This story, which was originally published in the March/April 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine was updated March 28 at 12:20 p.m. to correct Maryland Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) role in the Old Georgetown Road project.
Patricia Bibes still has panic attacks every time she hears an ambulance siren or sees a white “typical contractor minivan,” she says, “and they are everywhere.”
It’s been almost two years since Bibes’ 18-year-old son, Enzo Alvarenga, was killed on Old Georgetown Road in North Bethesda—mere blocks from her home—but her emotions remain raw, as if the tragedy happened yesterday.
In June 2022, Alvarenga, a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, was riding his bicycle about 4 p.m.—on what was then a narrow walking path alongside the busy roadway—when he swerved to avoid some tree branches extending across the sidewalk. He lost his balance and fell into oncoming traffic. He was struck almost immediately by a commercial minivan and was declared dead at the scene, according to news reports.
Early the next morning, state maintenance crews trimmed back the branches that Alvarenga had tried to avoid the day before, Bibes says. And within weeks, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) picked up the pace on an extensive and controversial bike lane project that has since narrowed and removed a car lane in each direction and added almost two miles of dedicated bike lanes along the busy roadway.
A few years earlier, the MDOT reduced the speed limit on Old Georgetown Road and began the first phase of changes after another local teenage bicyclist was killed not far from where Alvarenga was struck.
“If there had been bike lanes [then], Enzo [and the other boy] would be alive,” Bibes says.
Still, the bike-lane project created so much outcry that Bibes says she deactivated her local Nextdoor social media account shortly after the lanes were added because reading all the online complaints was too upsetting. Even today, a petition on Change.org to remove the bike lanes has more than 9,200 signatures.
North Bethesda resident Hope Page, who added her name to the petition last summer, says the bike lanes “are a death waiting to happen.”
Page volunteers at a dog shelter in the northern part of the county that she reaches by driving north on Old Georgetown Road and turning right onto Interstate 270. She says she has yet to see a bicyclist use the bike lane, but if cyclists were to use them, they’d likely get hit by motorists turning onto I-270 or I-495 because there is no stop sign for either the bicyclists or the drivers. “Very bad design,” she says.
Old Georgetown Road is one of many thoroughfares that county leaders, activists and residents have focused on in the name of traffic safety over the past several years. In many parts of the county, new bike lanes, reduced speed limits, and “road diets”—in which driving lanes are narrowed to encourage motorists to slow down—have received cheers from safety advocates, environmentalists and the biking community; and criticism from nearby residents dismayed by the addition of flex posts and blocked-off roadways where travel lanes and street parking used to be, and what they call frustratingly low speed limits, traffic backlogs, and ill-conceived design.
Yet despite the millions of dollars being spent to help make roads safer, the number of traffic deaths in the county in 2023 was about 33% higher than in 2017, according to Zero Deaths Maryland (ZDM), a database that tracks road safety throughout the state. The county implemented its sweeping Vision Zero initiative in 2017 with the goal of eliminating all roadway-related fatalities and serious injuries by 2030.
Wade Holland, the county’s Vision Zero coordinator since 2020, admits that part of the problem in addressing road safety across the county is that “you basically see a complete inverse relationship [in which] the communities with the least amount of traffic crashes [produce] the most [requests for attention].”
“That’s where that starts to build into inequity,” Holland says, adding that the county has begun to prioritize roads that are the most dangerous statistically and not just “where we’re hearing the most complaints.”
According to ZDM, not only were there more traffic deaths overall in 2023 than in 2017, but also more pedestrians and bicyclists who died after being struck by vehicles. In 2023, 15 pedestrians and one bicyclist were killed by motorists, compared with 14 pedestrians and no bicyclists killed in 2017.
Included in the 2023 figures: a 70-year-old Latin American woman who was struck by two vehicles while trying to cross Veirs Mill Road in Rockville on Dec. 26 with groceries she’d just bought across the street, says District 6 Councilmember Natali Fani-González. Her district borders the intersection where the fatality occurred.
“We are moving the needle, but not fast enough,” says Fani-González, whose district also includes portions of University Boulevard and Georgia Avenue that are part of the High Injury Network (HIN), where many of Montgomery County’s most serious and fatal crashes tend to occur.
According to the Vision Zero fiscal 2023 annual report, which covers the period from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, the network represents only 3% of the county’s non-interstate roadways, but 41% of its most serious and fatal crashes. Vehicle speed as well as distracted and aggressive driving are blamed for most road fatalities, safety advocates say.
The intersection of Georgia Avenue and University Boulevard, in Wheaton, is “one of the most dangerous stretches…[in the] nation…for pedestrians,” says Jose Ortiz, Fani-González’s director of community engagement, adding that it is “producing around 3.1 deaths a year, repeatedly.”
“It’s heavily populated by Latinos,” Ortiz says. Most of them are immigrants who don’t speak English or have the time or resources “to organize themselves and fight for [safer roads] in a more aggressive way,” he says.
A drive north on Georgia Avenue, from 16th Street in Silver Spring, past University Boulevard, and into Aspen Hill, reveals some of the safety issues that exist. Without enough crosswalks along vast stretches of the roadway, those who rely on public transportation and live just off the main drag or in nearby garden apartments must walk as far as a quarter-mile or more out of their way to cross Georgia Avenue to get to their bus stop or nearest grocery store via demarcated crosswalks.
More often, pedestrians and bicyclists opt to cross the six-lane thoroughfare when the roadway looks clear. But with cars traveling much faster than the newly posted 25 and 35 mph speed limits (down from 45 mph in some stretches), some pedestrians and bikers don’t make it across safely.
In February 2023, Ruth Nohemy Bermudez Chavez, 22, was fatally struck crossing Georgia Avenue in Aspen Hill while carrying a bag of groceries that she’d purchased at a store on the other side of the six-lane road, Ortiz says. She wasn’t in a crosswalk, he adds; the nearest one was a quarter-mile away.
Four months earlier, 19-year-old William Villavicencio was also killed along the busy thoroughfare. He was struck by a hit-and-run driver as he attempted to cross the road on his bicycle. He’d exited a bus with his girlfriend about 11 p.m. She made it safely across Georgia Avenue by foot. He tried to follow her moments later, after fetching his bike from the bus, but was hit before getting across, according to his mother, Sandra Ort, who was at the scene just after the ambulances arrived.
The vehicle that struck Villavicencio still has not been identified, nor has the driver, according to Montgomery County police. Investigators say they believe the vehicle that hit him was a 2003-2007 dark red Honda Accord that lost its right sideview mirror in the collision.
As in Chavez’s case, Villavicencio and his girlfriend didn’t cross at a crosswalk. The nearest one was a block from the bus stop in the wrong direction from where they were heading, says Villavicencio’s half brother, Jonathan Rivas. It’s not always practical, Rivas says, “to go in a complete opposite direction just to come back down to go where…you need to go.”
In 2021, a 63-year-old Aspen Hill woman was struck and killed on Georgia Avenue, blocks from where her husband was hit and killed five years earlier, according to news reports.
Walter Marks, who lives with his wife in a small one-story house on Georgia Avenue, in Silver Spring, says he sees cars speeding along the road all day long. There aren’t enough speed cameras to serve as a deterrent, he says, and the fines are too low to prevent drivers from speeding.
“Somebody’s got to…put pressure on the governor,” he says, “to do what he has to do to make it safe for our children and for…people that have to walk to get a bus to go to work to feed their family.”
Democratic Gov. Wes Moore agrees. “We are serious about making this happen,” he told reporters, following a walking tour of downtown Wheaton last May.
Fani-González, who had invited the governor on the tour, says she’s been working with him to study the feasibility of adding a grassy median strip and vegetation to a long stretch of Georgia Avenue and turning it into an urban boulevard. The state has also been working with the county to add pedestrian hybrid beacons at intersections on state-maintained roads with notoriously hazardous conditions, she says.
The federal government has contributed resources too—including a $28.5 million grant announced in early January to improve road safety across Maryland, according to a press release issued by the office of U.S. Rep. David Trone (D-Potomac). The release states that nearly $1 million of it has been allocated to projects in Montgomery County.
Still, it’s going to take “a significant amount of culture change” before the crash data shows consistent improvement, says Eli Glazier, Montgomery Planning’s acting countywide transportation planning supervisor.
Glazier was project manager of the county’s 2023 Pedestrian Master Plan, one of several programs, acts and guidelines approved by the Montgomery County Council over the past few years to support Vision Zero’s goals. Other programs include the 2018 Bicycle Master Plan, the 2021 Complete Streets Design Guide, and the Safe Streets Act, which became law in September 2023 after passing the council by unanimous vote. The Safe Streets legislation prohibits right turns on red at busy intersections in downtown areas.
For many years, Glazier says, the priority—not only locally but also state- and nationwide—was to keep traffic congestion down and commuting times short. So “you end up with wide lanes, a long distance between signals…[and] sidewalks and other pedestrian things being an afterthought.”
These days, with the emphasis shifted toward slowing down and staying safe, “that’s a lot of roadway miles that are going to need to be reimagined,” he says. “We may not actually see it in the statistics in terms of severe injuries and fatalities until we’ve reached some sort of critical mass where enough of these high injury roads have been redeveloped.”
To that end, the county has made some strides, Holland says, especially along the HIN corridor, which includes state-maintained thoroughfares such as Old Georgetown Road, Rockville Pike and Connecticut Avenue, as well as county-maintained roadways including Montgomery Village Avenue, Shady Grove Road, and East Gude Drive.
“We [are] seeing a stronger decline on the High Injury Network because of [our] focus on those roads,” Holland says.
And indeed, Vision Zero’s 2023 report states that “in 2022, serious and fatal crashes decreased 13% compared to the 2015-2019 annual average” and that “on [High Injury Network (HIN)] corridors where safety projects, outreach, and law enforcement were prioritized, there was a significant 28% reduction compared to a 1% decrease on non-HIN roadways.”
“It takes a long time to make the overall macro numbers change, but we are seeing…the numbers go down in those areas,” Holland says.
At the same time, the report acknowledges that crashes occurring in “equity emphasis areas,” or EEAs, rose one percentage point during the same period, from an average of 37% in 2015-19 to 38% in 2020-22. EEAs are defined as locations with “high concentrations of low-income individuals and/or traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities,” according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
Holland says Vision Zero’s no-deaths-by-2030 goal was always considered more motivational than realistic. “The idea was to push ourselves to think what can we double down on or do differently if we could eliminate serious and fatal crashes in 10-15 years,” he says.
Olney’s John Seng, founder and chair of the nonprofit Maryland Coalition for Roadway Safety, believes a cultural shift is necessary to curb deaths. “Here in Montgomery County…the thinking [is] that if we can only fix the infrastructure, fewer lives will be lost,” he says. “For instance, [we tend to think that] fewer bikers will be killed if we only created that bike lane…few[er] pedestrians would be killed if we only [add the] Safe Streets Act.
“I think all these things are good, don’t get me wrong…but the data shows that the major risk factor is speeding and aggressive driving,” he says. “How many times have you been driving on a county road and looked up in the rearview mirror thinking, you know, I…don’t want to go any faster…[but] I’ve got somebody riding my bumper?
“It’s this pressure, this bullying, really,” he adds. “If [we] drive the roads like it’s [our] kids on these roads, that would be a nice message for people to embrace as they get behind the wheel of their car.”
Journalist Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.
This story appears in the March/April issue of Bethesda Magazine.