‘Killing us by doing nothing’: After 2 UDel student deaths, pleas to make Newark’s Main Street safer have officials hustling

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Speed bumps and elevated crosswalks.

Going from two lanes to one.

Closing down a section of the road.

Those options are among the safety measures for Newark’s bustling Main Street that city, state and University of Delaware officials are considering after a graduate student died last week after being struck by a speeding U-Haul van whose driver was fleeing police.

Marina Vasconcelos, 24, was killed and an unidentified graduate student walking on Main Street was seriously injured, police said. Six others — five people in cars and another pedestrian — suffered minor injuries after the chain-reaction crash. The driver, who now faces second-degree murder and other charges, also was injured.

Tuesday’s tragedy marked the second time this school year that a student was killed while walking on the city’s main thoroughfare. In August, UD freshman Noelia Gómez was killed by a motorcycle whose driver had sped away from a city cop who tried to pull him over, authorities said.

And last October, an unidentified student suffered a broken back after a driver, once again fleeing a police command to pull over, hit him on Academy Street after turning off Main Street, Tom Coleman, Newark city manager, told WHYY News last week.

Coleman said an informal working group has been pondering safety enhancements since Gómez was killed just before midnight and after her first day of classes. Her death was the first one on Main Street that anyone in city government could recall, Coleman said.

But after last week’s carnage, Coleman said officials who met Thursday are collectively fixated on making safety enhancements, likely in two phases. Their joint meeting came after a multitude of students, parents and others used social media, emails and petitions to request fixes that include closing off Main Street to vehicles, Coleman said.

At a minimum, Coleman said speed bumps and raised pedestrian walkways on the roughly 1-mile stretch, along with new lighting and barriers between the road and sidewalks, are almost certain to be proposed. If approved, that work could be completed late next year, he said.

“That’s not necessarily a full fix,” Coleman said, noting that a speeding driver could hit a speed bump and lose control of his vehicle. “It will help, but I think looking at making fundamental changes will at least be reviewed.”

Coleman said concepts that will be studied for the second phase would include “mall-type ideas or essentially removing parking and reducing down to one lane and creating more off-street parking.”

Another potential fix involves putting in “planter-style [barriers] to try to prevent cars from hopping up on the sidewalks,” Coleman said.

During Thursday’s session, Coleman emphasized, “It was clear nobody’s going to say ‘no’ to anything out of hand that is at least a reasonable thing to consider.”

José-Luis Riera, UD’s vice president of student life, agreed that “there’s a renewed sense of urgency” since the death of Vasconcelos, who was working on her doctorate in chemistry and biochemistry and doing research on Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel condition.

“We absolutely want to see the safety of Main Street, both in the short term and in the long term, addressed,” Riera said.

For much of the year, throngs of students stream along and cross the strip filled with eateries and shops, as well as the university bookstore and student center. A dormitory complex sits just off Main Street, which also serves as a bridge from the central part of campus to academic, recreational and residential facilities in the university’s northern section.

Some 10,000 vehicles also travel the two lanes of the one-way road every day.

“Obviously the city looks at Main Street as kind of their crown jewel,” Riera said. “But for us as a university, it’s inextricably linked to our campus culture, to our student experience and it’s a big part of what our students think about when they think about UD.”

‘Add speed bumps, elevate crosswalks. Do something.’

While UD, Newark and state transportation officials and legislators met Thursday, WHYY News visited a makeshift memorial for Vasconcelos at the site of the crash in front of a storefront being renovated next to a Chipotle restaurant.

Flowers for Vasconcelos and other victims lined the base of a fence protecting the rehab project’s workers from traffic. Dozens of Post-it notes were taped to the chain links with sorrowful messages such as “my heart is broken for your family.”

One large plastic sheet hung on the fence and contained a handwritten appeal to the city and Delaware’s flagship university, which has more than 24,000 students.

“We are dying. Your future doctors, vets, business owners, artists, therapists, engineers, etc.,” the message on the sheet said. “We deserve to live. We deserve to graduate. We are your responsibility. You are killing us by doing nothing. Use the millions you make to add speed bumps, elevate crosswalks. Do something.”

The plea was signed by “your students.”

Students and others passing by the memorial between Choate and Center streets stopped to look or take photos.

Most agreed something must be done to make Main Street safer for pedestrians.

Crystal Sandoval, a senior majoring in human physiology, said it’s “ridiculous” that nothing has been done yet.

“Speed bumps would be a very good option. One-way roads like this are very easy to speed down,” she said. “Obviously there’s no such thing as too late because it’s going to prevent things from happening in the future.”

Junior computer science major Dylan Minchhoff would go further.

“Reroute the traffic,” he said. “Why does it have to go through campus?”

Minchhoff also suggested “putting up mini-barriers or something like that, so even if something were to happen where a car would go off, it would hit the side of the road.”

Reza Moqtaderi, a retired engineer and former UD student who has consulted with the city, said he usually takes parallel Cleveland Avenue to reach Main Street because the city’s main artery usually is too congested.

Moqtaderi said it pains him that two students have been struck down so close to campus.

“It’s so very unfortunate for someone so young to be killed for no reason at all,” Moqtaderi said. “I mean, it’s terrible.”

While he supports more crosswalks, enforcement and other lesser measures, he said only one potential remedy could prevent future pedestrian fatalities.

“There is really no simple solution unless you make this just no through traffic,” Moqtaderi said.

But Pat Dennis, a UD facilities manager, wonders if anything would both prevent future tragedies and allow a city that revolves around the university to thrive or even function.

“Criminals trying to avoid the cops might hit the throttle even if they know speed bumps would  impede them. I don’t know what you could possibly do that you could predict this kind of crazy crap,” Dennis said. “Idiots are gonna idiot.”

If Main Street is closed or reduced from two lanes to one for vehicular traffic, Dennis said, cars and trucks would be forced to use other narrow roadways that aren’t equipped to handle so much traffic.

“Where are you going to divert all the traffic to?” he asked. “That’s the question.”

Could a smaller section of Main Street be closed?

Coleman agreed that in the long term, shutting down all of Main Street would be impractical and snarl traffic on surrounding streets.

He said that was done during the COVID-19 pandemic but ultimately restaurants and other business owners didn’t want it. If nothing else, those operations need vehicles to bring in supplies, he said.

But in the wake of the second student pedestrian death in eight months, Coleman said many people are clamoring for closure and the creation of a pedestrian mall.

“One of the most frequent things that we’re hearing from people that have reached out is that Main Street shouldn’t have cars on it and to close it to traffic,” he said. “We’ll review it certainly, but that’s going to be probably the hardest thing to do fundamentally, because a lot of traffic uses Main Street, so it would be difficult to shift that onto side streets.”

Coleman suggested, however, that closing a smaller portion of Main Street or cutting it to one lane — perhaps along the 0.4-mile stretch from Chapel Street near the popular Ali Baba restaurant to South College Avenue, just past the Sypherd and Brown dormitories — is likely to be under discussion as a longer-term solution.

“That’s the only thing we were talking about” as far as closing a stretch of Main Street or reducing it to one lane, he said.

Coleman added that speed bumps and other fixes could also be coming to other parts of campus, such as Delaware Avenue, the two-lane, one-way road that parallels Main Street and is crossed by thousands of students going to classrooms or dining halls.

“While Main Street is a focus, we also have to be mindful of the fact that we have pedestrians all over town,” Coleman said. “And we we need to look holistically at the city to see if there are other locations that we need to improve that just haven’t had a tragedy yet.”

Riera agreed that while all ideas will be subject to public scrutiny, officials are committed to making Main Street safer.

He emphasized that discussions that began in the fall after Gómez was killed and included a civil engineering study have only accelerated since Vasconcelos was struck down.

“There’s a real spirit of cooperation,” Riera said. “We’re at the table to stay and we’re committed to the long haul.”