Anita Bavitz of the Kenwood neighborhood got a knee full of pebbles and tire tread marks on her arm.
Jamie Ratner of Bethesda had to get stitches in her head. She was three or four months pregnant when the crash happened; her ribs were broken, but luckily her baby son was unharmed.
Crashes and injuries on the Capital Crescent Trail — shared by bikers, walkers and strollers — are a long-standing concern of trail advocates.
Police reports and stories of actual crash victims paint a picture of the trail as a semi-chaotic place where collisions are rare, but hazardous when they do happen.
‘‘A very significant cause of the accidents is congestion and crowding,” said Isaac Hantman a board member with the Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail, a volunteer group. ‘‘No one really anticipated how popular and, as a result, how congested it would be when people were advocating for its being built.”
Nearly 600 people use the trail per hour during weekend mornings in the summer, according to coalition surveys. The crash tally could rise this year as the weather warms, he said.
Ratner’s injury happened last March.
She wrote a letter published in the Washington Post about the crash. She received ‘‘tons and tons of e-mails” in response, ‘‘going back and forth about whether it was my fault [or] the biker’s fault.”
Ratner had been walking along the trail between River Road and Massachusetts Avenue when a cyclist knocked her to the ground. Her head wound required stitches, and her ribs were broken.
‘‘He left the scene,” Ratner said of the biker. The biker may have left a name with someone in the crowd, but Ratner didn’t get it as she was loaded onto an ambulance and taken to the hospital. She stayed in bed recovering for a couple of weeks.
She hasn’t quit using the trail after the crash, despite her husband’s protests. But she keeps the sound low on her headphones.
‘‘One of the things I enjoy most in life is walking and running on a trail, and it’s the only one” nearby, Ratner said.
Ratner and others say trail accidents stem from a confluence of hazards: Bicycles traveling at high speeds are squeezed onto the trail with lower-speed walkers, often walking two or three abreast. Some bikers call out a loud warning when they’re about to pass pedestrians. Other bikers don’t. Or, the warning shout of, ‘‘To the left!” confuses pedestrians and both people end up on the same side of the trail, collision bound. The danger mounts when children or dogs are allowed to roam free on the trail.
The results, Hantman said, are broken collar bones, broken shoulders and head wounds. ‘‘All of these things have occurred, and they will probably recur as March turns to April.”
And then there’s the story passed around about one walker who lashed out and pushed a bicyclist.
‘‘We have trail rage,” trail advocate Pat Baptiste said. ‘‘It’s a shame because it’s such a wonderful facility.”
Record-keeping on trail crashes and injuries give sparse data on whether the trail is actually unsafe.
The Maryland-National Capital Park Police recorded no crashes this year. Last year, three crashes were reported — injuries had to be treated in all three.
But ‘‘not all accidents” are reported, Lt. Karen Petrarca said, confirming what many speculate.
‘‘It’s a pretty safe area,” she said.
Park police do patrol the trail — on bicycles, motorcycles, horseback, on foot and sometimes in cars. Officers can issue citations, but there is no speed limit on the trail. Petrarca said ‘‘rules of the road” for bicycles and ‘‘common safety rules” apply.
Advocates and trail users have pitched solutions — more signs and a repainted center stripe — and they almost universally want the trail widened at least in the busiest spots, Bethesda Avenue and Little Falls Parkway.
‘‘Yes, you’re going to have to move some dirt and uproot some wild shrubs and stuff like that in a few places, but essentially the extra width is there, and it’s a relatively low-cost operation,” Hantman said. ‘‘Even if you did nothing else, that would reduce congestion and accidents.”
The coalition and the Parks Department have been in contact for more than a year talking about solutions. The department agreed to restripe the trail and install more signage, but that project may be shelved until fall.
‘‘People are really upset, and rightfully so,” said Bavitz, who lives near the trail on Dorset Avenue.
Bavitz’s violent run-in with a bicycle happened in the fall of 2006. She was walking with a friend on the trail. They were walking shoulder-to-shoulder ‘‘hugging the right side of the trail” as they passed Massachusetts Avenue.
One cyclist whizzed past Bavitz and a moment later another biker ‘‘plowed into me and knocked me down,” she said.
Immediately both cyclists returned to check on Bavitz. The tires left tread marks on her forearm. Her hands were scraped, and pebbles were ground into her knee. As she sat with her leg bleeding, people passed and told her, ‘‘Oh, that happened to me last year. I broke my wrist,” Bavitz said.
She filed a report with the Park Police, but ‘‘honestly, you know, I don’t know how effective they could be,” she said. ‘‘I mean, what can they do?”
Bavitz is angry, but returned to the trail three days later. She still uses it every day.
‘‘I don’t think we should have to give it up to the cyclists,” she said.
