The DC Department of Transportation is taking a closer look at some of the city’s most dangerous intersections.
They are focusing on where traffic accidents happen frequently or where people were hurt.
“I mean it broke my heart when I heard that,” Jameelah Sabreen said about a serious crash near her job.
Sabreen is used to seeing traffic accidents at 9th and U Streets.
“It was a car that swerved around the car that had stopped to blast through the traffic light,” she said.
The DC native was not surprised to hear the spot is one of the city’s high-crash intersections.
“Sometimes they're high rates of pedestrian crashes, bicycle. Sometimes they're just vehicle in vehicle,” Sam Zimbabwe explained.
DDOT along with police and the community visited places like Connecticut Avenue and R Street in NW, Good Hope and MLK in SE, and Southern and Wheeler near the Prince Georges County line.
“It's a combination of engineering fixes that we can take on as DDOT, some bad driver behavior that sometimes individuals need to take some responsibility for, and then sometimes enforcement issues,” Zimbabwe said.
The city will be posting crash information on its open data website every 24 hours as an additional way to keep the public informed and hopefully cut down on the number of accidents.
“I hope that that database is helpful. I'm not sure that it would be,” Sabreen said.
But no matter the method -- Sabreen says it is important to do something to work toward getting DC traffic deaths down to zero.
“Anything can happen at any moment you know,” she said. “So it breaks my heart to hear about these fatalities.”
