People in Lincoln’s Near South neighborhood look to new approach to reduce crashes

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – People in the Near South neighborhood are concerned that the roads are unsafe, and they’re taking matters into their own hands.

One man said he witnessed a hit-and-run outside of his house a few weeks ago.

“I was outside smoking a cigarette and saw a minivan smash head-on into a Jeep, and that Jeep smashed backward into an SUV,” Richard Gerteisen said.

He said crashes happen too often in the neighborhood, and he wants to get to the bottom of it.

So does Brent Lucke, who works with an organization called Strong Towns, which works to change how cities and roads are designed.

“Whenever there’s a horrible accident in our neighborhoods, which unfortunately is all too common, we like to look at like, ‘Well was somebody drinking and driving? Was somebody distracted? Did the person walking not look both ways while walking across the street?” he said. “Which really shifts all of the responsibility to our communities being safe on the individuals.”

But Strong Towns has a program called the Crash Analysis Studio that looks for problems within the streets themselves.

Lucke bikes around the neighborhood often and notices that drivers often aren’t paying attention to their surroundings.

“If you don’t take a moment to intentionally slow down, you can easily get frustrated,” he said. “People honk at me. People zoom around.”

He said that’s because the way the roads are designed makes drivers too comfortable.

“It’s not anything specific inherent flaw of them as a person,” Lucke said.

A Strong Towns study found that high speed limits in urban areas and insufficient planning for cyclists and pedestrians are among the top contributors to crashes.

So Lucke wants to study how those factors might be present in the Near South neighborhood.

He said the first step is getting the community together.

“It’s not always, and it shouldn’t be someone else that comes along and saves us,” Lucke said. “It’s really us as people that need to come together. Like it’s not who, when and where? It’s us, here, now.”