Warren Cheng and Diane Ly had good reason to think they were safe to cross the street when they visited Boston in September 2019. They were in the crosswalk. The walk signal was flashing.

Cheng had invited Ly, his girlfriend, to the East Coast to meet his family. In a few months, he intended to propose. Before dinner at Lolita’s, on the corner of Summer and Melcher streets in the Seaport District, Cheng wanted to take some pictures with Ly at the Summer Street Bridge.

But then the unthinkable happened. The couple was hit by a transportation van while they were crossing the street. Cheng was badly injured. Ly was killed.

Courtesy: Jeffrey Catalano

“They were crossing as they were supposed to be doing in a crosswalk, not jaywalking. The light said the ‘walk’ was clearly flashing ‘walk,’” said Jeffrey Catalano, Cheng’s attorney. “There's no dispute. They were doing everything that they were supposed to do. Just two young people, in love, enjoying the city. And that happened.”

Catalano is representing Cheng in a lawsuit against the employer of the driver who hit the couple. Other defendants, including the city of Boston, may be added to the case.

But the van hadn’t run a red light. It had been given the green traffic signal to turn directly into the same crosswalk where Cheng and Ly had also been given a “walk” signal to cross the street.

As 5 Investigates and Northeastern University’s School of Journalism discovered, this conflicting kind of traffic and pedestrian signaling is not uncommon. Crosswalks at nearly 300 intersections all over the city operate under what is known in urban street planning lingo as “concurrent walk signaling.” They first appeared in Boston in the 1970s and have nearly doubled in use during the last 15 years.

How concurrent walk signaling works

Concurrent walk signaling gives pedestrians a walk signal and the right of way at the same time vehicles are given the green light to go. The idea is simple: Keep traffic moving as much as possible and give pedestrians more incentive to cross a street only when they see a walk signal. But the reality can be dangerous as pedestrians and drivers cross paths into each other, both thinking they have the right of way even though drivers are supposed to yield to pedestrians.

LISTEN: Red on Green podcast produced by Northeastern University journalism students

Needham resident Sharon Fener was struck in 2016 by an unmarked Boston police cruiser at the intersection of Parker and Ruggles streets in the middle of the crosswalk.

“The driver came up from the right-hand side and made a left-hand turn. I had the walk signal and was walking across. But he also had the green light, and crossed and hit me,” said Fener. “All of a sudden, I looked down and I saw the hood of a car. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is not going to be good.’”

While Fener empathizes with the officer, she said responsibility lies on both drivers and pedestrians to be more cautious.

“These changes have been very drastic,” said Fener. “Not everyone has learned or knows about what the new rules are for both pedestrians and drivers.”

Massachusetts law is clear: drivers with a green light must "yield to other vehicles, bicycles, or pedestrians in the road." But drivers don't always obey the rules.

Fener settled a claim with the city of Boston for $35,000 for her injuries.

“I was in the cast for about three months. And then therapy for about three months, and still didn't have a full range of motion with my knee. That took a couple of years,” said Fener.

Channel 5

That a sign saying "walk" doesn't mean it's safe to cross the street is a hard lesson to learn in what's supposed to be one of America's most walkable cities. And it's not helped by what had been, before the pandemic, an increasing amount of vehicle traffic and congestion in Boston. Statewide, the number of vehicles registered rose 18% in the past 10 years, reaching 5.8 million in 2019.

Channel 5

Brendan Kearney of the group WalkBoston, which works to make Massachusetts more walkable, is concerned that the new traffic signaling is more focused on moving traffic along than on keeping pedestrians protected.

“Right now, any given intersection seems to act a little bit differently,” Kearney said. “It's very focused on moving vehicles through downtown intersections. We really think there needs to be more of a focus on prioritizing pedestrians.”

Activist groups such as WalkBoston have pushed for safer streets by advocating a longer head start for pedestrians before vehicles get a green light.

But Kearney cautions not to use concurrent walk signals in every situation. Specifically, he discourages concurrent signaling at T-shaped intersections, where all drivers would be taking a turn.

“Every single car driver is going to be taking a left or right. A hundred percent of the drivers coming up from the bottom of that T is in conflict with pedestrians,” said Kearney.

Despite this argument, there are still 40 T-shaped intersections in Boston that use concurrent signals.

Deciding what type of signal to put where isn’t a guessing game, according to Mark Chase, a professor in the department of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University.

“It's really a traffic engineering decision,” said Chase. “I would expect the city to look at the conflicts, the potential conflicts, and try and put in a signal time and scheme that is the most comfortable for pedestrians.”

Chase said this involves someone going to the intersection and counting the number of “conflicts” manually. These can be anything from a car suddenly hitting its brakes to a pedestrian nervously jumping back onto the curb. As of yet, there is no automated process.

“A place like Boston or Cambridge or Somerville, you'll see maybe one or two of those in one hundred cases,” said Chase. “And if you see a lot of those, then you've got to reassess what you are doing at that intersection.”

Catalano, the attorney, said the city has been told repeatedly by residents that the intersection of Summer and Melcher streets is dangerous.

“This is a case that was completely and absolutely preventable,” said Catalano. “People were saying that someone's going to get killed, someone's going to get hurt. And we have the documentation of that.”

Catalano is referring to citizen reports to the city's 311 system, where pedestrians consistently pointed out that the intersection at Summer and Melcher streets is a hazard for walkers. The complaints say that the signals are “confusing and dangerous,” that they find the intersection “scary to cross” and warn that “someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed.”

“There were people who should have been attentive to this problem, should have acted, should've taken aggressive measures,” said Catalano. “It's not one of those [things] where people should have been shrugging their shoulders and throwing up their hands saying, 'What can we do?'.... Someone needed to intervene, and no one did.”

5 Investigates and Northeastern journalism students reviewed hundreds of complaints filed with the city of Boston about concurrent signaling at crosswalks all over the city. They range from, "I almost get hit here at least once a week!!" to, "Who does the sidewalk lighting for you guys? The grim reaper?" The vast majority of the complaints are closed and the response is usually the same: "...it improves pedestrian compliance with walk signals" and it's "...consistent with pedestrian signal operation throughout the country."

Chris Osgood, chief of streets for the city of Boston, said every complaint is taken “very seriously.” Engineers look at every intersection to determine the best signaling. After Ly's death, the city changed the signal so vehicles now have a red light when pedestrians are crossing where Cheng and Ly were walking.

“Why hadn't changes been made beforehand?” 5 Investigates’ Mike Beaudet asked.

“That particular crash is under investigation, so I can't speak to the specifics of that. But every issue that comes up that is raised by our residents is really important to us. And we take it very, very seriously.”

LISTEN: Boston’s Chief of Streets responds to questions about pedestrian safety. The city of Boston initially turned down requests for an interview, but later agreed to speak.

Chase, the Tufts professor, believes pedestrians tend to accept wait times at concurrent signals. However, he thinks the city could do a better job of finding intersections where pedestrians are more at risk, and adjusting those accordingly.

“People in the city complain about traffic and things all the time. But you need to compare [complaints] around the city and be like, well, why are there five times as many people complaining about this intersection as the next one down or a very similar intersection?” he said.

But finding consistent and accurate crash data is more complicated than it seems. WalkBoston’s Kearney said Boston’s data is inconsistent. While the Emergency Medical Services uses one system, the Boston Police Department uses another. The end result: Boston’s police department hasn’t shared crash information with MassDOT, the state’s transportation department, for as long as anyone can remember.

“There's 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts; 350 of them submit it the correct way. Boston doesn't. So there's just this hole in the data set. So the real problem is not that we don't know that there's crashes happening,” said WalkBoston’s Kearney.

By not sending complete crash data to the state, Kearney said the city could be missing out millions in federal funds which could be used to make the streets safer.

“It's really about leadership when it comes down to it, because the city of Boston should be leading on these issues,” said Kearney. “[The city] received funding a number of years ago to make their systems talk to each other. I don't really know what happened to that and why it didn't work. But we're definitely frustrated by it.”

Despite years of not submitting crash data, the Boston police department is expected to unveil a new system and start sharing crash information with MassDOT next year.

In an effort to curb pedestrian crashes, Boston joined the Vision Zero Coalition in 2015. It is an effort across 10 densely populated, crash-prone cities in the U.S. The goal for each city is to bring down the number of crash fatalities to zero by 2030.

Pedestrian crash trends in Boston

There has been a slight decrease in incidents since 2016, but Kearney said fatalities statewide have stayed at more than 70 annually. Boston usually has 7-10 of those fatalities a year.

But without reducing the risks of allowing drivers to turn into crosswalks, Catalano, the attorney, says more pedestrian-involved crashes are inevitable.

“If more attention isn't paid to traffic control systems generally, then, yeah, people are going to get hurt if not die. They're going to get struck by cars. We need to take aggressive measures because there's going to be more deaths of pedestrians in crosswalks,” Catalano said.

Reporting for this investigation was done as part of a seminar on investigative reporting taught by 5 Investigates' Mike Beaudet, who is also a journalism professor at Northeastern University. The following students participated in the project: William Condon, Matthew Cunha, Jin Kim, Alexander Martin, and Richard Romero.