursions on pedestrians per 10,000 residents. Fifty-three of those resulted in deaths (2.3 per 10K), and 210 caused serious injuries (9 per 10K).
Richmond and just two other localities — the cities of Petersburg and Roanoke — cracked the top 10% in all three categories during that six-year period. Among the 19 Virginia localities with 100,000 or more residents in a 2024 population estimate, however, Richmond alone achieved the pedestrian mayhem trifecta.
Those numbers and the misery underlying them accrue over time, one incident at a time. We learn of many in snippets a minute or two long on local television newscasts (if it bleeds, it leads!). Those stories are particularly hard to hear when they involve children or respected community leaders because they put faces on the statistics. They make it easier to comprehend the gruesome toll a ton of fast-moving steel, glass and plastic takes on fragile flesh and bone.
Richmond’s disproportionate tally of pedestrian deaths makes it a conspicuous outlier. Virginia as a whole is not among the nation’s worst statistically, according to a 50-state study in 2024 by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Governors Highway Safety Association.
Ranked proportionally by population, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina were the five worst, respectively, each far above the national average of 9.7 deaths per 100,ooo population from 2020 through 2024. Virginia, with 7.6 pedestrian fatalities per 100K during that span, was a respectable 33rd. Minnesota, with the fewest at 4.2 per 100K, was 51st.
Have the heart-rending stories and sobering stats finally registered with policymakers? Richmond municipal and state elected representatives seem to be taking the pedestrian bloodshed seriously.
A handful of bills are churning their way through the General Assembly’s sausage grinder this session (including Senate Bill 84, House Bill 819, HB 1220, HB 1330). To varying degrees, they use automated speed and stop sign monitoring technology plus public engagement to persuade drivers to slow down, pay attention to roads and intersections and give pedestrians a brake. Some also promote better driver and pedestrian awareness and safer habits for people walking on or near roads.
In Richmond, Mayor Danny Avula announced a handful of roadway safety measures including “Vision Zero,” a proposed long-term plan to slash traffic deaths and serious injuries in the capital city.
The Vision Zero Network is a campaign founded in Sweden in the 1990s that strives for eliminating traffic fatalities. It seeks to shift responsibility for safety from individual users to the entire system — including engineers, policymakers and community influencers — with an emphasis on safe speeds, smart and equitable street design, public accountability and decisions informed by data.
But this isn’t Richmond’s first dalliance with Vision Zero.
According to a 2023 article in “Transportation Letters: The International Journal of Transportation Research” by University of New Mexico civil engineering professor Nicholas Ferenchak, Richmond was among 68 U.S. cities since 2012 that took the Vision Zero pledge. Only two — New York and Chicago — showed statistically significant reductions in fatal collisions, Ferenchak found. Richmond’s overall traffic fatality count increased in 2017, the year after adopting the Vision Zero pledge; its pedestrian mortality count increased by 87%.
Changing the way streets are designed and monitored, the way motorists and pedestrians interact, and the priority that governments place on reducing traffic-related serious injuries and deaths is hard, painstaking work. Mike Doyle of Alexandria learned that after a vehicle struck him as he crossed a street in the city’s Old Town on his walk home from work on Dec. 7, 2016, and changed his life.
The proprietor of an investment banking firm, Doyle suffered life-threatening and debilitating head injuries in the crash. He was in a crosswalk at a four-way stop sign intersection a couple of blocks from his house when it happened.
“I was more than halfway through when somebody yelled ‘Look out!’ For a millisecond, I turned and I saw the black hood of what turned out to be a SUV. I threw up my hands, but I knew I was in deep trouble,” Doyle said in an interview last week. “He hit me with such force that my forehead put a dent in the hood of his car.”
During his long recovery, Doyle channeled his anger into founding Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets, a nonprofit dedicated to ending pedestrian and cyclist injuries. And what began as an informal collection of Doyle’s friends and neighbors now has about 1,600 members in chapters in Fairfax and Arlington counties and the city of Alexandria. He hopes to establish a badly needed one in the Richmond region.
For now, however, he’s in frequent contact with key state lawmakers, pushing them for the strongest versions of the bills noted earlier, all of which comfortably passed in their chambers of origination by last week’s deadline and now await action in the other chamber. If they’re successful there, they advance to Gov. Abigail Spanberger for her signature, amendments or veto.
I’ve been around politics and government too long to predict the ultimate outcome of those bills or whether the actions Richmond is contemplating (again) are anything more than contemporaneous lip service.
Time will tell.
Time and, hopefully, the witness of activists like Mike Doyle speaking for the silenced voices of Bill Martin, Hope Cartwright and others we’ve lost just trying to cross the road.