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The 4-mile stretch of Westheimer Road between Fondren Road and the 610 Loop is among one of the most fatal spans in the whole city.

In fact, it is the longest continuous corridor within the city of Houston that has been designated a “Priority High Injury Network” by Vision Zero Houston, the city’s initiative to eliminate traffic deaths. That sounds like jargon, but it’s an important definition: Priority High Injury Network streets are half-mile segments with at least two traffic deaths, at least five severe crashes and at least one pedestrian severe crash between 2018 and 2022.

There are dozens of these short spans throughout the city, according to Vision Zero. But this stretch of road on Westheimer contains eight such segments running from one directly into the other, resulting in a 4-mile section of one of the city’s signature roads that has logged 26 pedestrian deaths, three cyclist deaths and nine driver deaths in that five-year period. That’s 38 lives lost. 

What is it about this part of Westheimer — that straight shot that includes the glitzy Galleria and stripmalls jam-packed with diverse cuisine — so deadly?

I laced up my boots to find out. 

Houston Landing photojournalist Antranik Tavitian and I began our walk at the western boundary of the 4-mile stretch, parking our cars in the lot outside a now-shuttered Stein Mart at the corner of Westheimer and Fondren. The first half-mile, I explained to Antranik as we started walking, accounted for five deaths in the past five years — four pedestrians and one cyclist. 

I suspected a lot of this had to do with speed. If you’re at all familiar with Westheimer as it rolls out of the city’s innermost concentric circle, and toward the next one at Beltway 8, you know that it’s as wide as its retail offerings are varied. At Fondren, we counted four westbound lanes and another four eastbound. 

The traffic lights — and corresponding crosswalks for pedestrians who need to ferry themselves from one side to the other — are far apart. It took more than five minutes of walking to hit the first intersection, at Lazy Hollow Road, about a quarter-mile into our journey. Cars and trucks can really speed up in that amount of time. And they do. 

We listened and watched as vehicles whirred and whizzed by us, blasting by the posted speed limit signs that require drivers to keep it to 35 mph or lower. The vast majority of those cars were certainly speeding. 

That’s not a far-fetched assertion. According to Vision Zero’s 2022 Annual Report, only 9 percent of drivers obey the speed limits on Houston roads with a 35 mph speed limit. Nope, that’s not a typo. Only 9 percent. 

Another 36 percent of these drivers exceed the speed limit by less than 5 mph, while the majority of drivers — the remaining 54 percent — are driving at least 40 mph on these roads. 

This is where things become increasingly dangerous. A study out of Michigan, which examined crashes in which vehicles hit pedestrians, found that the 40-mile-per-hour mark is a key indicator for whether a pedestrian will survive. According to the study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 23 percent of crashes that involve cars and 30 percent of crashes that involve SUVs resulted in pedestrian fatalities when the vehicles were driving at speeds between 20 and 39 mph. After crossing the 40 mile per hour threshold, all SUV crashes in the study resulted in fatalities, as well as more than half of the car crashes. 

I’ll give you one guess whether I saw more SUVs and trucks than cars on Westheimer. 

Traffic enforcement could certainly help keep pedestrians and even drivers safe in areas like this. And while the Houston Police Department did not provide a requested interview about how it targets enforcement along this dangerous stretch of road, Antranik and I did spot cruisers engage in what appeared to be two traffic stops during our walk. 

The deadliest stretch of this walk, according to the High Injury Network data, begins about 100 yards west of Winrock Boulevard and continues through Potomac Drive (for those of you who are better with landmarks than street signs, this is where you’ll find the Westheimer location of House of Pies). 

Here, Vision Zero reports that there have been five pedestrian deaths, two cyclist deaths and one motor-vehicle death in the five-year period during which data was analyzed. 

Also here, I spotted the first jaywalker of the day.

And the second. 

And the third.

All three seemed to be traveling between a strip mall on the south side and a mid-block bus stop on the north side that sits almost exactly at the point where this half-mile segment of road begins — stopping for a moment in the narrow median to switch the direction of traffic they monitored before jogging across four more lanes to their final destination. 

I held my breath each time. 

Why can’t they just wait for the crosswalk? I thought, the Vision Zero data fresh in my mind.

But here’s the thing: Those crosswalks aren’t perfect, either. 

Along our walk, Antranik and I noticed several small intersections at which the “beg buttons” — those buttons pedestrians can use to summon a walk signal — seemed to have been removed or were missing. As we waited a few moments at one such intersection, a little east of where we’d seen the jaywalkers, I emailed Erin Jones, the spokeswoman for Houston’s Department of Public Works, to ask whether these missing buttons fell under her department’s purview. 

She had an answer for me in minutes:

“Houston Public Works maintains the signals along Westheimer,” Jones wrote. “Push buttons are not required at this location because the walk signal is programmed to generate as part of the signal timing at these locations, like Downtown. Our team will inspect the area to make sure they are working properly.”

I had just reached Fountain View Drive when I received her answer — an area I know well, after spending my first two years in Houston living in a Fountain View apartment, half a block off Westheimer. 

But when I looked up from my email, the thrill I’d felt from her swift reply fell off in an instant: How had I never noticed in the two years I’d lived on this street that there’s no digital walk signal for pedestrians crossing Fountain View on either the north or south side of Westheimer?

I emailed Jones again, this time attaching a photo of my view: How does the city determine which crossings receive digital walk signals, I asked. 

“The City requires countdown pedestrian signals (digital) to be installed on all signalized intersections and pedestrian crossings,” Jones responded. She continued that the city operates and maintains most of the signals along Westheimer, even though it is a state roadway, and that Public Works is working to upgrade old infrastructure to meet current design standards. 

She also asked if submitted a 311 request. I hadn’t yet, but I did as soon as I returned home to write. (It only took about two minutes, and there’s a ready-made field for reporting a needed pedestrian signal.)

Submitting a 311 complaint can often feel like tossing a message in a bottle out to sea. But after watching those three pedestrians cross eight lanes of traffic on what I now know is the longest stretch of hyper-deadly road in Houston, I have to hope that flagging any concerns about pedestrian safety to the city is worth it. 

Sidewalks became wider and sturdier, with fewer cracks and interruptions the closer we inched to The Galleria, and the buttons for crosswalks were also more likely to be equipped with auditory cues to increase accessibility for those walking along the sidewalks. 

Maybe that can help explain why the final mile of the walk only accounts for four of the 38 deaths along this part of Westheimer — two for pedestrians and two for those who were in motor vehicles — even though we know this particular portion is perpetually snarled with shopping traffic. 

And maybe it can also give us hope that as the city works to inspect and upgrade infrastructure along the other three miles, we could see the number of fatalities begin to decline. 

Share your Houston stories with me. We can start on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Or you can email me at maggie@houstonlanding.org.

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