A review of more than 300 accidents over the last three years shows that a one-mile stretch of West 1st Street accounts for nearly a fourth of all pedestrian deaths in Santa Ana, a city with the highest pedestrian fatality rate in Southern California.
Despite the accident cluster on 1st Street between Fairview and Bristolstreets, the city has focused little effort on improving road conditions there. Officials maintain that safety measures would be costly and not necessarily effective.
Two years ago, the city actually raised the speed limit along a portion of the route from 35 to 40 mph--a move questioned by residents as well as some police officers.
"I think we kind of shot ourselves in the foot on that," said Officer Paul Hayes, a member of the city's Pedestrian Accident Reduction Team. "I think it [the speed limit] should go back down."
Five pedestrians lost their lives and six have been injured on the stretch of West 1st Street since 1995, according to a Times survey of pedestrian injury reports. They include a 35-year-old man struck by a drunk driver who ran a red light and another unidentified pedestrian who died while jaywalking.
The six-lane road into downtown is so intimidating that some pedestrians dare cross only in groups and firefighters alter their routes when responding to emergency calls.
The portion of West 1st lacks raised medians that traffic engineers have placed elsewhere in the city to reduce pedestrian and car accidents. Officials said they have no plans to install the medians or additional traffic signals, saying they are too expensive and would slow traffic.
The review of accidents across Santa Ana identified West 1st Street as the worst of several areas where pedestrians and cars collide with unusual frequency. A 2 1/2-mile stretch of Bristol Street, for example, has been the site of three pedestrian deaths and 14 injuries. A 2 1/2-mile portion of Main Street has seen one fatality and 12 pedestrian injuries.
City officials said last week that they weren't aware of the accident clusters on West 1st Street and several other locations and vowed to review safety measures. But they maintain that engineers can do little to improve the situation because the vast majority of the accidents are the fault of pedestrians.
"Based on the cause of accidents, I am not sure we can redesign streets to eliminate" accidents, said Ruth Smith, Santa Ana's associate traffic engineer. "Even if we put signals on every intersection, we wouldn't solve the problem."
Others strongly disagree, complaining that the city has been slow in dealing with pedestrian safety issues and rarely grants requests for new traffic signals and other improvements.
"The city blames the pedestrians for being hit, rather than spending the money to make it a safer community," said Marti Baker, the principal at Madison Elementary School. For a decade, Baker has unsuccessfully lobbied the city to install a signal in front of the school on Standard Avenue, where two fatal accidents have occurred.
"We believe we should have a traffic light, rather than wait for someone else to get killed," she said.
Cities Must Weigh Safety Versus Gridlock
City officials said they have been studying traffic around the elementary school in recent months and will decide soon whether to place a signal there.
The problem illustrates the balancing act governments face in trying to protect pedestrians while at the same time avoiding gridlock. It is an issue that's receiving more attention across the nation as community groups push for changes in existing street designs that they say favor movement of traffic over pedestrian safety.
The issue came into focus earlier this year with a UC Irvine study that found Santa Ana to have the highest pedestrian-death rate in Southern California and the third-highest in the state. So far this year, five pedestrians have lost their lives--one shy of matching the city's pedestrian death rate for all of last year. More than 300 pedestrians are injured in accidents each year--many of them children and elderly people.
The Santa Ana Police Department in March began a major enforcement effort that includes more jaywalking patrols and a public-education campaign targeting the city's Latino population. Since the crackdown began, police have issued more than 1,500 jaywalking citations and more than 250 tickets to motorists who failed to yield to pedestrians.
On the dangerous stretch of West 1st Street, the five pedestrian fatalities have a variety of causes, with both drivers and jaywalkers being at fault.
The street carries 30,000 vehicles daily--an average of 20 cars a minute over a 24 hour period. Residents call it inherently dangerous. The wide road is dotted with supermarkets and other businesses that serve a densely populated neighborhood where many residents don't have cars.
