Recommendations

What Alexandria should do. Not one fix — three layers, because each one catches what the others miss, and right now the city could be better-using all of them.

1. Adopt a Charlottesville-style general order

Every Virginia city operates under the same statutory reporting threshold as Alexandria. But not every city stops there.

In Charlottesville, Police Department General Order 542.01 has been on the books in some form since at least 1999, most recently revised in 2020. It is a routine internal departmental policy, not a reaction to any single tragedy:

Whether on public or private property an incident report is required for accidents that result in death, critical injury, pedestrian/bicyclist, Hit and Run and all Hazardous Material. — Charlottesville Police Department, General Order 542.01 (section IV.D.1). View the PDF.

The order creates an internal record for every pedestrian or bicyclist incident, regardless of whether the state's reporting threshold is met. Alexandria does not appear to have an equivalent policy. Adopting one — and explicitly extending it to scooters, which didn't exist in meaningful numbers when Charlottesville's order was last revised — would close the documentation gap for the strikes officers responded to but the state never recorded. This is a simple ask that I believe would just require a policy change to implement.

2. Systematically screen dispatch audio every month

The incidents documented on this site were found by listening to publicly-available dispatch audio, transcribing it, and reviewing what came up. I built the tool myself and ran it for a month for the cost of $21 in transcription credits, plus an AI subscription I was already paying for and a few hours of my time.

We have a rich, nearly-free data source sitting out there in these dispatch records, waiting for us to use it. This ask is that we use it. The output isn't perfect, and we shouldn't present it as such — but as a starting list it lets advocacy groups, community associations, and city staff fill in context from a template rather than a blank sheet. It catches incidents that would otherwise disappear into refused-medical, no-property-damage, no-paperwork silence.

The point is not to react to each individual incident. T&ES has tried that and rightly stepped back when crashes outpaced the engineering capacity to address them one at a time. Instead, we should use this data to spot patterns the official crash record is too sparse to reveal — a feeder for trend analysis, not a backlog of individual repairs.

This could play an especially critical role as we update our Vision Zero Action Plan. T&ES has signaled interest in a citywide risk-assessment framework — combining vehicle speeds, lane counts, traffic volumes, and corridor design with crash history, so a corridor's risk profile doesn't depend solely on whether a fatal crash has already happened there. Systematically-coded dispatch data is well-suited as one of several inputs. NVFSS is positioned to staff this going forward, and I'm at their service to help. The ask of T&ES is not to do the work — it's simply to use the output.

3. Expand the DASH–NVFSS near-miss reporting partnership across city signage

Even with a documentation policy and dispatch monitoring in place, two large categories of data are still missing: close calls in which no one was hit, and incidents involving people who don't call the police.

Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets already operates a regional near-miss reporting form, modeled on what other cities — including Charlottesville — run through their transportation departments. Today, through a formal partnership with DASH, QR codes linking to the NVFSS form (and soon SMS short codes) are posted at Alexandria bus stops. The data is real, the data is published, and the partnership works.

What's missing is reach. The same signage that works on a DASH bus stop would work on a city-maintained crosswalk pole at a high-incident intersection, on construction signage where a sidewalk has been closed, at the entrance to a park, at a recreation center, on a school's perimeter signage, at a Capital Bikeshare station. A pedestrian forced into the street by a closed sidewalk and then hit by a driver is exactly the kind of incident a near-miss form could have surfaced earlier — if anyone walking past had known how to raise it.

Expanding signage also reaches the people the other two layers miss entirely: residents whose first language isn't English, residents who'd rather avoid law-enforcement contact, residents who simply don't know that reporting a near-miss is something they're allowed to do. Those are exactly the residents whose experience is currently absent from Vision Zero datasets. Reaching them isn't a nice-to-have; it's the data-integrity question at the center of an equity-focused safety program.

One thing this is not: a substitute for the reportable crash data Alexandria already tracks. Near-miss reports are a complement — supplementary input for specific corridor projects, not a citywide prioritization tool. The participation-bias concern is real: if reporting concentrates in Rosemont and underrepresents the West End, it should never outweigh hard crash data when allocating resources. The expansion strategy above exists precisely to broaden who participates.