My blog friend Mnmom already posted on this, but it's so wrecked my day that I'm going to follow anyhow:
A Northfield woman was killed just before 7:30 this morning as she and her husband were out for a morning walk. Northfield Police Chief Mark Taylor said the couple was in the crosswalk when they were struck by a pickup truck. The driver of the truck, whose name hasn’t been released, was headed east on Jefferson and turned north onto Division after stopping at the stop sign. (From the Northfield News.)
A traffic fatality is always bad, of course, but in this case, two things make it even worse. First, I happen to know the driver; he works at Carleton in a role which has brought us into semi-frequent contact, and I've always been impressed by him.
Second, the intersection where this accident occurred (Google Map) has long been considered an accident waiting to happen: it's a four-way stop on two busy streets, one of which has a 55-mph speed limit, and is a main crossing point every morning and afternoon for kids going to the elementary and middle schools that sit just a few hundred yards away.
Anybody could see - many did see! - that this was a bad situation. In fact, the "Safe Routes to School" project which Northfield will start this summer with federal and state grant money is focused on trying to make this intersection safer. I'm on the steering commitee for the project, and it horrifies me to realize that we're already too late to save a life. We can't even say that the intersection was an accident waiting to happen.
(A concluding aside: I announced the Safe Routes grant back in March, and guess who made the first comment on that post? Mnmom. And what'd she say? "Can we please start with the Middle School and that horrendous intersection?")