County Rated 10th in State in Danger to Pedestrians

Walking in Ventura County is getting more deadly.

The county ranks 10th on a list of the most dangerous places for pedestrians, a statewide study reported Thursday. Thirteen pedestrians were killed in the county last year, up from 10 the year before.

The ranking is based on a formula that factors in pedestrian deaths and injuries along with population and the amount of walking done in the county.

“The counties that are most dangerous are ones like Ventura with rapid expansion, where new suburban sprawl is being built,” said Gloria Ohland, coauthor of the study done by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a nonprofit safety group. “These are communities that are designed for the car and are anti-pedestrian.”

She said that, increasingly, walkers are not made to feel comfortable on the street, and drivers are sometimes unaccustomed to seeing them. High speeds contribute to the number of deaths because drivers and pedestrians have less time to react.

Ohland noted that throughout the state, pedestrian fatalities account for nearly 20% of the traffic-related deaths, even though only 8% of all trips are made on foot. Statewide, at least 688 pedestrians died and another 14,346 were injured last year.

In Ventura County, pedestrian deaths accounted for 22% of all traffic fatalities in 1999. In San Francisco, by contrast, more than half of the 48 traffic fatalities involved pedestrians. But because considerably more people walk in San Francisco than in most other cities in the state, it ranked No. 12.

Los Angeles County, which ranked No. 3, had 203 deaths, about 30% of its total traffic fatalities last year. Sacramento, with 30 deaths, was ranked the most dangerous.

Ohland said transportation engineers could do more to make pedestrians safer, such as installing crosswalks with zebra striping, speed bumps or narrowing streets to slow speeding cars.

However, many cities have begun taking out crosswalks along streets without traffic signals because they fear that pedestrians are given a false sense of security, she said.

Camarillo Traffic Engineer Tom Fox explained that cities make those decisions because the accident rate falls when crosswalks are removed.

“If I create a crosswalk, I’ve created a potential for more accidents,” he said. “I wouldn’t take it out because I’m thinking about the cars, but because I’m thinking about the pedestrians.”

The study found that California spends less than 1% of its federal transportation funds on pedestrian safety, less than any other state.

Tom Mericle, transportation engineer for the city of Ventura, noted that the priority for many of his colleagues is to move cars as efficiently as possible.

“As a general statement, the focus of the profession over the last 20 or 30 years is what’s happening between the curbs, rather than outside the curbs, like pedestrians, landscaping and bicyclists,” he said.

In the last two years, Mericle said, Ventura hasn’t had any pedestrian deaths, possibly because the city has used traffic-calming devices, such as narrowing roads.

The study addressed the question of who drives and who walks, saying those who walk are disproportionately minorities who don’t have the money to own or operate a car.

The report said: “It is speculated that the link between pedestrian collisions and ethnicity is due to the fact that Latinos and African Americans in California are less likely to own a car and more likely to walk, bike or take public transit--resulting in greater exposure to the dangers of the street.”

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Mean Streets

The 10 California counties rated the most dangerous for pedestrians in 1999 are listed below. The ranking is based on a combination of factors, including population, pedestrian fatalities and injuries, and the amount of pedestrian activity.

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County Deaths 1. Sacramento 30 2. Contra Costa 8 3. Los Angeles 203 4. Santa Clara 22 5. San Mateo 7 6. Orange 45 7. San Joaquin 12 8. Kern 12 9. Stanislaus 9 10. Ventura 13

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Source: Surface Transportation Policy Project