She complained about an unsafe crosswalk. Then Sacramento closed it to pedestrians

Reality Check is a Bee series holding officials and organizations accountable and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email realitycheck@sacbee.com .

A dead man was on her mind when Maya Polon emailed the Sacramento Department of Public Works about that crosswalk at 14th Street.

Did that sound a little dramatic? Maybe, but the crash had just happened half a mile away. Shanmugan Pirabarooban, 50, a California Department of Water Resources engineer, tried to cross at P and Eighth streets around lunchtime on April 4, 2023 and was hit by a truck and killed. He had been around the corner from his office.

That he was struck eight blocks away from the dicey crosswalk at 14th and N streets irked Polon.

So yes, you could look at the lack of pedestrian visibility created by the construction off the south side of Capitol Mall as an inconvenience. If you were a pedestrian, you had to get pretty far into the lane before you could see the two lanes of eastbound cars coming past the construction site on the southwest corner of the street.

Even worse, the drivers couldn’t see much at all until they were right on top of you.

It was annoying. But the capital region is one of the most deadly metropolitan areas in the country for pedestrians, and UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows that 81 pedestrians died in the city from 2021 through 2023 .

Polon was faced with a dangerous crosswalk on a street the city has identified as part of the “high-injury network” — those streets with the highest numbers of fatalities and serious injuries. So it wasn’t just an annoyance, she thought. It was a potential death trap.

On April 10, 2023, six days after the truck driver killed Pirabarooban, Polon emailed Jason Clermont, an inspector with the city.

“I cross N street to walk my dog in Capitol Park each day, which has been terrifying since construction started on the corner ... leaving oncoming cars with no visibility of anyone entering the crosswalk,” she wrote. “Following the recent pedestrian death downtown, I sincerely hope the city is taking this seriously.”

Sacramento did seem to take her complaint seriously, though not in the way she hoped.

By July 27, 2023, city workers put up signs saying the crosswalk was closed.

“I wrote my email to the city right after there was the horrific pedestrian death downtown. This was their response,” she said this June, gesturing to one of the two big orange barriers that now sit blocking the curb cuts. “We just had something horrible happen. We had the worst-case scenario happen. And then for them to put pedestrians in a situation — the city must know people are still crossing here.”

In 2017, Sacramento leaders made a “Vision Zero” pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries, but the California capital remains far from fulfilling that promise.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg said that road safety should be “ a top, top priority ” in May, shortly before the city chose not to earmark $10 million in the budget to make safety improvements to dangerous roads. The city has also failed to finalize a construction detour policy for years.

And when it came to closing the crosswalk at 14th Street, Polon believed the city placed avoiding lawsuits over safety.

She said when she reads that “SIDEWALK CLOSED” sign that directs people to the signalized intersection a block away, she sees a message from the city of Sacramento:

“‘If you die, it’s not our fault.’”

Deadly speeds and slow Sacramento officials

Gabby Miller, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works, said the current state of affairs will continue. She said the city’s “goal is to prevent detours as much as possible while maintaining accessibility and connectivity for all users when practical and safe,” but also that this crosswalk “will remain closed until the barricades required for construction can be removed.”

When asked about Polon’s comment that the city wanted to minimize its exposure to liability more than it wanted to protect people on foot, she said: “The crosswalks at 14th and N streets were closed due to the lack of visibility with the obstructions at the construction site. People walking should follow detour signage at all times.”

Multiple construction zones on N, which is normally a three-lane one-way street, appear to be slowing down traffic somewhat through confusing lane closures, but the city hasn’t taken formal action to slow cars before this crosswalk, as Polon hoped.

On a recent Wednesday, a Sacramento Bee reporter stood east of 14th with a small traffic radar gun. Over the course of 10 minutes, The Bee took 29 speed measurements as cars passed through the crosswalk.

Though one driver was traveling at 20 mph, most were moving faster. The fastest vehicle measured was traveling at 34 mph, and 16 of the 29 drivers were exceeding the posted limit of 25 mph.

These are lethal speeds.

A study in Accident Analysis & Prevention found that if a driver traveling 24.1 mph strikes a pedestrian, the average risk that the pedestrian will die is 10%; by 32.5 mph, the risk of death jumps to 25% .

Even if drivers were obeying the posted speed limit on N, the risk of death or serious injury for a pedestrian in the event of a collision would still be fairly high.

Those risks led leaders in Hoboken to lower the speed limit to 20 mph citywide, said the New Jersey city’s mayor, Ravi Bhalla.

“The data shows that the risk of serious injury is substantially less when you drive 20 miles an hour,” Bhalla said. “Twenty is plenty. … The actual data shows that when you are careful, the severity of injuries is a lot less than when you’re traveling at a high rate of speed.”

The research has borne out: After a robust effort to implement changes to infrastructure coupled with the speed limit change, his city hasn’t seen a traffic death of any kind in seven years.

By contrast, Sacramento saw 12 pedestrian and cyclist deaths in just the first six months of 2024: Mattie Nicholson , 56, Kate Johnston , 55, Jeffrey Blain, 59, Aaron Ward , 40, Sam Dent , 41, Terry Lane, 55, David Rink, 51, Tyler Vandehei, 32, James C. Lind, 54, and — in one nine-hour span in June — Jose Valladolid Ramirez, 36, Larry Winters, 76, and Sau Voong, 84 .

The Sacramento Bee is chronicling all traffic-related deaths on city streets in 2024 not only to show the causes of these fatalities and what can be done to prevent them, but also to memorialize the people we lost.

One traffic death has occurred downtown this year: Marvin Alcides Moran, a motorcyclist, was killed in a hit-and-run on Eighth and N streets, six blocks west of the crosswalk that’s been troubling Polon.

A history of crosswalk closures

Given the life-or-death stakes, she said was frustrated by the city’s response to her complaint.

“It made me feel unheard and unsafe,” Polon said. “Because I still cross here every single day.”

Polon lives nearby and walks her dog, Delta, through the Capitol Mall — a beautiful public space that has come to feel like her own backyard. Like many people who need to get across N at 14th, she now jaywalks around the barriers. She said she’s had some close calls with oncoming traffic.

The closed crosswalk, she said, was “not the end of the world.” But it worried her. She doesn’t drive often, but when she takes N Street, she’s nervous.

“If I drive down the street, I can’t see people stepping off the corner,” she said. “And I I know to slow down, at least, because I live here and I cross this every day. But for drivers who don’t live here, why would they even think to slow down here? But people are using this crosswalk all day long.”

Just after the crosswalk was closed last summer, Polon wrote to the city, “I hate that pedestrians are being penalized as a part of this construction work.”

Sacramento has moved slowly to make safety improvements, even after tragic collisions. In January 2018, QuiChang Zhu, 72, and her young grandson were crossing Freeport Boulevard at Oregon Drive when a driver struck the pair, killing Zhu and leaving her 6-year-old grandson, Jian Hao Kuang, with debilitating permanent brain damage .

In the six and a half years since the little boy was gravely disabled, Sacramento paid Kuang’s family an $11 million settlement and adopted a plan for infrastructure changes that would slow down traffic on Freeport. The unfunded plan hasn’t yet gone through the design phase, and it’s far from breaking ground.

City officials have made one tangible change to the intersection where a child almost died, though.

They removed the crosswalk.

The Bee’s regional transportation reporter learned about this unsafe crosswalk after Polon contacted her. Do you have to navigate unsafe road infrastructure in Sacramento? Ariane Lange would love to hear from you at alange@sacbee.com.