WASHINGTON — We can’t talk enough about street safety. People living in Ward 8 along Stanton Road SE are calling on leaders to make their bus stops and streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
Residents say the conditions are far worse than in other parts of the city and they feel neglected. When you turn on to Stanton Road SE from Suitland Parkway, there are three bus stops along the street. Neighbors want to see safety made a priority.
“I mean it's like the motocross speedway,” Melik Abdul said.
Going uphill, there’s one crosswalk and many drivers zoomed through it.
“We have to kind of play the, you know, the cat and mouse kind of game out in the street and it's not something that's really safe,” Abdul said.
He and other neighbors are calling on DDOT, council members and the mayor to make their street safer. Especially the lone bus stop on one side of the street.
“What you're seeing now hasn't changed over the years. The sidewalk ends behind the stop here. So, there is no other side, which is why we have to go on the other side of the street,” Abdul said.
Abdul said in his 20 years of living in this area, environmental improvements have happened. But the overall quality of life isn’t keeping up with the pace of other parts of the city.
“We try to focus on quality of life issues. It's not just about the big-ticket items, there are certain quality of life issues that impact what we do much like this bus stop,” he said.
On the first part of Stanton Road SE, coming off of Suitland Parkway, there are three bus stops. Two of them have ample room for riders to stand but an abandoned moped and shopping carts take up a portion of the small sidewalk where riders wait at the stop across the street.
“All here don't have access to cars, and so we rely on bikes, we rely on walking. I don't have a car myself and so I'm always walking or I'm taking the circulator, and all of that access is great. But when we're talking about our streetscape that's always a problem,” Abdul said.
Abdul is hoping their plea doesn’t fall on deaf ears and improvements can be made before someone is hurt.
“Fortunately we were able to get a crosswalk back there, but that crosswalk itself is still pretty dangerous because so many people speeding up Stanton Road, trying to just get all the way up the hill,”
We’ve reached out to DDOT to see if they’re aware of the concerns neighbors expressed. As of this report, we have not heard back yet.