One ANGRY neighbor

Thank you Ms. FITZPATRICK for writing this to the Durham News:

http://www.thedurhamnews.com/front/story/198083.html

(She is ONE angry neighbor)

Editor's note: This letter, printed with the writer's permission, was originally sent to City Manager Tom Bonfield, Mayor Bill Bell and the City Council


I am writing to express my concern about careless driving in downtown Durham. Since my husband and I purchased our home last February, I have been involved in two accidents while crossing over busy streets during my less than two-mile commute to work. In the first accident, I was hit by a speeding car as I went through a green light at the corner of Trinity Avenue and North Roxboro Street. In the second accident, I was stopped at a red light at the corner of North Duke Street and Morgan Street and was rear-ended by a car that did not stop soon enough. Although I was not injured in the first accident, I was injured in the second and am still suffering from severe neck and back pain months after the accident.

My husband and I first came to Durham as Duke students and, after living in Boulder, Col., and Nashville, Tenn., we chose to come back to Durham both because we have a soft spot for old industrial cities and because we wanted to help make the community a better place. We really love living in the city, and see so much potential in the architecture, the leadership and the people in Durham. For that reason, we chose to purchase a home in an up-and-coming area of Durham in order to be a part of the solution and not the problem. Professionally, I research low-cost behavioral interventions for caregivers of Alzheimer's patients and attend graduate school in social work. My husband teaches at Duke. I consider myself to be an upstanding citizen; I have chosen a profession which (I hope) will improve the lives of others, I regularly tutor foster children who live in my neighborhood, I respect my neighbors, and I try my best to obey traffic laws.

While my accidents have certainly been inconvenient for my family, I know that I will be all right despite these minor setbacks. Instead, I worry more about the harm that could be done to others who are in similar situations. While I am young and healthy (both physically and financially), I can't help but imagine the harm that could be done to some of the individuals that I work with on a regular basis. If one of the caregivers with which I work were similarly injured in an accident caused by a careless driver, the ramifications for their family and the individual with Alzheimer's for which they care would likely be catastrophic. In the same way, if one of the foster children which I tutor were injured by a careless driver, their injuries could set them back both financially and physically to the point that they might not recover.

Over the past year, I have seen a barrage of e-mails on the Duke Park Neighborhood Association and Old North Durham Neighborhood Association listservs wherein individuals have had similar experiences to mine. While anecdotal, these accounts surely indicate a pattern which could possibly be explained by the lack of enforcement of traffic laws throughout the residential neighborhoods in downtown Durham.

I urge you to look more closely at possible strategies that might be used to improve the situation. Solutions might include enforcing traffic laws more strongly and installing traffic control mechanisms (such as those found in Watts-Hillandale or Trinity Park) throughout the myriad of neighborhoods that comprise our community. I urge you to examine these as well as other potential solutions to this problem both for the sake of individuals that have already been affected by the reckless driving of others and for individuals who might be especially vulnerable to the negative physical, financial and psychological effects of accidents caused by careless drivers.

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