At Cross-Purposes in Safety Debate : Traffic: City staff finds crosswalks can give pedestrians a false sense of security. However, the council refuses for a second time to abolish them.

Are crosswalks hazardous to pedestrian health?

Santa Monica traffic experts, bolstered by an armload of studies, say yes. Crosswalks at intersections without stop signs or signals have been shown time and again to be deathtraps. It seems that pedestrians, knowing they have the right of way, are lulled into a false sense of security only to be challenged by a car. The car always wins.

That is why for the past year, Santa Monica city staff members have been urging the City Council to pass a policy to phase out unprotected crosswalks as streets are resurfaced.

It’s a hard sell. The public has an all but unshakable faith in crosswalks as safe passageways. In Santa Monica, removing them also runs counter to the goal of fostering a pedestrian-friendly environment.

On that basis, the Santa Monica City Council recently rejected its staff’s recommendations for the second time, voting 4-3 to order the city’s traffic engineer to figure out a way to make crosswalks safer, rather than gradually eliminating them.

The pro-crosswalk forces were led by Councilman Kelly Olsen, who had asked for council action on replacing crosswalks at corners without stop signs on Montana Avenue and Pico Boulevard. Both streets have been resurfaced in the last two years.

“I think crosswalks do work,” Olsen insisted.

Sam Hall Kaplan, a board member of the Wilshire-Montana Neighborhood Coalition who has written extensively about urban planning, advised the council not to surrender to the car--nor to traffic engineers whose chief loyalty is to moving traffic.

“Traffic calming is an idea whose time has come,” Kaplan said.

Olsen was also armed with a letter from state Assemblyman Terry Friedman (D-Brentwood), who all but ordered the city to put back the crosswalks in the upscale Montana business district.

“Frankly, I do not believe this matter requires further study,” Friedman wrote. “Immediate action is necessary before there is a serious accident.”

Preventing serious accidents is also the goal of the anti-crosswalk forces, led by Santa Monica Parking and Traffic Engineer Ron Fuchiwaki and City Manager John Jalili.

“I don’t think you’ll have a pedestrian-friendly environment if the pedestrians don’t live to experience friendship,” Jalili said.

Jalili was backed by Councilwoman Asha Greenberg, a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles, who said she has prosecuted cases of vehicular manslaughter in which victims were killed in crosswalks.

“I’m concerned about the city’s liability,” Greenberg said. “I don’t want to go, willy-nilly, painting crosswalks all over the city.”

A study by Fuchiwaki found that, in 1990 in Santa Monica, 36 of the 39 accidents in which a vehicle hit a pedestrian occurred in marked crosswalks. In 1991, 19 out of 22 accidents were in marked crosswalks.

One publicized 1991 accident claimed the life of Alice Fiondella, the 89-year-old mother of restaurateur Jay Fiondella. She was struck by a car while in a crosswalk on Ocean Avenue in front of her son’s restaurant, Chez Jay. Jay Fiondella called for a flashing light to make the crosswalk safer, but the city painted it over instead.

Santa Monica is not the only city struggling with mixed signals over crosswalks. “That issue is the most difficult thing I have to deal with as a traffic engineer,” said Los Angeles’ Chief Transportation Engineer Jim Sherman.

The policy in Los Angeles has long been to let unprotected crosswalks die from attrition, but, Sherman said, he is sometimes overruled when constituents, who refuse to believe the studies he quotes, persuade their City Council representative to intercede.

The perceived danger of crosswalks that are unprotected by stop signs or signals is nothing new. The seminal study was done in San Diego about 20 years ago. It concluded that, at intersections without stop signs or lights, pedestrians were about twice as likely to be hit by a car if they are in a marked crosswalk than if they were not.

Other studies followed, including one from Long Beach published in 1985. It concluded that in uncontrolled intersections, a pedestrian was 7.5 times as likely to be struck in a crosswalk than to be struck when crossing a street without the painted white lines.

Moreover, the Long Beach study found, accidents in crosswalks were more likely to result in serious injury or death.

A 1992 survey of crosswalk research, written by Kenneth Todd and published in Transportation Quarterly, urges a shift toward teaching pedestrians to watch out for themselves, rather than insist on a right of way that has proven to be dangerous.

“A law that encourages pedestrians to force fast-moving vehicles to stop . . . may have political appeal but does nothing for safety and efficiency,” Todd wrote. “The current system is incompatible with pedestrian safety.”

Although some traffic engineers say the crosswalk law was always based on a faulty premise, it used to work somewhat better in years past because of less aggressive drivers and more stringent enforcement.

In the 1950s, Sherman said, motorists were legally required to stop for pedestrians, no matter where they were crossing, including the middle of the block. Later, the law was modified to give pedestrians the right of way only when in a crosswalk.

Those who recall life in Southern California 25 years ago know that drivers who did not stop for pedestrians who had stepped down from the curb were routinely ticketed by police. And the fervent belief in the safety of the crosswalk was born.

Now, traffic engineers cite the influx of immigrants who were never inculcated with California’s pedestrian right-of-way laws as one explanation for the growing disregard of crosswalks by motorists.

Enforcement, meanwhile, has all but vanished as police with limited resources are stretched thin by the more serious ills of urban life.

“Everything gets a priority,” traffic engineer Fuchiwaki said. “We don’t have that enforcement stronghold anymore.”

While others may bemoan the lack of crosswalk etiquette as another example of the loss of urban civility, traffic engineers say they must deal with the reality: Righteous pedestrians facing oblivious motorists are courting disaster.

If having no markings on the streets is what it takes to make pedestrians into the walking equivalent of defensive drivers, Fuchiwaki said, he is all for it.

Traffic engineers for Santa Monica and Los Angeles agree that the parallel white lines denoting crosswalks are difficult for drivers to see, but they said they know of no research to support the premise that better-marked crosswalks are safer. Still, both cities are trying bold, ladder-like stripes in selected locations.

Other suggestions for making Santa Monica crosswalks safer include warning signs for motorists or putting in lane-divider bumps, called rumble strips, to get drivers’ attention while they are still able to stop.

Fuchiwaki said in an interview that such measures would cost from $100 to $300 per crosswalk, a consideration in a city currently beset by an anticipated budget shortfall for the second year in a row.

Urban affairs expert Kaplan, however, is not about to cede the streets to pollution-belching four-wheeled urban terrorists. Taking out crosswalks encourages drivers’ aggressiveness, Kaplan said.

Armed with his own studies of ways to create a pedestrian-friendly environment, Kaplan talks of narrowing roadways, putting in more crosswalks and lowering speed limits so drivers can see pedestrians as people.

City Councilman Ken Genser is one who is sold on that idea: “Let’s put in crosswalks and let the streets adapt to that,” he said.