Steps Urged to Protect Pedestrians

Los Angeles, Orange and three surrounding counties constitute the nation’s eighth most dangerous metropolitan area for pedestrians, according to a study released Thursday that calls on government officials to devote more money to protecting walkers.

“At this rate, pedestrians are becoming an endangered species,” said Gloria Ohland, who supervised the gathering of Southern California data for the nonprofit Surface Transportation Policy Project. “People are literally being driven off the street.”

The study ranked three urban areas in Florida as the most precarious for pedestrians: Orlando, followed by the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater region and the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area.

Eight of the top 10 locations on the study’s most hazardous list are Sun Belt communities that have stressed traffic flow over walking space as they have grown rapidly in the post-World War II years.

“These are places where little attention has been paid to building communities that work for people as well as for cars,” said Roy Kienitz, executive director of the transportation project, a coalition of 30 national and more than 200 state and local advocacy groups.

According to the group’s report, there were 1,382 fatalities and major injuries to pedestrians in the area encompassing Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties in 1996. That number far surpassed the figures for every other region in the country, but seven other communities were deemed more risky based on the report’s “pedestrian danger index.”

That index factored in population, 1996 government data on the number of pedestrian accidents per 100,000 people and U.S. census data on the percentage of people who walk to work.

The study laments that nationwide, a lack of concern for pedestrian safety is especially harmful to children--the segment of the population most dependent on walking and bike-riding for its mobility. In 1996, the study said, 69% of all pedestrian fatalities occurred on neighborhood streets, not on major roads; 16% of the pedestrians killed were 18 or younger.

Orange County coroner’s records show there were 42 pedestrian deaths in the county in 1996, but that was a marked improvement over the previous three years, when an average of 63 pedestrians were killed annually on the county’s roadways.

Through July this year, there have been 22 pedestrian deaths in the county, a pace that, if it holds, would result in the lowest fatality total in more than a decade.

Investigators with local police agencies say it is difficult to make generalizations about pedestrian accidents, but here, as across the nation, many involve youngsters darting into traffic. Other common situations are drunk pedestrians stepping into traffic at night and pedestrians trying to beat cars at busy intersections.

“Around Disneyland, for example, we have so many people walking and driving that it can create problems,” said Sgt. Joe Vargas of the Anaheim Police Department. “We put up lots of signs just to make sure everyone is aware, but you still have problems.”

While making streets more pedestrian-friendly is a daunting task in burgeoning metropolitan areas, the report offers several suggestions to achieve this, including a major reallocation of government funds on the state level.

From 1992 to 1997, according to the report, pedestrians were involved in 18% of all of California’s traffic-related accidents, yet less than 1% of the federal transportation money the state received went to safety projects aiding pedestrians. The figures were comparable elsewhere, and the report called on states to correct what it termed “this spending discrepancy.”

Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago responded that “our safety effort is woven into our entire state operation. When we build a shoulder on a bridge, that contributes to safety. But it doesn’t get listed as a ‘safety’ project.”

Caltrans spends about $200 million of its annual $1-billion to $1.5-billion budget on projects such as cleanup, safety barriers and road widening, Drago said.

Other measures suggested by the report include:

* Providing more sidewalks and improving existing ones.

* Increasing the number of crosswalks.

* Greater use of “traffic calming” devices--traffic circles, narrowed streets and speed bumps that encourage slower driving.

Other California metropolitan areas included on the report’s pedestrian danger list and their ranking were: Sacramento (15), San Diego (23) and the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area (27).

In the city of Los Angeles, pedestrian deaths have fallen sharply from a post-World War II level of 300 a year to 172 in 1990 and 108 last year. Between them, Los Angeles and Orange counties had 307 pedestrian deaths and more than 6,500 injuries in 1997.

California Highway Patrol Officer Rhett S. Price said the primary reason for fatalities is pedestrians crossing roads without either marked or implied crosswalks. Of the 782 pedestrians killed statewide in 1996, 40% involved people who were crossing roadways without using crosswalks.

Another common culprit is what officers call the “California stop,” the failure of drivers to come to a complete stop when they approach a stop sign or red light readying for a right-hand turn. Pedestrians are often hit by a driver who accelerates too soon.

“What California motorists fail to realize many times is that there is a crosswalk at every intersection unless otherwise posted,” Price said. “So when a pedestrian steps into a road even if there is no crosswalk painted, they are legally on a crosswalk.”

But crosswalks do not mean pedestrians always have the right of way. In fact, traffic laws say pedestrians should defer to cars approaching crosswalks unless the driver has time to stop safely.

“If a truck is coming down the road at 55 mph, and it is 100 yards away, you don’t step onto the crosswalk,” Price said. “Just because you are in a crosswalk it doesn’t mean you have the right of way.”

Sgt. Bob Rieboldt of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Traffic Coordination Section agreed.

“Crosswalks give pedestrians a false sense of security,” he said. “The car still has to see you to stop. You have to see the driver and make eye contact, that is very important.”

He added that some older neighborhoods in Los Angeles were not originally designed to handle modern rates of traffic.

“We need more stop signs and more traffic lights,” he said.

In the hustle of lunchtime traffic in downtown Los Angeles, the frustration of some pedestrians was apparent.

“This is the worst, you get so frustrated,” said Araceli Romero at the intersection of Flower Avenue and 7th Street.

Romero and a group of co-workers from a nearby building had just finished trekking the busy crosswalk where the green light for pedestrians lasts barely a few seconds. The group complained that drivers are often inattentive and do not respect pedestrians’ right of way.

“Even if you have the green light, they drive right by,” Alice Holsonback said.

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Times staff writer Geoff Boucher contributed to this report.