Dr. Sia Sobhani has been told that he is no longer considered a US citizen because he was mistakenly granted citizenship when he was born, and now must reapply, in his office  on November 22 in Vienna, VA.

The Washington Post

handout

 Justyce, no birth certificate

migrant buses arrive in DC

For The Washington Post

staff

The national debate on local law enforcement cooperating with ICE has arrived in Frederick County. There has been lots of controversy surrounding a longstanding contract that the Sheriff's office has with ICE. It is coming to a boil this weekend with two competing rallies. 

The national debate on local law enforcement cooperating with ICE has arrived in Frederick County. There has been lots of controversy surrounding a longstanding contract that the Sheriff's office has with ICE. It is coming to a boil this weekend with tw..

“Hands Off DC” rally and march - Washington, D C

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

The 6 best things to do with kids in the D.C. area this weekend 

The 33 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

Ask Amy: My wife’s sister confessed her feelings for me

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

NASA moon capsule suffered extensive damage during 2022 test flight

Russian state media ramping up English, Spanish presence on TikTok, study finds

Apple is behind in AI and killed its self-driving car project. What’s next?

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

World Press Freedom Day, 2024

How Trump convinces Republicans to adopt extreme views

Campuses are grappling with the Gaza war. So are our columnists.

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Chinese EVs are good for the world. Biden says they’re bad for America. 

Why the Solomon Islands election matters to China and the U.S.

Biden calls ally Japan ‘xenophobic’ like China, Russia, at campaign event

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

This masterpiece ‘Birth of Venus’ probably isn’t of Venus at all

The beginner’s illustrated guide to watching an F1 race

US President Joe Biden Departure

Courtesy of the Hart family

Earlier this month, days before the anniversary of her 5-year-old daughter’s death, Jessica Hart sat down and wrote about how she used to look forward to September.

“As a mom, I loved watching my daughter Allison swing her backpack and pose with her ‘first day of school’ sign by our front door,” she wrote. “I look at those photos now and marvel at how little she looked as a 3-year-old headed to pre-K, versus how big she seemed back then.”

Now, she confessed in that piece of writing she shared with me, she feels only heartache and rage in September as she watches other children head off to school.

“Heartache, because Allie died in her third week of kindergarten,” she wrote. “Rage, because she was killed by the driver of a van as she rode her bike in a crosswalk. In a school zone.”

Allison “Allie” Hart was riding her bike with her father, Bryan Hart, two years ago on Sept. 13 in her D.C. neighborhood when her life ended suddenly and violently.

Children should be able to walk and bike to school safely. But, in D.C., four have been hit in crosswalks in less than four weeks.

If you had asked Jessica Hart before that day about road deaths or street safety measures or vehicle testing, she wouldn’t have been able to talk at length on those issues. She was still like many of us — able to let those issues exist in the background of her days.

But Allie’s death changed that. It forced her to take on a role no one wants: A grieving mother who knows too well the cost of doing nothing or not enough to make roads safer. She now thinks often about our roads and what might keep other families from knowing the horror her family experienced the day Allie’s 40-pound body ended up under a van that weighed thousands of pounds.

Amanda Andrade-Rhoades

In the last two years, Hart has been vocal about the need to improve D.C.’s streets. Now, she is trying to bring attention to a measure that would have a national impact. She created an <a href="https://www.change.org/p/dangerous-cars-are-killing-our-children?source_location=search" target="_blank">online petition</a> that calls on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to change its 5-Star Safety Ratings program which <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings" target="_blank">aims</a> to “help consumers make smart decisions about safety when purchasing a vehicle.” The current ratings system only reflects the safety of the people inside the vehicle. Hart’s petition calls on the system to also include a vehicle’s risk of killing a pedestrian.

“After Allie died, we heard from people who had to buy new cars,” Hart told me on a recent afternoon. “They said, ‘Oh my gosh, we thought of Allie while car shopping. We made sure to buy cars with the highest safety ratings.’ But the highest safety ratings actually don’t care about a kid like Allie.”

There is no way right now for someone to know if they are buying a vehicle that will help them keep children who are strapped in their seats <i>and</i> children who are walking, running and riding their bikes nearby as safe as possible.

“Even people who are thinking, ‘Are there kids around me?’ or ‘I have kids and I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can,’ they are still not getting all the information,” Bryan Hart said.

I hadn’t considered that side of vehicle safety before seeing Hart’s petition, and I’m the type of car owner who would look for that assessment. The first time I started thinking about vehicle safety was when I was a reporter in New York and I covered a story about a parent who accidentally ran over their child. The depth of guilt and grief I witnessed in talking to that family is not something I will ever forget. Since then, I have covered many more traffic crash deaths, including Allie’s.

At 5, she was killed riding her bike in a crosswalk. Her legacy should be safer streets.

In a column about her life and her death, I wrote, “Five-year-olds shouldn’t have legacies. They should have futures. But since Allie won’t get that chance, her legacy should be safer streets in her city and in others.”

What her parents are trying to do now is part of that legacy. The petition comes at a time when vehicles have gotten larger and road deaths across the country have reached highs despite cities putting in place <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/03/16/dc-traffic-safety-deaths-vision-zero/" target=_blank>Vision Zero</a> goals of ending traffic deaths and injuries. The year that Allie was killed, more than 42,000 lives were lost on U.S. roads.

“This is not going to save every one of the 42,000 lives that are lost every year, but it’s a start,” Jessica Hart said of the new rating system she hopes to see. “It’s a start in changing the way we think about vehicles. It’s a start in the government saying, ‘Okay, carmakers you also have to pass these tests.’”

The family, which is now part of <a href="https://www.familiesforsafestreets.org/" target=_blank>Families for Safe Streets</a>, a group that is made up of people who have lost family members to traffic crashes, is not alone in calling for a change to the rating program. So, too, have other advocates and organizations.

Joe Young, a spokesperson for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, told me through an email that the organization has expressed support of incorporating that assessment into the ratings program but would like to see NHTSA go even further. He said the organization recently sent a letter to NHTSA pointing out “that regulation would be a more effective move because it will ensure that all vehicles meet some level of pedestrian crashworthiness, and results would not rely on voluntary action by the automakers.”

“If NHTSA were to take the 5-star ratings route, however, the ratings should be highly visible, included in the overall 5-star rating, and should not be based on a pass/fail scheme, as NHTSA has suggested,” Young said. “A pass/fail assessment doesn’t give consumers enough information to appropriately compare vehicles and wouldn’t compel automakers to make incremental changes that could provide benefits in the real world.”

Young and Hart both noted that the ratings are just one aspect of making roads safer. Other actions that would help: Making sure as many new vehicles as possible have automatic emergency braking systems, putting in place infrastructure that makes it safer for pedestrians to cross roads and implementing measures that force vehicles to slow down.

In a tolling bell, a grim message about preventable truck deaths

When I asked Jessica Hart what would have made a difference that day Allie died, she gave an answer that was at once simple and complex: “Seconds.”

At their core, that’s what many of these efforts aim to do: Give drivers seconds more to notice a tiny figure that can’t be seen through a windshield. Give pedestrians and cyclists seconds more to get out of the way of a vehicle that outweighs them by thousands of pounds. Give people inside and outside of vehicles seconds more to avoid a horrific crash that will forever alter their lives.

As of Wednesday, Hart’s petition had drawn more than 31,000 signatures. Many people also left comments, explaining why they signed.

“In memory of my son, Ryan, who was killed by a teen driving an unsafe vehicle,” reads one comment.

Another: “My 28-year-old daughter was killed by a driver of a large vehicle while she was operating a scooter (small motorcycle) perfectly safely and obeying all the laws of the road.”

And another: “My son was walking in the crosswalk with the right of way when the bus knocked him down then ran him over. … Not a day goes by that I don’t think about this. It torments me.”

bachelor's from Stanford University

master's from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Theresa Vargas is a local columnist for The Washington Post. Before coming to The Post, she worked at Newsday in New York. She has degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University School of Journalism.

Theresa Vargas

washpost

Mom of 5-year-old killed on bike convinces thousands to demand change

the-washington-post

The District

Maryland

Virginia

Crime & Public Safety

Local Education

Obituaries

Transportation

Capital Weather Gang

D.C., Md. & Va.

Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.

The Washington Post offers breaking local news, weather and traffic information for the DC, Maryland and Virginia metro areas, plus information about school districts, crime, government, religion, the lottery,restaurant reviews and obituaries.