Designers face uphill road to safer streets
At 4:27 p.m. on a skillet-hot June afternoon, a dozen weary people gathered outside a day labor depot no longer could stand the wait and began to bolt across Culebra Road at Navidad Street to catch the cooling respite of VIA’s approaching 82 bus.
They had six divided lanes to cross as cars hurtled by, ignoring the 45-mph speed limit sign.
At that location, pedestrians have a new dedicated crosswalk, a flashing yellow beacon, big yield signs and a raised-curb safety island in the middle lane — but human nature easily takes over.
A laughing young couple jay-sprinted to the island, dodging a Ford F-150 pickup that roared through the yellow lights. A sunburned blond woman, high on something, gyrated like a puppet on a string, balancing on the curb.
“People do not stop for you,” said Desiree, a neatly-coiffed middle-aged woman carrying a red canvas H-E-B shopping bag. “A flashing light ain’t enough. It’s dangerous.”
The stretch of Culebra between Interstate 10 and Loop 410 is a seven-lane, inner-city free-forall. On just the 1.7 miles between Zarzamora and General McMullen Drive, nine pedestrians were killed by vehicles between 2010 and 2017, Texas Department of Transportation data show.
Throughout its entire length, dozens have been severely injured in the past decade.
Others have died on Culebra this year, the latest on Monday night. At least three vehicles hit a man as he ran across the roadway near North Calaveras.
Hours later, a man was fatally struck by a police cruiser and possibly other vehicles early Tuesday as he tried to run across Interstate 35 near Wurzbach Parkway.
Across the city, almost 800 pedestrians were involved in vehicle incidents in 2016 alone, an unusually high number compared to years before and after. Some victims were drunk, drugged, wearing dark clothing at midnight, jaywalking or just oblivious to danger. But many were not.
The city and state are well aware of the problems on Culebra and other major traffic arteries — Broadway, San
Pedro Avenue, Fredericksburg, Blanco and Bandera roads, Austin Highway, Zarzamora Street, Military Drive, among others — and they’ve made limited improvements that likely saved lives. But critics say such roads remain testaments to outdated auto-centric planning.
They are notorious among the urban planners, engineers and pedestrian activists who were in San Antonio on Friday for a statewide convention of Vision Zero, an international initiative with the lofty goal of eliminating “all traffic fatalities and severe injuries.”
In 2015, San Antonio was the first Texas city to join Vision Zero, which began in Sweden in the 1990s, took hold throughout Europe and now has been adopted in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, among other U.S. cities.
While dismissed by some as just a feel-good program that puts engineering Band-Aids on deadly highways, Vision Zero supporters say it is, for America, a long-overdue paradigm shake-up that places bicyclists, pedestrians and mass transit on equal footing with automobiles when urban landscapes are being designed or, more often, retro-fitted.
Few dispute the need for some nationwide effort on pedestrian safety. The Governors Highway Safety Association estimates the number of walkers killed on roads hit a 32-year high in 2016 – a 27 percent increase since 2007 — even though all other types of traffic deaths decreased by 14 percent.
Five states — Texas, Arizona, California, Florida and New York — account for 43 percent of all pedestrian deaths. The 44 pedestrians killed in San Antonio last year was the lowest number in five years, after inexplicably spiking to 65 in 2016.
In San Antonio, the Vision Zero program largely has been directed by the city’s Transportation and Capital Improvements Department, which used $1 million in 2016 to focus on the five E’s of traffic safety — education, encouragement (social media campaigns), engineering (doing 10 projects annually), enforcement (pushing camera speed zones) and evaluation (identifying 20 high-crash corridors and intersections).
Additional money from the $850 million in bond projects approved in 2017 will be available for better-designed bridges, streets and sidewalks.
After identifying the city’s most pedestrian-threatening roads, TCI officials discovered a remarkable statistic — 33 percent of all severe pedestrianauto crashes in San Antonio were occurring on just 1 percent of its roads, including smaller but bustling streets such as Roosevelt, Probandt and Lone Star.
On the city’s 76 most dangerous roads, TCI researchers said, about half of the severe pedestrian injuries occurred from 6 p.m. to midnight, with the greatest number from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. The most frequent contributing factors to pedestrian deaths were predictable — roadway speed, sidewalk availability, lighting and behavioral issues such as alcohol or drug use — but there was little mention of poor road or signal design, or the lack of robust mass transit.
“We need a more forgiving system,” TCI transportation planner Rebecca Pacini said. “For example, when a driver gets a green light, the pedestrian usually gets a walk signal at the same time. We might should change that interval and let walkers go first and be more visible.”
But Culebra needs more than signal light tinkering.
“It has to be fundamentally redesigned,” said City Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales, an early proponent of Vision Zero for San Antonio. “We have a long way to go before it is safe. It should be turned into a ‘complete street,’ with bike lanes, sidewalks, trees, lower speed limits and limited driveways for businesses.”
Gonzales, whose family has owned a pawn shop on Zarzamora for decades, said she can remember when that road and Culebra were more welcoming to pedestrians.
“But then they were expanded with no concern whatsoever for anything but autos,” she said. “They just became the way to get out of town.”
Alberto Virgen, a lawyer who has kept his office on Culebra for 22 years, called it “absolutely a war zone.”
“People dart out from everywhere. Every week I’m talking to my wife driving home — hands-free — and I scream out, ‘Oh, my God,’ when someone just escapes getting killed.”
“In the last four years, I’ve known three people who got hit on Culebra,” said Roger Gonzales, a cook at Delicious Tamales who travels the street each day. “It’s not safe to walk.”
“The signs and lights are helpful,” said Christian Phelps, a landscaper from Van Nuys, California, who says he has lived near Culebra for 20 years. “But you can’t be sure anyone will stop. … We have hookers at night, people selling heroin, but we also have grandmothers and kids going to school.”
Dale Picha is what you might expect a veteran TxDOT traffic engineer to be — restrained, exacting, not prone to hyperbole. But when he parks his big state vehicle to monitor the pedestrian chaos on Culebra near Navidad, he gets a bit agitated.
“Those pedestrian islands make a huge difference, but it’s still a freaking runway,” said Picha, who knows Culebra the way a teacher knows a disobedient child. “Good luck finding people obeying the speed limit, unless it’s rush hour. I wouldn’t let my daughter cross at this spot.”
“I wouldn’t let mine cross Culebra, period,” then-TxDOT spokesman Josh Donat added.
Through the windshield, Picha, the traffic operations manager for the state agency’s San Antonio district, looked at the turn lane in the middle of Culebra. “I have a job because of left-hand turn lanes,” he laughed, suggesting the margin for head-on human error is small and smart design is essential.
He was proud to see the pedestrian “refuge” at work in the middle lane, but chagrined to see so many pedestrians who would not push the button that, in theory, stops traffic and allows them to cross.
“You want to yell and scream,” Picha said as a middle-aged man actually leaned on the pole that contained the traffic button, but chose to wait for all the traffic to pass.
Picha said the Culebra crossing at Navidad has been successful in curbing collisions — in the Vision Zero culture, the word “accidents” is frowned upon — but that the safety islands were actually opposed by some merchants because they would force traffic to drive perhaps 100 or 200 yards past their desired destination and then make a u-turn. Some called their state representatives to complain.
Picha said an understanding of politics, culture and human behavior makes urban planning work.
“You have to engage the whole community,” he said, “to make a street safer.”