Tag: crosswalk

San Juan Rd at Airport Rd kills another person

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

I posted to Instagram about this, but it deserves amplification. “The Sacramento Bee had an article today that provided in-depth information about the death of a person crossing San Juan Rd in North Natomas. It included information about the dangerous roadway and lack of crosswalks and about the individual and family of the person killed. This is the kind of crash reporting we need to raise awareness and get the city to allocate resources to save lives.”

Apple Maps capture of intersection of San Juan Rd and Airport Rd in North Natomas, Sacramento
intersection of San Juan Rd and Airport Rd in North Natomas, Sacramento

I have worked off and on doing bicyclist education in North Natomas, and therefore crossed through this intersection many times, mostly bicycling but occasionally walking. It is not a safe intersection, for anyone.

Walking

The lack of crosswalks is obvious. The posted speed limit is 40 mph, but common practice and the design of the road sets that as a minimum rather than maximum. Knowing that this is a dangerous situation, the city has cross-hatched out the area from Azevado Drive to Airport Road on the north side, narrowing the roadway to one lane, but drivers routinely use this area for both travel and turning. Westbound drivers coming down off the overpass over I-80 accelerate to 60 mph. People walk across San Juan here. The city has decided to leave them to fate, and in this case the fate was death. A crosswalk without any additional protection would not be appropriate given the high speed traffic. It would require, at the least, a RRFB (rectangular rapid flashing beacon), which is a sign with flashing lights activated by the person wanting to cross. But given actual speed, it probably would need additional protection. Fixing poorly designed roadways is expensive, but so are lives.

There is a crosswalk over Airport Road, but given the wide-open design of the intersection, it is meaningless. Drivers turning from San Juan Road are unlikely to notice it. Drivers southbound on Airport Road generally stop over or beyond the crosswalk, because they need the visibility, and as much head start on the dangerous turn as possible. I know this from extensive observation.

Bicycling

Some people would say “but it has bike lanes”. Not really. Eastbound, motor vehicles turning onto Airport Road cross over the bike lanes at many points, regardless of any paint on the ground. If a person stayed in the bike lane, they would be exposing themselves to high speed traffic for along distance. Hug the curb to be further from motor vehicles, or use the bike lane so that you are more visible? It is a devils choice, forced by road design. West of Airport Road, the bike lane is missing for a distance, implying to drivers that they have the right-of-way over bicyclists. Eastbound, the bike lane is mostly continuous, except for the intersection itself (why?), but it is full of debris from construction traffic and car parts. To my knowledge, the city has never swept this bike lane.

It is difficult many times of the day to turn east from Airport Road to San Juan Road. High speed traffic, high volume at certain times, does not slow in the least in this area, and there is no signing to indicate they should.

Regular Class 2 bike lanes should be illegal on roadways posted over 35 mph. This road was mis-designed from the beginning. I don’t know whether the city later added bike lanes, though it is probably so given all the striping on San Juan to the east. The bike lanes did not make it safer for bicyclists.

Journalism

News media in general does a very poor job of reporting on traffic crashes, particularly when the victim is a walker or bicyclist. The initial news item parrots the law enforcement statement. Unless waiting for ‘notification of family’, the victim’s name is given, but the driver’s name never is. This is a strange inversion of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, making the driver innocent and the victim guilty. As I have stated many times before, law enforcement personnel have no training in analyzing the ways in which roadway design contributes, if not causes, traffic crashes. But they have a lot of ideas, not based in any research or training, that they are too happy to relay. One that will ring home with bicyclists is the repeated phrase ‘they weren’t wearing a helmet’, as though wearing a helmet protects against being hit by a driver traveling over the speed limit (they almost all are) or well over the speed limit, as is likely in this case.

A good summary of the issue is by SafeTREC, Media Narratives of Pedestrian and Bicyclist-Involved Crashes. If you want more, simply search the Internet for ‘poor journalism on traffic crashes’ or similar terms. Angie Schmitt wrote an entire book, Right-of-Way, about this issue and others. What about the next reporting? There usually isn’t any. The incident is never mentioned again. Law enforcement contributes to this by making sure that the incident report is delayed for weeks or months after the crash. In California, there is the common practice of law enforcement claiming that incident reports can never be released to anyone but immediate family. This is no backed up by state law, but it is common practice. So even when the incident report is completed, the public is unlikely to ever know the facts of the crash. All the public ever knows is the untrained, biased speculation of the law enforcement officer on the scene. The cynic in me can only see this as an intention on the part of law enforcement to protect drives and keep the public in the dark about traffic violence.

So, it was a wonderful breath of fresh air to read the Sacramento Bee article by Ariane Lange: A father died crossing a dangerous Sacramento road. His 13-year-old son was watching. The article went into depth about the person who was killed, and his family. It looked at the dangerous design of the road, and the fact that the city rarely fixes dangerous roads except with state or federal grants, not its own money. It talked about Vision Zero and the high injury network, of which San Juan Road is one, though in part due to problems further east. It talks about the statistics for death at various vehicle speeds, including 50% death at 40 mph (though it is very unlikely the driver was going that slow).

Traffic violence is pervasive in Sacramento, with the highest rate of fatal crashes in the state. The usual media reporting glosses over this, basically selling the story that if it wasn’t someone you know, it wasn’t that important. But it is always important, and sooner or later it will be someone you know, or you. These are real people with real lives, and real families and friends, and their death leaves a huge hole, whether they are homeless or not.

Thank you, Ariane, for telling the real story behind the death.

Yield to walkers? Nah.

Dan Allison1 Comment

This is essentially the second part of my red-light-running bullies post. Except that it applies to every intersection, not just signalized intersections.

This is another driver behavior that accelerated with the pandemic. But it didn’t start there. It primarily started with the election of Donald Trump. There was a noticeable change in driver behavior immediately after the election. Many drivers apparently thought, well if the president can say and do whatever he wants without consequence, so can I. It was really noticeable to me how belligerent drivers became. I’m guessing that it was because many drivers see people walking and bicycling as ‘other’, people with different values and political views. Used to be communists, then it was “lib’rels”, and I won’t use the current round of words here. If you are walking or bicycling, you are ‘other’ and if you are walking or bicycling and black or poor, you are truly the enemy. God meant us to drive, and anyone who thinks otherwise or gets in my way is against both God and me. That may sound outlandish, but it does accurately reflect how many drivers view the world.

But back to the driver behavior. Most drivers no longer yield to people using crosswalks. Of course most drivers are not aware that there is a crosswalk at every intersection, whether marked or not. And the DMV is complicit in this, they make no effort to educate drivers about pedestrian right-of-way. The law doesn’t require a driver to stop until the walker steps off the curb (or ramp) and into the street. Common decency would mandate yielding to waiting walkers, but common decency is not common among drivers. Once the walker has stepped into the street, they have the right of way. But most drivers will not stop. They may change lanes to avoid the blood splat on their car, but they won’t stop.

There are drivers who do stop, but when I look at them, I see the fear in their eyes, that they are going to get rear ended by an inattentive driver, or that on a street with more than one lane in the same direction, another driver in another lane will fail to stop or even slow, and they will have to see someone die right in front of their eyes. I understand that fear, because both these things happen with disturbing frequency.

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does Sacramento enforce illegal parking?

Dan Allison2 Comments

As a person who walks a lot in the central city, and some in other areas, I often see and report illegal parking to the city through the 311 app. I’m not talking about parking too long, or not paying, but about blocking driveways, sidewalks, and crosswalks. 90% of the time, the response that I get was that a parking officer was dispatched and the vehicle was no longer there, so no citation was issued. I provide the license number, vehicle description, and a photo, but the city will not use that information to ticket once a vehicle has moved. But, the real issue it that they often ignore the violation completely.

An example. I reported this illegally parked vehicle at 9:17AM. It was blocking the crosswalk over 13th St, and the ADA ramp. The remaining ramp area was not wide enough to allow a wheelchair to pass. At 11:09AM I received an email reply from the city, stating: “A Parking Enforcement Officer arrived at P ST & 13TH ST, SACRAMENTO, 95814 to find that the vehicle(s) reported were no longer on the scene.” At 7:30PM, the vehicle was still in exactly the same place. The officer was lying. The vehicle was still there. Either the officer never visited the location, or decided not to cite the vehicle.

illegally parking vehicle blocking crosswalk and ADA ramp
illegally parked vehicle, 13th St, not cited

This is the sort of attitude the city has toward people who walk, or roll. They are always less important than people who drive.

assault by an entitled driver

Dan Allison4 Comments

This morning I was nearly hit and then assaulted by the driver of an SUV in Sacramento. I was crossing 14th St at the south side of P St at about 7:30AM. The driver had stopped before the crosswalk, so I proceeded across, but the driver lurched forward and nearly hit me. I had to jump back to avoid being hit, and slapped the side of his vehicle to get his attention. I proceeded across the crosswalk and onto the sidewalk. The driver leapt out of this vehicle and came after me, screaming that if I ever touched his car again, he would hurt me. I don’t remember the exact words, but they were violent words. He kept saying “I didn’t see you”, not in an apologetic manner, but in a way that implied it was my fault that he didn’t see me. After yelling a number of more threats, he shoved me. This is assault.

A bystander took photos of the driver and his vehicle, seen below. The bystander used the same term that I often used, ‘entitled drivers’. She was more than happy to provide the photos to me, and expressed hope that I would file charges. I have submitted an incident report to Sacramento PD.

the vehicle: GMC Yukon, grey, license M546BO
the driver, on left, white middle aged male

I notice when walkers and bicyclist post photo of vehicles driven by offending drivers, they often blank out the license number. I’m not sure why. Maybe it is fear of retaliation, worse violence from the driver. But here you go: the license plate was CA M546BO. It is a strange license number.

Back to the entitled. Many drivers feel that they own the road, and it is the responsibility of others to get out of their way. This applies particularly to walkers and bicyclists, but it even applies to other drivers. The excuse often offered is “I didn’t see them”. I think this is often fabricated after the fact to justify what would otherwise not be justifiable, which is an intention or willingness to harm others. But in some case it is true. They didn’t see because they didn’t look. Many drivers are looking at their phones or their large in-dash information displays. In this case, the driver was looking only to the right to see traffic on one-way P Street. He probably never looked left at all. But it is the legal responsibility of drivers to look and to see. If they are not willing to do that, as is true of this driver, they should not hold a license to drive. This driver, in part because he has a large, expensive vehicle, felt entitled to be driving on the street without paying attention, particularly at a crosswalk where walkers have the right of way.

This is the people we share the streets with. And the people about whom traffic ‘safety’ agencies such as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) continue to claim that road safety is a shared responsibility. Bullshit. Drivers kill people, walkers and bicyclists (with extremely rare exceptions) do not.

This is also a street design issue. One way streets are safer to cross for walkers because you only need to look in one direction, left or right. However, for people on cross streets, they are much more dangerous because many (most?) drivers never look the other direction for people in the crosswalk or bicycling.

I hope your day is going better.

the blind spot of roadway re-design

Dan Allison1 Comment

It has become popular these days to claim that the only real solution to traffic violence is re-design of roadways to prevent bad driver behavior, and to eliminate traffic enforcement as a solution to bad driver behavior. I’m not in disagreement with this. Re-design does prevent a lot of bad driver behavior. Traffic enforcement is very often a tool of oppression by law enforcement on people of color. All true.

But… There is also a blind spot. Roadway re-design does not force drivers to yield to walkers in the crosswalk. Sure, if traffic is going slower, it is less likely that collisions will be fatal to the walker, and perhaps slightly less likely to result in a collision at all, with more reaction time. But a driver that won’t yield at 35 mph is a driver that won’t yield at 25 mph. Failure to yield to someone in the crosswalk is sociopathic behavior, in that it intimidates people against walking, and it is psychopathic behavior in that it prioritizes driver convenience over the lives of others. These people are mentally ill, and they should be removed from our roadways. Not just ticketed, but their drivers license pulled and their vehicle confiscated.

No technology that I’m aware of will automatically enforce yielding behavior, or ticket failure to yield. Red light running cameras are legal in California, but are installed on only a tiny fraction of signalized intersections, and are not even used in many localities. Speed cameras are illegal in California (to protect the guilty). I have never heard of cameras focused on failure to yield.

Law enforcement has essentially stopped enforcing failure to yield. I’ve never seen someone stopped for this violation, and the traffic stop statistics say that it almost never happens. Law enforcement doesn’t care. It sees walkers as second class citizens. After all, they are often lower income and sometimes homeless, people that law enforcement feels obligated to oppress, not to serve. I myself have experienced law enforcement officers failing to yield to me in the crosswalk a number of times. CHP is the worst offender, but all the agencies are guilty.

What provoked this post? I was bicycling home along P Street from the store. A woman was crossing. The driver in the left hand land stopped for her, as did I. The driver in the right hand lane not only did not slow to see why, but blew through the crosswalk, very nearly hitting the woman. I caught up with the vehicle, and saw that both the driver and passenger were high-income, white, and young. When I tried to talk to them about their violation and nearly hitting the woman, they blew me off and implied that I was crazy for even caring about this. This is the drivers we share the road with.

Yes, let’s re-design the roadways. But in the meanwhile, lets enforce failure to yield with serious consequences. The lives of people walking are too valuable to sacrifice to drivers, for even one day. I realize there are equity implications of traffic enforcement, but my anecdotal observation says that the worse drivers are high-income white males. Hardly the oppressed class.

CVC 21950

Hmm. 16th St traffic calming

Dan Allison2 Comments

A new traffic calming feature has showed up on 16th Street approaching R Street in midtown Sacramento. Paint and flex posts have been placed between the travel lanes. Advance yield lines (‘sharks teeth’) were also painted, showing where drivers should stop when yielding to pedestrians.

16th St lane channelization

I’m not sure what to think of this. Certainly this is a problematic intersection. Cars stopped for the light rail gates between R Street and Q Street often stop throughout the intersection, blocking both the north and south crosswalks over 16th Street, as well as the intersection itself, preventing vehicles along R Street from proceeding while the traffic is stopped. As with all multilane streets, but particularly high speed, one-way arterials, drivers in one lane may stop for a walker while the others will not. I see this every day, and this intersection is worse than most. For reasons I don’t understand, traffic speeds on 16th Street northbound are noticeably higher than 15th Street southbound, even though the design of both streets in the same.

So, how’s it working. Well, I’ve so far only had the chance to observe it for 15 minutes. I’m not sure it is making much difference. About 10% of drivers stopped at or close to the advance yield lines. About 70% of drivers stopped at the forward edge of the flex posts, about 10% stopped over the crosswalk, and about 10% did not stop for people using the crosswalk. I saw three people nearly hit by drivers. This is not unusual, and it not worse than before, but it is not good.

Below is an example. The driver to the left stopped over the top of the crosswalk, even though it was clear that traffic ahead was stopped for the light rail gate, and there was no space to proceed into. The driver to the right stopped before the crosswalk, but not at the advance yield line. Not visible it the driver in the closest lane who did not stop at all because there was a space in that lane across the intersection.

walker using the crosswalk over 16th St at R St

While I appreciate the effort, I’m not sure if the results will be what is desired, which is the ability of walkers to safely cross the street.

In the long run, the reallocation of roadway on 16th Street to reduce the general purpose lanes from three to two will help this location a great deal, but I don’t know when that will happen. It could be years away.

With the new businesses on R Street to the east, and the street dining area on R Street to the west of 15th Street, this intersection has become quite busy with walkers, bicyclists, scooters, and motor vehicles. It does deserve attention.

crosswalk barriers done right

Dan Allison1 Comment

And now, before going on to all the examples of failure to accommodate walkers and bicyclists, some examples of crosswalk/sidewalk barriers that are done right. These barriers are for the state office building being constructed on the north side of O Street between 11th Street and 10th Street. It is also the light rail alignment, and one of the busier light rail borderings is across the street at Archives Plaza.

These barriers are some of the few ADA compliant barriers in the entire city. These are hard barriers, not construction tape or plastic barricade poles that can be walked through without notice be a vision impaired person. They have a base plate which is detectable by canes. They are anchored to the sidewalk, so that they can’t be knocked over intentionally or accidentally. The signing is clear, that the sidewalk/crosswalk is closed, and that the route goes left, crossing O Street.

11th Street at O Street, northeast corner

At the opposite corner of the project, on 10th Street southbound, there is clear signing, even wayfinding signing for the State Museum. Though the sidewalk is open for half the block, the barriers and signing make clear that a crossing of 10th Street is the appropriate action. Again, these are ADA compliant barriers.

10th Street east side, southbound from N Street

On 11th Street northbound, there is ‘share the lane’ signing, which is not ideal but serves acceptably in this situation with narrow street width. On 10th Street northbound, the bicycle lane has been carried through by shifting travel lanes to the left (west) and removing parking (no photo, but I will add one later). This is a good solution to accommodating bicyclists.

11th Street northbound

The remaining photos below show the other barriers and signing for this construction project. I don’t know why this one was done correctly, when most of the others are not. Was it the construction company that insisted on doing it right? Was it the state? Was it the city?

10th Street at O Street, northwest corner, crosswalk barricade
O Street at 10th Street, southeast corner, barricade and signing
O Street at 11th Street, southwest corner, barricade and signing

J & 13th needs a pedestrian scramble

Dan Allison1 Comment

Following the post yesterday, Morse-Cottage pedestrian scramble, here is my first suggestion for a pedestrian scramble in Sacramento. J Street and 13th Street would be a great location for one. It has high pedestrian traffic, it has pedestrian attractors on three corners (convention center, Sheraton Grand Hotel, and a parking garage), and many people cross more than one direction. I am not sure that it is the highest volume intersection, but it is quite possible the highest visitor location where people are less likely to be paying attention or to understand our signal system

Most importantly, the pedestrian signalization here is seriously screwed up, and it needs to be changed. On the west leg, the pedestrian phase is short. On the east leg,there is a ‘leading vehicle interval’ that allows southbound left turning vehicles to start before the pedestrian walk comes on, so almost every cycle creates pedestrian-vehicle conflicts. All the crossings require button pushes, none are on automatic recall that is standard at intersections in urban areas with heavy pedestrian flow. And the whole intersection cycle is much too long, giving preference to drivers on J Street over walkers, right here in the heart of a place where so many people walk. The cycle also sometimes skips the west leg completely, making pedestrians wait through two cycles of J Street traffic, which is a long, long time.

In addition to the exclusive phase, diagonal crosswalks should be marked to make it clear how the intersection works.

Let’s make this the first of many pedestrian scrambles in the central city.

Morse-Cottage pedestrian scramble

Dan Allison1 Comment

At the intersection of Morse Ave and Cottage Way in the Arden-Arcade community of Sacramento county, there is a pedestrian scramble. What this men’s is that the pedestrian signal is on, for walk, in all the directions at once. They are also called Barnes Dance, for Henry Barnes, the traffic engineer who popularized them, and exclusive pedestrian phases.

Sometimes these intersections have marked diagonal crosswalks, as a reminder that diagonal crossings are permitted, and sometimes they do not, but a pedestrian may cross diagonally whether the marked crosswalk is there or not.

I am most familiar with these from Reno (I lived in Carson City for some years), which has several along Virginia Street in downtown. I’ve seen them other places, but don’t recall exactly where right now. At every location where I’ve seen them, right turns are prohibited on red, by signing, so when pedestrians are crossing, no cars are moving at all, and there is no issue with drivers failing to yield to pedestrians using the crosswalk.

I think that every intersection that has heavy pedestrian traffic, particularly where many of the pedestrians are crossing one street and then the other, should have pedestrian scrambles. Yes, they slow traffic a bit, but they increase pedestrian safety and comfort, a great trade-off in my opinion. Many scrambled that existed in the past were removed by traffic engineers who wanted to prioritize vehicle flow over all other considerations, including safety, but it is time to bring them back, at least in select locations. See Governing Magazine, Cities Revive an Old Idea to Become More Pedestrian-Friendly, or search the Internet for pedestrian scramble for both recent and old installations.

The county had this to say about the intersection:

  1. The all-ways crossing, also known as a pedestrian scramble, at Cottage and Morse was in place/operation prior to the 2016 Cottage Way modification project. After doing some researched, we discovered it has been in place since the signal was installed in 1969.
  2. The pedestrian scramble operates 24 hours a day.
  3. The configuration of this intersection is unusual for the County. The scramble works for this location given the layout and right of way constraints that result in some of the corners only having one pedestrian push button to serve two directions.
  4. We currently do not have any plans to add diagonal crossings at this location.
  5. This is currently the only location in the County that has a pedestrian scramble.

removal of crosswalks

Dan Allison2 Comments

In today’s SacBee, an article on the City of Sacramento’s removal of crosswalks (Why Sacramento erased 23 crosswalks, including one where a grandmother died after removal), which has contributed to at least one fatality, had the following information from Ryan Moore, the City Traffic Engineer.

“To send the message via crosswalk that this is a good place to cross the road is a false message,” Moore said of the Oregon Drive intersection. “Our standards dictated that we remove the crosswalk or build safety enhancements.” The city would have kept the crosswalk marking in place, he said, if it would have been able to install a traffic light there. But the money – in the $500,00 plus range wasn’t available. Instead, traffic engineers hope that by removing some crosswalks, pedestrians will instinctively choose to cross at a safer, nearby intersection, Moore said.

This is definitely the engineer perspective that says lives don’t matter as long as policy was being followed, and the windshield perspective that it is OK to make pedestrians walk out of their way so long as drivers are not inconvenienced.

Freeport-Oregon.pngAs you can see to the right, at the intersection of Freeport and Oregon, there are residences to the west and businesses to the right. There are signalized crosswalks about 700 feet to the north and about 700 feet to the south, but walking to either of these adds a one-quarter mile walk. Is this reasonable or not? It could be argued either way, but to discount it as Mr. Moore did demonstrates bias against pedestrians. The Google Map photo is from before the removal of the crosswalk.

The suggestion that nearby intersections are safer is also questionable. At the intersections of arterial roads, which Freeport and Fruitridge to the south are, drivers routinely fail to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk on right turns. That is in fact why many walkers prefer to cross away from major intersections.

Common estimates of the expense of a HAWK signal (High-intensity Activated crossWalK) are $100,000, not $500,000. $500,000 is the cost of a fully signalized intersection. So Mr. Moore’s $500,000 number is a straw man meant to deflect criticism by saying the solution is more expensive than it really is.

There are solutions to this particular problem, and to the removal of crosswalks in general:

  1. The city should be required to perform a complete traffic study before removing any crosswalk. The city is always saying that they have to do traffic studies before anything can be done to change traffic flow, so I would presume that doing a traffic study in this situation would be a no-brainer.
  2. If the traffic study indicates that the crosswalk is unsafe, then the next step is to design a solution or options, with a funding estimate, and then go to city council with a request for the funding.
  3. The city council would have to hold a hearing, either as part of the regular city council meeting or as a separate meeting, to gather public input on the removal. If the city council then makes a decision not to expend the funds to create a safe crossing, the crosswalk can be removed.
  4. If a crosswalk is removed, the city would be required to post informational signing at that location with distances to the nearest safe crossing in both directions, so that pedestrians can make informed decisions. The signing would have to stay in place for at least two years.

Anything short of these actions makes the city engineers both morally and legally responsible for any fatalities or severe injuries that occur at the site of a removed crosswalk.