On Oct. 22, 2024, 13-year-old Nehemiah Jackson was walking home from the public library near Kelley Highway in Fort Smith. As he approached North 44th Street from the east, a Ram pickup approached from the south and stopped.
Turning right, the driver was likely looking at traffic to his left, the opposite direction from Jackson, who stepped into the unmarked crosswalk just as the driver found a break in traffic and put his foot on the gas pedal.
Nehemiah never made it home.
Parents, citizens, and the media all responded to this tragedy with outrage. Opinions were diverse: the driver must have been under the influence. The child didn’t look both ways. Parents shouldn’t let their children walk home from school.
I agree with this outrage, but not with the finger-pointing. It is easy to put the entire issue to bed by blaming traffic fatalities on distracted driving, dark clothing, or inattentive pedestrians, then clap our hands and consider the matter resolved. This is a mental block and does nothing to save lives.
When a doctor makes a mistake, their industry doesn’t chalk it up to fatigue and move on to the next surgery. They ask what conditions caused the fatigue, and how to prevent it from happening again. We should apply this same diagnostic to crashes.
When I look at the environment surrounding the crash of Nehemiah Jackson, I see a space where death is an inevitability. And indeed, his death follows the death of an adult on the same stretch of Kelley Highway when a semi overturned in 2022. Nehemiah’s death wasn’t an “accident” in the sense of something unexpected.
Take the number of fatalities that occur in a place, divide it by the population standardized to 100,000, and you can derive a roadway fatality rate. In Fort Smith, that number is around 13.5, which rivals some of the world’s more dangerous countries such as Turkmenistan or Djibouti.
Many people accept a certain level of traffic death as the cost of a functioning society. There is a red line: above it the deaths are too much, and below it the deaths are tolerable. But there are some cities, including Fort Smith, that signed a pledge to reject this idea and commit to a future of zero traffic deaths, just as the Hippocratic Oath compels doctors to do “no” harm.
Among those cities is Hoboken, N.J. Hoboken has not experienced a traffic fatality since 2017. Helsinki, Finland, just finished a year without a traffic death, and even our neighbors in Conway (city streets only) can claim a year without any fatalities. These cities all have people who text while driving, and probably also drunks and addicts jaywalking at night in dark clothing. Instead of finger-pointing, these cities reshaped their environments to protect the citizens they have, not the perfectly sober and attentive citizens they want.
There is no universal remedy for every fatality on every road in every city. My novice prescription for Fort Smith can be summarized as “let highways be highways, let streets be streets.” We cannot slap in a crosswalk, a flashing beacon, or a strip of sidewalk and declare a place like Kelley Highway safe. The entire essence of a road: its speed, its function, its relationship to surrounding land uses, must be scrutinized. Instead of restricting access like highways, the historic gridded streets in Fort Smith restrict mobility with low speed limits, narrow lanes, trees, and tight turning radii. All of these things signify a complex human environment that compels drivers to travel safely, and for the price of lower speeds, the return is more desirability for housing and economic productivity.
Review the Arkansas Crash Analytics tool and cross-reference its information with the Average Daily Traffic tool, and the results seem to be that our medium-volume, medium-speed arterials like Kelley Highway are the most dangerous in Fort Smith. I theorize that this is because these arterials have all the high-mobility features of a highway while simultaneously having all the high-access features of a local street.
In other words, we naturally drive Kelley Highway a little like an interstate, but we zoned it so that children must use it at the same time. We wanted the speed of a highway with the land use of a street, but by combining uses in this way, it is neither efficient at moving vehicles, nor does it have the desirable housing and economic productivity of a street.
These design decisions have an impact that lasts decades, and if safety is truly the first priority, it should be on the top of our minds when considering projects like the proposed extension to Kelley Highway. Everyone knows this is a place where a child died, and everyone knows that an extension doesn’t address its lethal design flaw. But we will greenlight this project anyway, and when we do, it will be an unspoken agreement that some future person, perhaps another child, will die so that our commutes may be slightly faster. We don’t say this out loud because, if we did, it would force us to confront the morality of our choices.
I believe zero deaths are attainable. Fort Smith could start by halting the expansion of deadly places like Kelley Highway. Then, qualified engineers and planners could collaborate to identify routes that can be reconstructed to highway standards. Over decades, dozens of miles of roadways could be transformed into highways that accomplish the safe and fast movement of vehicles without the dangerous complexities of children and homes alongside them.
Drivers might prefer these faster routes, thus allowing other roadways to be rebuilt into slower-moving streets with flowers, trees, homes, and all the things that make smaller streets safe and productive. The street/highway hybrid, a concept that did not exist a few generations ago, deserves more attention as a possible culprit for Fort Smith’s higher-than-average fatality rates.
This is an opinion. I am not a traffic engineer. But in 2022 I heard the city of Fort Smith commit to zero traffic deaths, and then in 2025, I heard them consider spending $7.1 million to replicate the conditions that killed Nehemiah Jackson.
When we spend money to reproduce deadly places, the death of a child is not a fluke, it’s a decision.
Editor’s note: Andy Posterick is a pedestrian safety advocate in Fort Smith. He is starting a non-profit organization aimed at giving personal reflectors to road users. The opinions expressed are those of the author.