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A little after 4 a.m. on a clear night last October, three Notre Dame students were walking alongside North Ironwood Road from the Legacy Village neighborhood on their way to eat at Nick’s Patio. All three of them, dressed in dark clothing, were walking several feet off the curb in an area without sidewalks.
As they approached a dimly-lit intersection near St. Therese Little Flower Catholic Church, a Toyota Sienna minivan traveling south on Ironwood struck the three pedestrians. Then, a Chevrolet Impala driving the same direction ran over one of the two victims who was lying on the road.
According to the police report, the street was “dark, not lighted.”
Two young women were pronounced dead on the scene. The surviving pedestrian, a young man, was transported to Memorial Hospital in critical condition. At 10:28 a.m., the university sent an email to the Notre Dame community about the accident but provided no identification of the students.
“You never think it’s going to be people you know,” said Daniela Simons, a senior at Notre Dame.
The international Latino community at Notre Dame became aware that the surviving student was Eduardo Jose Elias Calderon, 19, of the Dominican Republic.
Simons, who is from Panama, then started to receive text messages from people abroad. Word of the accident traveled fast. Worried siblings of Notre Dame students tried tracking down their brothers and sisters to make sure they were safe.
Still unaware of the identities of the two young women, Simons’s younger brother, Augusto, a freshman at Notre Dame, tried piecing the information together. Augusto texted the Latino freshmen group chat asking for everyone to respond if they were okay.
“The only people who didn’t respond were Valeria and Olivia,” Daniela said.
Shortly after, the deceased women were officially identified as Olivia Lara Rojas, 19, of Bolivia, and Valeria Espinel, 19, of Ecuador.
Justin Cavallo was operating the minivan that initially hit all three pedestrians, according to the police report. The report also said Cavallo told investigators at the scene that he didn’t see the students until he hit them.
In the last six years, there have been 12 pedestrian accidents on Ironwood Road. Three of those 12 accidents occurred when the conditions were classified as “dark, not lighted.”
Ironwood Road is not the only street in St. Joseph County, Indiana, where pedestrian accidents and deaths have occurred in poorly lit conditions. From 2009 to 2019, 950 total pedestrians in St. Joseph County have been involved in traffic-related collisions, according to detailed records kept by the Indiana University Public Policy Institute.
Between January 2015 and March 2021, 40 pedestrians in St. Joseph County died in traffic accidents involving dark, unlighted conditions. In South Bend during that time period, there were 19 total pedestrian deaths, eight of which were in dark, unlighted conditions.
It is clear that the lack of lighting in South Bend is a problem for pedestrian safety.
During a two-month investigation of lighting conditions in St. Joseph County, we identified several areas that have both a lack of street lighting and pervasive pedestrian accidents. These areas include all of Eddy Street and Western Avenue, as well as the intersections of Ironwood Road with Eugene and Wall streets.
St. Therese Little Flower Catholic Church sits at the intersection of North Ironwood Road and Eugene Street, near where Espinel and Rojas were hit and killed. While this was the most recent tragedy with pedestrian safety near the church, the problem with dangerously dark streets has not gone unnoticed.
“It could definitely be safer here with the foot traffic we have here with all of the residents,” said Brenda McDonald, an employee of Little Flower. “It would benefit us to have sidewalks on Ironwood. And more lighting.”
Vehicle-pedestrian Accidents
With 11,800 city-owned streetlights covering 42 square miles, South Bend, a city of approximately 102,000, has fewer streetlights than some other comparable Midwestern cities. Evansville, Indiana, for example, has 118,000 residents in 48 square miles, and maintains 14,980 streetlights. Additionally, Springfield, Illinois — a city of 113,000 in 67 square miles — has 17,523 streetlights.
“Even though it looks like there are a lot of lights when you look [at the map,] there are definitely many spots with distance,” said Eric Horvath, the director of the South Bend Department of Public Works.
The St. Joseph County Fatal Crash Team (FACT) maintains pedestrian traffic data, which reveals where accidents occur with the most frequency.
From 2015 to 2021, the highest number of pedestrian accidents occurred on Grape Road, with a total of 18 accidents. However, none of the crashes on Grape Road took place in poor lighting conditions. The highest number of accidents in the dark occurred on Ironwood Road. Other roads with high numbers of pedestrian accidents in the dark include Eddy Street and Western Avenue.
The map below combines the city’s streetlight inventory with this pedestrian accident data. It shows where unlit streets pose the biggest threat to pedestrians.
Each yellow point on the map represents a streetlight, while orange points represent pedestrian accidents and red points represent deaths.
Jerry Frye has lived in South Bend since 2013 and has been noticing issues with street lighting ever since he arrived. “To me, it was always a security thing, a safety thing and an aesthetic thing,” he said.
In 2019, Frye wrote a letter to the South Bend Tribune, expressing his concerns with non-functioning streetlights in the business district of downtown South Bend.
Frye even felt impassioned enough to read his letter at a city council meeting, where a council member thanked him for bringing the issue of street lighting to their attention. He is not the only citizen concerned about street lighting conditions in a city where it can take up to three months for a reported broken streetlight to have the bulb changed.
Lighting Initiatives
Light Up South Bend, which started in 2014, is an initiative that developed from community meetings held by the South Bend Common Council’s Residential Neighborhoods Committee. The initiative’s goal is to bring more lighting to parts of the city without adequate coverage.
When Councilwoman Karen White and other members of the South Bend Common Council were invited to a neighborhood association meeting, they became aware that adequate lighting was a top priority. Their attention was drawn to Washington Street west of downtown.
“We got in the car and we drove to that particular area. And we actually counted the number of streetlights that they had — but also the number of streetlights that the bulbs were not in,” White said. “We discovered that there were some streets that only had maybe one or two lights.”
From that point on, the South Bend Common Council pushed for adequate lighting, and Light Up South Bend was born.
“I saw this as a public safety need,” White said.
South Bend budgeted $1.5 million for street lighting for 2021, and an additional $260,000 for the Light Up South Bend Program.
“Money is always an issue, but it hasn’t kept us from doing lights,” Horvath said.
Before Light Up South Bend began, the city did not have a specific budget for additional lights and lighting repairs. After the initiative began, the South Bend Department of Public Works agreed to create a singular fund for these efforts.
In partnership with American Electric Power (AEP), a private business that provides electric service to Indiana and Michigan, Light Up South Bend works to erect more lighting through each of the six districts in South Bend.
Light Up South Bend started to erect more lighting in the second district, where the initiative began, but it has since worked in each of the six districts. Now, Light Up South Bend goes through each district one at a time.
It typically takes six to nine months for new lampposts to be installed, according to Horvath. In some areas where lampposts already exist, it takes three months to replace an existing light bulb.
If a South Bend resident believes there is a spot that requires more street lighting, they can call 311, the South Bend city services request portal. Once these complaints or requests are called in, they are routed to whoever owns the lights in the problem area: AEP or the city of South Bend itself.
Next, Horvath said South Bend’s project engineers check the Light Up South Bend display maps to see how many lamp posts are in the area. It is also crucial to check if there is a 250 feet radius between the already existing lights. If the radius between the lights is more than 250 feet, the Department of Public Works can add new lights or put in a request to AEP, depending on ownership.
Public works considers many factors before it decides whether to add additional lighting, Horvath said. Among those: Who owns the lighting? Is something blocking the existing lights? Are there any existing lamp posts with broken bulbs? Does the city have an inventory of the lights in that area? Sometimes the existing lights could meet all the lighting requirements, and yet the area is still dark.
In addition, Horvath and his team try to look for areas with gaps in lighting every year and try their best to fill in those gaps. It takes about a year to get all the new lights in, especially if new poles are needed. That is a year of inadequate lighting for South Bend pedestrians.
“We do it in a way that we typically have somewhere between 80 and 100 new lights every year,” Horvath said. “I would guess that we’ve put in several hundred over the years, probably upwards of 700.”
According to South Bend project engineers who work on the city’s lighting initiatives, the types of lighting in South Bend fall into two different categories: high pressure sodium lights (HPS) and LED lights. HPS lights are generally AEP owned, and have a typical power of 100 watts.
By the end of 2022, the South Bend Department of Public Works hopes to fully transition from HPS lights to LED lights. LED lights are more efficient compared to HPS lights because they use less electricity and emit more light.
Although it takes time for the city to put new lamp posts in dark areas, residents have told White that they appreciate the lights.
“They feel more comfortable, they have a sense of safety and they are more visible,” White said.
Accidents such as the one that took place last fall are among the reasons why Light Up South Bend is trying to make sure the city has adequate lighting, Horvath said. Poorly lit intersections are another area of concern for Light Up South Bend.
“We’re trying to, again, just prevent vehicle-vehicle accidents and vehicle-pedestrian accidents,” Horvath said.
Justice Beyond Streetlights
The deaths of Olivia Lara Rojas and Valeria Espinel have brought awareness not only to insufficient streetlights but also the issue of justice.
Since the accident, Justin Cavallo has been charged with two misdemeanors, one for operating a vehicle with an alcohol concentration above 0.08 and one for operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Despite his alcohol level, city prosecutors did not level more serious charges like manslaughter or vehicular homicide.
In response, Natalie Hodnett, Rojas’s childhood best friend from Bolivia, started a petition demanding greater justice for Rojas and Espinel. The petition currently has upwards of 20,000 signatures.
Hodnett said Rojas’ mother appreciates the show of support from so many who loved her daughter.
The Observer, Notre Dame’s student-run newspaper, printed two articles in which friends and members of the Notre Dame community remembered Rojas and Espinel.
Daniela Simons remembers the shock of the international Latino community at Notre Dame and said that in the week following the accident, they spent every single second together. Most of the freshmen and sophomores in that community did not attend their classes. All of the upperclassmen had the freshmen sleep in their off-campus homes during the week.
“That was what made it less hard for all of them,” Simons said. “They were always together.”
On the night of the accident, hundreds of members of the Notre Dame community gathered at Notre Dame’s Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, a shrine where people gather to pray, light candles or spend a few quiet moments. There, the Notre Dame community honored and prayed for Rojas, Espinel and Eduardo Calderon. The following Tuesday night, thousands of members of the Notre Dame community gathered at a Mass in the Notre Dame football stadium to remember the young women.
Calderon is in good health, back on campus and going to classes, according to Simons.
Light Up South Bend only has jurisdiction within South Bend city lines. The intersection where the October accident happened is about a quarter of a mile outside city limits. Despite this fact, Horvath said two things could have prevented the accident.
“Having a safe place for people to walk in the first place, and making sure you’re promoting sidewalks and bike lanes,” Horvath said. “Secondly, better lighting. Had we had those in that area, it definitely could have prevented two people from losing their lives in the tragedy.”
Horvath’s statement succinctly summarizes the path to improving South Bend pedestrian safety. Only a greater regard for pedestrian safety and an expanded lighting budget will help to protect the South Bend residents endangered by walking in the dark.