Santa Ana Lags in Safety Spending

Santa Ana has the highest pedestrian fatality rate in Southern California, but it spends less to make streets safer than some cities with fewer accidents and has been slower to embrace new forms of traffic engineering.

Santa Ana spends about $1.1 million a year on various pedestrian projects, or about $3.60 per resident.

By contrast, two smaller cities that have made pedestrian safety a high priority--Santa Monica and West Hollywood--spend $1.7 million and $2 million respectively. Their allocations amount to $18.28 per resident in Santa Monica and $55.56 per resident in West Hollywood.

Traffic engineers are using the money to remake street scapes with an eye on slowing traffic and reducing pedestrian accidents.

* In West Hollywood, officials are dotting crosswalks with flashing yellow lights that resemble airport runways.

* In Santa Monica, Pico Boulevard is being ripped apart and rebuilt with grassy medians that give pedestrians refuge as they cross the street.

* In Pasadena, busy intersections have been redesigned to allow pedestrians to cross diagonally through the street while all car traffic is stopped.

Santa Ana officials recently told a state Assembly committee examining the pedestrian issue that while they are committed to reducing the city’s accident rate, there is no additional money in the budget to start new pedestrian infrastructure projects.

In March, the city began a police crackdown on both jaywalkers and motorists who fail to yield as well as a public education campaign targeting schoolchildren and others.

But unlike West Hollywood and Santa Monica, Santa Ana has not included a significant increase in funding for traffic engineering--from redesigned roads to new stop lights.

Safety experts as well as local police said such engineering--along with public education--are far more likely to reduce pedestrian accidents than aggressive ticketing.

“If you can modify drivers’ behavior with engineering, it’s a permanent solution,” said Michael Ronkin, the bicycle and pedestrian safety coordinator for the state of Oregon.

Moreover, Santa Ana officials are reluctant to employ two of the most common types of safety improvements, which experts say show promise for reducing pedestrian crashes.

One device is the so-called “bulb-out,” concrete extensions of the sidewalk that protrude into streets at major crossings, narrowing the distance pedestrians must cross.

West Hollywood installed bulb-outs along Melrose Avenue a few years ago, and officials report a corresponding drop in accidents. The city is now adding them to its bustling main drag, Santa Monica Boulevard.

But George Alvarez, Santa Ana’s director of public works, said the city probably won’t follow suit.

Bulb-outs are commonly used on streets that allow parking and take up several spaces. Most Santa Ana boulevards, however, prohibit parking, so adding bulb-outs would take up a lane of traffic in each direction--something the city is unlikely to do.

Medians Offer a Safety Zone

Another widely used approach to improve pedestrian safety is building raised medians in the middle of major boulevards. These medians, experts said, offer pedestrians a safety zone as they attempt to make their way across.

A study by the Federal Highway Administration found that streets with raised medians have lower pedestrian accident rates compared to streets without them.

But in a move questioned at the time by safety experts, the Santa Ana City Council this summer approved an ordinance prohibiting pedestrians from standing on raised medians.

Officials said the law is designed to force pedestrians to cross at intersections or crosswalks, instead of mid-block locations where many accidents occur.

“That’s absurd,” Ronkin, a national authority on pedestrian safety, said of the ordinance. “If you’re at an intersection or mid-block location and if you have that median island, you have a refuge. We actually design our medians to be accessible to pedestrians.”

On the 17 miles of Santa Ana road that contain raised medians, schoolchildren, senior citizens and even mothers toting children can often be seen waiting for gaps in traffic to develop before crossing.

The medians appear to have made a difference in accident rates on at least one of Santa Ana’s most dangerous streets.

On West 1st Street between Bristol and Main streets, a one-mile stretch with raised medians, there were no fatal accidents between 1995 to 1998, according to a Times review of accident data. On an adjoining half-mile stretch of 1st Street with no medians, four pedestrians died.

Alvarez said the city doesn’t believe medians improve pedestrian safety and that they are installed mainly to divide road traffic.

The city plans to build medians along a portion of Bristol Street, but they will include tall grass mounds that make it difficult for pedestrians to cross, officials said.

To Ronkin and other experts, a serious focus on reducing pedestrian accidents requires city officials to change their mentality from simply ensuring smooth traffic flow to examining how cars and people share the roads.

This is especially significant in Santa Ana. Much of the central city was laid out 70 years ago in a narrow grid pattern and lacks the broad expressways of neighboring suburbs. The city has tried over the last few years to remove some bottlenecks from its street system, including a major widening of Bristol Street.

But some residents say the city now needs to refocus its attention--and open its purse strings--to capital projects that will benefit pedestrians.

“I just think that it requires a change of emphasis, and I’m not sure that mind-set is there right now,” said Michele Morrisey, a neighborhood activist and former member of the city’s environmental transportation advisory committee.

In both Santa Monica and West Hollywood, the push to improve pedestrian safety came in large part from residents who demanded government action--a type of grass-roots groundswell that Santa Ana so far hasn’t experienced.

“We realize that streets are no longer pedestrian-friendly, and now we’ve made a conscious decision to reverse that,” said Santa Monica Councilman Kevin McKeown, whose campaign platform included the slogan: “Paint a Crosswalk for the 21st Century.”

“It’s getting harder for people to cross the street,” he said. “We’ve made a substantial budget commitment to make Santa Monica a pedestrian-safe city.”

Seattle Tries Narrowing Streets

Santa Monica is not the only city taking aggressive action. In Seattle, some four-lane streets have been narrowed to two lanes to allow pedestrians and bicyclists easier passage.

The city of Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, has installed about 20 flashing crosswalks that alert drivers when pedestrians are crossing streets. The city also provides “pedestrian flags” at busy intersections. Pedestrians can pick up the one-foot square flags at corner containers and hold them aloft when they cross. Once across the street, the flags are redeposited for the next pedestrian.

Over the last four years, West Hollywood has placed flashing yellow signs at major crosswalks aimed at alerting drivers to slow down. In areas where these and other improvements were made, the number of pedestrian accidents has dropped significantly, said Eric Millsap, West Hollywood’s traffic engineering technician.

The city will spend $4 million during the next two years to remake Santa Monica Boulevard with bulb-outs, added signals and other pedestrian safety features.

Santa Ana traffic engineers said they are using the resources they have to improve conditions for pedestrians. The city is spending its $1.1 million on a variety of projects, such as installing better street signs, rebuilding crumbling sidewalks and making curbs accessible for wheelchairs. The city also plans to remove more than a dozen crosswalks from streets it considers unsafe.

Officials hope more extensive improvements can be funded through a new state program aimed at reducing pedestrian accidents involving children. The program makes $20 million available statewide, and it’s unclear how much, if any, Santa Ana would receive.

Based on Santa Ana’s problems, Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim) is also planning to introduce legislation next month that would allow cities to double traffic fines in certain pedestrian danger zones and use the extra money to make safety improvements.

Alvarez, the city’s public works director, said the city is unlikely to narrow streets as Seattle and West Hollywood did or otherwise reduce traffic flow on major boulevards. Such moves, Alvarez said, would simply spill commuters onto residential streets, creating more hazards for pedestrians.

The city, however, is considering several ideas, including building traffic circles in certain neighborhoods to slow traffic. It is also looking into installing flashing crosswalks at five locations.

The crosswalks feature embedded runway lights that flash when triggered by pedestrians who want to cross. Still considered experimental, only about 10 are in use statewide, including one in the unincorporated section of El Modena near Orange.

“These things are attention getters,” said Ignacio Ochoa, Orange County’s traffic engineer. “If you are a motorist approaching this area and this thing is activated, you’ll notice. They really jump out at you. They’re very bright.”

But the crosswalk installations are still uncertain. Like many infrastructure improvements the city has planned, officials say they hinge on receiving state grants.

Over the last year, the city has expanded public education programs promoting pedestrian safety. A police officer visits schools to talk with children, and Mayor Miguel A. Pulido is working on a television public service announcement.

Experts say education is an important step in reducing the accident rate. In Washington, D.C., officials even used a federal grant to produce a Spanish-language soap opera about the importance of pedestrian safety.

Meanwhile, Santa Ana police continue their aggressive enforcement of jaywalkers and motorists. So far, officers have issued more than 10,000 citations during the last nine months. But Cpl. Eric Mattke, who heads the department’s crackdown, acknowledged that tickets alone won’t solve the problem.

“I used to think that enforcement was the key, that writing lots more tickets and hammering the speeders was the solution. But not anymore.”

*

Times staff writer Ray F. Herndon contributed to this report.

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Protecting Pedestrians

A breakdown of how much three cities spend on pedestrian infrastructure projects per year, per resident:

Santa Ana: $3.60

Santa Monica: $18.28

West Hollywood: $55.56

Source: cities listed