Opinion: I (Almost) Killed a Pedestrian With My Car

“Careless Driver Slays Innocent Lives; Held for Drink and Drug Testing.”

You’ve read that headline a hundred times, or one very like it. A photo of a crumpled bicycle, perhaps, or a small shoe on the pavement. A neighbor quoted saying the motorist always drove too fast. The reader shakes his head and turns the page.

I have very nearly been that driver. More than once. I was not drunk, I was not on drugs, and I was not driving too fast. But I still almost killed someone, because of structural conditions that made it almost impossible not to.

I live in Skyline Plaza, a condominium in Falls Church, Virginia, and park in the building’s mostly-underground garage. Several doors used by pedestrians open directly from that garage into lanes used by moving automobiles.

One day in 2023, I was driving towards the garage just as someone stepped through one of those pedestrian entrances. A mother was taking her three young children to their car parked outside, and I suspect the children enjoyed racing each other to it. All three burst through the door at once, directly into my path.

The mother shrieked in stark terror.

The children stopped dead in their tracks — figuratively, not literally—and I drove through the place where, had their mother not screamed, I could easily have killed three young souls in two blinks of an eye.

Here’s the thing about that pedestrian door: someone, at some point, recognized how dangerous its placement is. When it opens, two warning lights come on to alert approaching drivers.

They are shriveled little things, those lights, installed behind two pipes, so that a driver cannot see them until he is a few feet from colliding with a walker — which is to say, too late for them to do any good.

Compare that with the street outside. Nearby Arlington County has installed highly visible flashing lights at pedestrian crossings, giving drivers ample time to react. Car-on-pedestrian crashes can be prevented — if you use the right tools well.

In April 2024, I reported the problem to our condominium’s Safety Committee and demonstrated it in person to a committee representative. In November 2026, she confirmed that the committee had notified management. Still, nothing had been done.

At least six garage doors have inadequate warning lights, or none at all.

This was not the first time I narrowly avoided striking a walker, though.

Garland, Texas, 1982. Behind our house ran an alley bordered by a six-foot wooden fence. You could not see over it or around it. Normally I drove the alley at ten or fifteen miles an hour. That day, for no reason I can recall, I was poking along at five or seven.

A boy shot out from behind the fence, directly in front of my car, without looking. Thank goodness, I thought, I was barely moving.

Then a second boy, chasing the first, crossed in front of me. Another near miss. That one was Adam, who lived next door.

By now I had stopped. A third boy, plainly hell-bent on catching the other two, came around the corner at full tilt and ran smack into the side of my car.

My stopped car.

He bounced off, unhurt. He was, as it happened, a member of the youth soccer team I coached.

What happened next told me a good deal about two families.

Adam’s father heard about it and made his son come to my door and apologize. Adam hadn’t touched my car, but his father understood what had nearly happened and wanted his son to understand it too.

The third boy’s father reacted differently. I went to explain what had happened, opening rather clumsily with, “I hit your son.”

Once I explained that his son had actually run into my stopped car and was unhurt, the father relaxed. He seemed to regard the whole affair as nothing worth discussing.

Two fathers. One recognized a narrowly avoided tragedy and acted. The other saw that nobody was hurt and left it there.

Forty-four years later, I’ve encountered the attitude I experienced from the second kind of father again. This time, though, it’s coming from the condominium association.

I still think about the headlines that would have run if I’d actually killed those children.

They would not have been about the six-foot fence. They would not have been about warning lights hidden behind pipes, or a safety recommendation that management ignored. They would have been about me — “careless driver slays innocent lives.”

I was lucky twice. Once because I happened to be poking along. Once because a mother screamed.

Neither of those is a safety system, and we can do better.