Residents have been calling for traffic calming on Johnston Ave for years

A day after a RT837 closure that is detouring cars through Glen Hazel and Hazelwood through early August, six year old child, Jamel Austin, died after a driver struck him on Johnston Ave near his home. While most of Johnston Ave is residential, drivers treat the road as a speedy cut through between Browns Hill Rd and Second Ave.

Following reports of multiple crashes on Johnston Ave, neighbors say the boy’s death could have been prevented with traffic calming, better lighting and signs.

“There’s a lot of people to come through here that don’t live here and speed, don’t stop at the stop sign. They need to put more children signs up, ‘watch children,’ or speed bumps because this is the third accident in two years,” neighbor Betty Robinson said in a KDKA news report.

While we still don’t know much about the circumstances of the crash, what we do know is that residents who live on these streets should not be subject to dangerous driving outside their front doors. People will make mistakes that result in crashes, but the choices that engineers make in the design and speeds of our roads determine the severity of those crashes.

Speed Kills

The City’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI) has a program where residents can request traffic calming on their street. This popular program has proven effective in slowing down cars. However, due to limited funds and staff, DOMI can only improve a handful of streets per year, leaving most requests on a years-long wait list. According to former Councilman Corey O’Connor, residents along Johnston Ave have been requesting speed humps in the area for years. This illustrates that much more funding and staff capacity needs to be made available for the City’s traffic calming program.

It was a beautiful night on Tuesday, so it’s unsurprising that kids were out playing near their home. A residential cut-through street like Johnston is a strong candidate for traffic calming measures, to ensure drivers stay within the speed limit, and to discourage people who don’t live there from using it as a short cut. As the Mayor and his team are developing the first budget of his administration, this fatality serves as a reminder as to why the City of Pittsburgh must generously fund safe streets infrastructure.

“That baby lives right here on the corner. All of those kids in this neighborhood play with him every day. Our babies are traumatized right now,” Saundra Cole McKaney, a neighbor, told WPXI.

If you would like to make a contribution to helping Jamel’s mother pay for funeral costs and legal fees, please see the family’s GoFundMe site.