Over a year ago I wrote about how Northampton’s approach to road safety results in multiple people being injured (or killed) while we await fixes to known problems. Sadly, that piece was prescient. On Dec. 14, 2023, a year and one week after I was hit in a crosswalk on West Street, another pedestrian, Grace, was hit in the next crosswalk up the road. This occurred after the release of the traffic study Smith College funded, which included recommendations for pedestrian safety beacons to be installed at those crossings on West Street.

As my August 2023 article outlined, safety beacons are an obvious partial solution to the problems on West Street, which is why I started advocating for their installation in January 2023. Smith officials tell me they did ask the city of Northampton to let them pay for safety beacons to be installed there before the traffic study was complete, but Northampton refused. Of note, that traffic study points out that safety beacons are a relatively low-impact solution that can be installed before other, more involved traffic calming measures. Once again Northampton’s refusal to take quicker action — even when it is funded, in this case by Smith — may have contributed to another serious injury. As I write this in September 2024, those beacons are finally being installed, after one serious accident and multiple near misses in the past year.

I understand that Northampton — like Amherst, where I live — is struggling to fund its public schools adequately, to keep its roads in good shape, and to provide all the other services we expect from local government. I also understand that some residents don’t think it is fair for Smith to protect its own students and employees while other problems go unaddressed. Regardless, it shocks me that the city continues to hew to a slow process that, as my previous article outlined, does not make use of widely available data and studies from other entities, including some local ones, to enact simple, possibly lifesaving measures in time to prevent further injuries and death. For example the town of Amherst recently installed similar beacons at many of their crosswalks, without a comprehensive traffic study, which proves yet again that faster action is possible.

When I made this point about the human cost of Northampton’s process at a City Council meeting last December after Grace’s accident, Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra is cited in a local news article as responding that she understands processes like this are never as fast as people may like. Things that are never as fast as I may like include my coffee order when the café is busy, or the RMV line. Never as fast as I may like is not adequate to describe how Grace feels about the fact that, over a year after one pedestrian was hit, she was hit in almost exactly the same location, perhaps in part because the city refused to allow Smith to fund the timely installation of any improvements to that dangerous area. Grace’s accident and her recovery are her own story to tell, but when I read those callous words, all I can think about is visiting her at Baystate in the days after her accident, when she was unrecognizable from her injuries, unable to walk, and unable to go home for the holidays to her family. There are costs to inaction, and they are devastating.

Of course it is possible that safety beacons would not have alerted the driver who hit Grace. It is also true that Smith College bears some responsibility for being, as far as I can tell, the only college or university in the region that didn’t get these kinds of beacons installed on the crosswalks near their campus years ago. Safety beacons will not completely solve the problem on West Street, where (as the traffic study notes) cars routinely travel well over the 25 mph limit. The more involved traffic calming measures the study recommends would likely do more to make the West Street corridor safer for all road users, but the ability of pedestrians to activate a strobe light before crossing will be a good start.

Finally, if you are reading this and thinking, “Well, pedestrians need to be more careful,” I ask you to think about what it is like to be a driver who hits a pedestrian. Don’t take my word for it — listen to the driver who hit me, who as luck would have it in a small community is someone I know: “The feeling of helplessness while waiting for medical assistance is life-altering. I now compulsively flinch at crosswalks while driving, double checking for people at wide open crosswalks and triple and quadruple checking at dangerous ones. At the time of the accident, a safety beacon would have been a godsend. After the accident cars continued to race by in the other lane even though a good Samaritan and I were standing in the middle of the road waving our arms to get them to slow down. But it was dark and foggy and drivers probably didn’t see us until they were almost upon us. A safety beacon would have helped then, too.”

Please tell your elected and appointed officials in Northampton that unnecessary delays before implementing simple safety solutions cost lives, and ask them to tell you how they will do better in the future.

Kate Queeney lives in Amherst.