I have heard some variation on that sentence more times than I can count at public engagement sessions, County Board hearings and civic association meetings: “Cars just come speeding around that corner.” They shouldn’t be able to.
A street designed for pedestrian safety uses a solid, dependable and simple technique to force cars to slow down, the “corner radius.” Arlington is building streets using corner radii that are much larger than our policies say they should and they don’t seem to be taking into account a key concept: “effective” versus “actual” curb radii. The end result: drivers can whip around a corner at a high rate of speed making them much more likely to kill or severely injure a pedestrian in the crosswalk.