Two people were hit and killed in separate crashes on Montgomery County roads overnight Monday into Tuesday.
One of those crashes happened on Muddy Branch Road and West Diamond Avenue in Gaithersburg. A man was hit by a car at 4:27 a.m. Police said the driver didn’t stay on scene.
And seven hours before, a bicyclist died along New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring
after being hit by a car that apparently left the scene at first but then came back.
There have been 22 people killed on roads in the county so far this year, according to Montgomery County police.
That includes eight pedestrians, one bicyclist, two motorcyclists and 10 people in cars. That’s almost one person a week. And police told News4 more people have died on the roads than they have in homicides this year.
“The reason we’re talking right now is that number is way too many. Five is way too many,” said Captain David Reed, the director of Traffic Operations with the Montgomery County Police Department.
News4 asked him what’s to blame for these crashes.
“I would say distracted driving,” he said. “I see it all the time. […] And it’s not just the drivers. I will see a pedestrian crossing the roadway with their head in the phone, not even looking, just assuming that somebody is going to stop for them. Bicyclists on the road have to know the rules, don’t stop for a red light or a stop sign, assuming that the other car is.”
Montgomery County was one of the first counties in the country to implement a Vision Zero program — the idea is no fatalities and no serious injuries by 2030.
This is what Reed had to say to people who think that vision is unachievable:
“If you think it will never happen to you, because we get that a lot, I’ll pull somebody over for distracted driving and they just assume it’ll never happen to them. Well, everybody does until it happens to you.”
from Local – NBC4 Washington https://ift.tt/m3ZU68l
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