I Want You to Stay… Off Gallatin Pike

On Monday morning around 11:30 I boarded a plane for a conference on data visualization and analytics. As one does, I turned on airplane mode and settled in and began reading Yesteryear for the four-hour flight to the west coast. When we landed and I turned off airplane mode and a slew of notifications came through on a group chat for the bench-building To Nashville with Love folks. I thought it was going to be about some logistical conversations being had, instead it was about a horrific accident on Gallatin Pike where a 58-year-old man was reported as hit by semi-truck after stumbling on the sidewalk.

Shortly thereafter I viewed a clip from the Metro Human Relations Commission where Whitney Pastorek, one of its commissioners, made an impassioned and frankly infuriating speech outlining where we are as a city on multimodal infrastructure and safety. I suggest people watch it for themselves, but Gallatin Pike has a disturbing history of being an incredibly unsafe street. Last week a vehicle ran into some telephone poles. In March a 71-year-old was also struck and killed.

All the while Vision Zero plans for Gallatin as an all-access corridor have not come to fruition. Rather than being completed this year as outlined in its initial five-year-plan, its implementation is now pushed back to 2030. And to make matters worse, Vizion Zero has been stripped of $4 million by NDOT to repave Gallatin as it currently exists. This is in contrast to, as Pastorek points out, safer pedestrian infrastructure in areas frequented more by tourists, such as downtown and 12th South. I applaud those efforts to build safer infrastructure, but it’s not just inequitable but cruel to the residents of Nashville who have to navigate the many unsafe streets in our city.

I can’t speak about anyone else’s experience here, but I can tell you twice in my life I have been hit by a car, and both of those times were in Nashville. The first time I was running in my parents’ Glencliff neighborhood when I was back from college. A lady was distracted by her grandchild in the back seat, and I was swiped by the mirror of her Buick. Not a major intersection or corridor, just a regular neighborhood 25 mph road with no sidewalks.

The second time I was riding my bike, my only form of transportation at the time, from my Granny’s house in Germantown to my AmeriCorps job at the Martha O’Bryan Center. I was on Shelby Avenue turning right on 7th and a lady was looking left while turning right in her SUV. While quick thinking made me jump off my bike and avoid injury, the front of my bike was pulled under her front wheel and crushed it. She apologized, but words don’t account for much as she immediately left as I was trying to call to report the accident.

Both incidents occurred more than 15 years ago, and I really can’t say how much my experience with safe streets has improved. I haven’t gotten hit since, but I also am very cautious about when and where I walk or ride.

I live in Bellevue off Highway 70. My little section has bike lanes. Not once have I considered using them because there are no barriers and I see so many accidents on 70. More often than not, I drive to Bellevue Park and Ride, take an electric scooter out of the trunk, jump on the bus, ride into downtown, and use the scooter to navigate to work from there. I would love to be able to use the bike lane to ride to the grocery store a few miles from my house or hitch our carriage and take our kid to school, but I don’t because I never feel at ease in this city as a middle aged man let alone as one with a young child in tow.

Near the end of her righteous tirade, Pastorek begs that the people in power do something about the sorry state of infrastructure in this city outside of the tourism development zone. While they pat themselves on the back for a little more than symbolic changes to school start times or rezoning what is certainly a heavily contaminated former scrapyard into residential housing, this administration has completely whiffed it on completing Vision Zero campaigns on some of Nashville most dangerous local roads. It should be an indictment that Vision Zero was not on the list of accomplishments.

We were supposed to have a multimodal mayor. Former Board Chair of WeGo, former Board President of Walk/ Bike Nashville, he got the transit referendum over the finish line. Instead, we have instance after instance of NDOT removing pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure. Vision Zero on corridors we don’t have to ask permission from the state to build on have stalled. Local council members are lobbying for and celebrating the removal of infrastructure. Tourist safety gains preference over that of residents.

It feels like an insult because I personally walked dozens of miles and knocked on hundreds of doors to, in my own small way, help get a mayor elected that would make this city safer to navigate outside of a car. Pastorek did too. And yet there seems to be a complete lack of leadership on the things that are directly within this administration’s control to make that a reality for its people.

“I want you to stay.” Really? I’m not sure how you do that in a body bag.