I’m heartbroken to report that we have lost yet another pedestrian to traffic violence this year. Linh Hong Nguyen was struck by a driver while walking on a sidewalk in the village of Red Hook, on a New York State Department of Transportation-owned road. Nyugen was an aspiring piano player from Vietnam who had just graduated from Bard, hours before she was killed.

Like the other local pedestrian deaths of Starllie Swonyoung and Raymond Rattray this year, Nguyen was killed on a road which is owned by NYSDOT.

State Route 9, which runs through the center of Red Hook’s downtown, is notorious with Red Hook residents for speeding cars. One village resident wrote “I have seen tractor trailers passing my house (in the village, on North Broadway) at 3 a.m., easily doing 50 mph.” It’s reasonable that residents would be concerned, since higher speeds are a major factor in deadly crashes. Even small accelerations at lower speeds make a big impact; the risk of death for pedestrians and cyclists doubles between 20 and 30 mph. At 40 mph, death or serious injury is pretty much guaranteed.

Red Hook residents have become so fed up with speeders that someone took matters into their own hands with guerrilla speed limit signs. The Town of Red Hook’s website reports, “The Town of Red Hook Highway Department has brought all illegal speed limit signs (20 mph, 30 mph) into compliance at this time.”

The Village of Red Hook has begun to take steps to beg NYSDOT to lower the speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph. However, the process for this very minor change is convoluted and expensive.

In fact, New York State just passed a law in 2022 which allows towns and cities to decrease the speed limit from 30 to 25. But during the process, NYSDOT interfered and pushed for the requirement of a speed study, which takes an excessive amount of time and money to complete.

Regardless, the village does not have the authority to lower the speed limit on Route 9. Since it is a state road, that power lies with NYSDOT.

But even if the speed limit were lowered, it might not have prevented the crash that killed Nguyen; after all, the car was likely already exceeding the speed limit by quite a bit.

Much more effective than lowering speed limits is changing the design of the road in order to force drivers to slow down and drive more carefully. Looking at the area where Nguyen was killed, the lanes are very straight and wide, which encourages higher speeds.

“Traffic calming” is the use of street design to slow cars and create a safer environment. One example is called a “pinchpoint.” A pinchpoint is what it sounds like — it is the placement of barriers mid-block in order to narrow the lane by “pinching” it. You probably have encountered the effects of pinchpoints when passing by construction sites using traffic cones and drums to delineate a closed-off lane.

NYSDOT could recognize its role in this recent crash and immediately deploy measures to address the crisis of speeding in the village. It could be as simple, easy and cheap as installing some traffic drums to create pinchpoints intermittently on the road. Slightly more expensive, more attractive and even more protective would be big concrete planters. This could be done in the next week or so, if there was the political will to do it.

In other jurisdictions, citizens have added different types of traffic calming elements themselves, out of frustration with the lack of government action. Those installations are reliably removed by the Public Works Department within hours. It shows that our leaders do have the power to act quickly to effect change.

We should honor the memory of Linh Hong Nguyen, and all traffic victims, not just with words — but by taking action to make sure that these needless, preventable deaths don’t happen again.

For more of Sweeten the Streets, visit Ella Kondrat's Substack here.