About 40 people gathered outside of Ann Arbor City Hall Friday evening for a die-in protest concerning a lack of biker and pedestrian safety on city roads. The demonstration came after the release of the 2023 pedestrian crash data, marking the worst year for pedestrian safety in the city since 2014.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Kirk Westphal, former Ann Arbor city councilmember and protest attendee, said the data was not in line with the City Council’s Vision Zero goal to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries caused by traffic accidents by 2025.
“This was a grassroots protest to recognize that the city is not just missing the Vision Zero goal of zero serious injuries and fatalities by 2025, but we’re going in the wrong direction,” Westphal said. “So we’re calling on (the) City Council to take significant action because people are losing their lives.”
Westphal spoke to attendees briefly prior to the protest and emphasized remembrance of pedestrians who had been severely hurt or killed during the previous year.
“This is a silent protest, except for the sound of a bell, and each sound of the bell represents a vulnerable road user who was killed or severely injured last year in the city of Ann Arbor,” Westphal said. “(We) just ask you to please keep them and their friends and families in mind as the bell rings 17 times, which is a nine-year high, unfortunately.”
After the protest, attendees gathered at a bike party in Kerrytown, a monthly event on the last Friday of each month where members of the cycling community can come together. Westphal said the broader Ann Arbor cycling community demonstrated strong interest in improving pedestrian and cyclist safety measures.
“The community seems aligned and motivated to make change,” Westphal said. “There’s a lot of community energy behind this. And I get the sense that folks are just getting fed up with lack of progress.”
Zlato Fagundes, cyclist and protest attendee, told The Daily at the bike party he felt Ann Arbor has made progress in regard to pedestrian safety, but still has room for improvement.
“I think that the city of Ann Arbor has done a great job of developing bike infrastructure in the last 10 years,” Fagundes said. “(But) I think the issue is still very incomplete. It’s very car-oriented, meaning that it just mimics cars. And importantly (it) still puts us, me and my kids, in dangerous situations constantly as I’m trying to navigate the city.”
Fagundes said he hopes the safety infrastructure will one day be good enough for him to feel safe giving his kids the autonomy to bike on their own.
“There’s no way I would let my kids bike alone at this point,” said Fagundes. “It would be great if they go to school by themselves at some point and I could feel reassured that they have a safe A to B bike (passages) to school.”
In an interview with The Daily, Rackham student Lawson Schultz said having the autonomy to bike is important to them at home and in Ann Arbor.
“I didn’t grow up in Michigan; I came to Ann Arbor for school,” Schultz said. “But I grew up in a very bike-oriented household. Both my parents actually biked to work, and growing up, before I got a driver’s license, my bike was how I got anywhere. So coming here, I knew I was going to bike as a student, and it’s really important for me.”
Schultz emphasized that U-M student voices are important to consider in city decisions, especially those surrounding bike and pedestrian safety infrastructure.
“As a resident here, even though students are only viewed sometimes as very transient, we are residents of Ann Arbor and we’re impacted by the city’s (decisions),” Schultz said. “The risk of biking for longer term residents is going to be the same as a student biking. It benefits everyone in the city to have safer, better biking infrastructure … I just hope that more of this advocacy continues into the fall when more students are around.”
Daily Staff Reporter Lyra Wilder can be reached at lyrawild@umich.edu.
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