Engineer made plan to stop crashes like one that killed a grandpa. Sacramento said no

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 .

The dead man was a number in a spreadsheet. His crash was acknowledged in the “fatal” column in a resident’s plea to slow down traffic at 20 Sacramento intersections. At the crossings, the spreadsheet said, five crashes in the previous five years were deadly; 26 more left people severely injured.

And so next to the words “Rio Linda Blvd” and “South,” there was a number, and that number referred to two crashes, including the one that killed Juan Ramon Flores. He was a husband and a grandfather who loved to give his neighbors ears of corn he grew in his yard.

On Feb. 24, 2023, he crossed the street at Rio Linda Boulevard and South Avenue. The grandfather was on one of his regular evening walks to the park when a driver made a left turn into him. He died in the hospital a week later. He was 78.

Almost exactly two years earlier, on Feb. 19, 2021, a crash killed Amritpal Singh, 61, and Ryan Jacob Murphy, 38, at the same Del Paso Heights intersection.

Since Feb. 19, 2021, the crossroads has remained the same: a four-way stop where Rio Linda — with two lanes in each direction — crosses South, a two-lane street. Rio Linda is lined with apartment complexes and homes, and although many residential streets in California have 25 mph limits, the posted limit on Rio Linda is 40 mph.

Jerry Champa marked the wrecks in his spreadsheet. The Land Park resident and Caltrans engineer had taken on a side project: advocating with a handful of neighbors for safer streets in Sacramento. It seemed urgent, as he noted three deaths in two years at that same intersection.

He thought he had a solution to stop future severe collisions and a way to get the state to pay for it: mini-roundabouts. They were cheap, they were effective, and a study cited by the Federal Highway Administration found that roundabouts led to a 90% reduction in the number of fatal and debilitating crashes . By restructuring traffic patterns, they eliminate broadside crashes; through their curvature, they slow traffic down so that any collisions are much less dangerous.

Sacramento said in 2018 that 78% of crashes happen at intersections ; roundabouts, Champa argued, could help solve the problem. The federal agency lists them as a “proven safety countermeasure,” and Champa thought they would help the city achieve its “Vision Zero” promise to eliminate all traffic fatalities by 2027.

He told just about everyone in city government he could think of. A Caltrans safety grant was open for applications, and the 20 intersections he pitched were eligible for funding.

The city listened, and then came out with an answer: No. It was too much, too fast. Officials needed more information, they needed to study whether the materials could conform to Sacramento’s design standards, and they really needed to learn how the roundabouts would accommodate bikes, trucks and street sweepers. Maybe they’d do a pilot project.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works, Gabby Miller, said city officials chose to apply for the safety grant for a different, no-roundabouts proposal, making improvements at 17 high-crash intersections with signals. The four-way stop where Flores was killed did not make the list, and likewise, it is not in the city’s 2022 Transportation Priorities Plan .

In its safety grant application, the city plans to ask Caltrans to fund new paint on the road, new pedestrian crossing signals, new traffic signals and systems that can use real-time information from the road to guide light changes. Workers would also install new yellow borders around traffic lights that make the color of the lights easier for drivers to see. Sacramento, she said, has “been diligently working to address the corridors with the highest number of fatalities and severe injuries.”

But Champa and a fellow advocate did not see that road safety strategy as particularly diligent.

They said the city was too focused on adding “bells and whistles” to intersections that already have signals. The improvements wouldn’t prevent drivers from running red lights, nor would they stop pedestrians or cyclists from taking risks. They wouldn’t change the fundamental structure of the intersections. It was an incremental shift when the city needed a transformative shift.

And outside of the 17-signal-crossroads project, the city directs significant efforts toward ambitious corridor overhauls, such as the Broadway revamp currently under construction. At a recent city council meeting, Councilmember Katie Valenzuela, who represents a district including downtown, midtown and East Sacramento , said the Department of Public Works was considering whether to hire an outside consultant to design a “quick-build program,” a process that is still in the early stages.

Champa insists that along with the longer-term projects, the city should be putting more resources into faster safety interventions.

Because the death toll has crept up. So far in 2024, The Sacramento Bee has reported on 16 people killed on city streets.

Car crash investigations don’t always lead to change

Sacramento has a dedicated team that evaluates roads where collisions have killed people. Miller said the team, which also responds to some injury crashes as well as resident complaints, “conducts approximately 1,000 investigations per year to address traffic safety concerns citywide.”

That work doesn’t always lead to timely or tangible change.

Dirk Couvson, then 20, lost his leg in January after a hit-and-run on Arden Way ; one month later, police found a driver, Federico Zacarias Cambrano, 28, dead after a two-car collision 1,000 feet west of Couvson’s crash. Larry Winters, a 76-year-old pedestrian, was hit by a car and killed in June, just east of Couvson’s crash. Traffic through this quarter-mile stretch led to an amputation and two deaths in less than six months, but the collisions resulted in no emergency plans to make the roadway safer.

The city does have longer-term plans. In early 2024, it applied for — and then won — a $400,000 Caltrans Sustainable Transportation Planning grant to begin the planning phase for improvements on Arden Way. The project is in the earliest stages, years away from construction. The city may include two intersections in the quarter-mile area in its 17-intersection Caltrans safety grant application this September.

In the meantime, the status quo continues.

In 2024, traffic collisions have killed Mattie Nicholson , 56, Kate Johnston , 55, Jeffrey Blain, 59, Aaron Ward , 40, Michael Kennedy, 40, Cambrano, 28, Marvin Moran , 22, Sam Dent , 41, Daniel Morris, 38, Terry Lane, 55, David Rink, 51, Tyler Vandehei, 32, James Lind, 54, Jose Valladolid Ramirez , 36, Larry Winters, 76, and Sau Voong , 84.

Of the dead, Kennedy, Cambrano, Moran and Morris were driving. The remaining 12 were pedestrians or cyclists.

Miller, the city spokeswoman, called the volume of fatalities and serious injuries “deeply tragic” and pointed to the city’s efforts to fulfill its promise to stop such deaths by 2027, including with several large-scale street overhauls on the five corridors considered to have the most severe crashes.

As residents have waited for progress, most of the traffic deaths this year have followed patterns. UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows that between 2019 and the end of 2023, severe injury crashes happened at the same intersections where six deadly crashes occurred in 2024; fatal crashes happened at the same intersections where Lane, Winters and Valladolid were killed this year.

Severe or fatal crashes occurred within 800 feet of each of these 16 fatal collisions on city streets in 2024.

Matt Malkin, an anesthesiologist at UC Davis Medical Center who worked with Champa to lobby for the roundabouts project, thought the city was strangely tolerant of a deadly state of affairs.

“Do you ever say a train crash is inevitable? No. Do you ever say a plane crash is inevitable? No. Space shuttle, inevitable? No,” Malkin said. “But a car crash is considered, ‘Oh, that’s just the way it is.’”

Interim safety measures?

Malkin said the lack of urgency around implementing new, perhaps temporary safety measures in the aftermath of fatal and serious crashes confused him.

“Construction companies can set (detours) up at will, but the city is completely incapable of setting one up at one intersection,” Malkin said. “People set up things in the road all the time if they just need to trim trees or all this kind of stuff. Yet for some reason, the city found this to be something that was just beyond their ability to plan. That was something that we never could quite understand.”

Lisa Kaplan, the city council representative for Natomas, has called for a bond measure that would fund road improvements, including quick-build projects. Immediately after any traffic death, she said, “There might be plans, but we have no money to implement what may make an intersection safer.”

A quick solution that doesn’t address driver speed

When officials do move quickly to address a safety issue , they often start with the smallest changes.

After a crash almost killed a 12-year-old crossing the street at Sutterville Road and Mead Avenue in 2019, the city promptly added signage on the approach to the crosswalk at Mead and removed some parking spaces to increase pedestrian visibility.

Champa and Alena Wong, the now-16-year-old who survived the crash, wanted the city to add a roundabout to the intersection to slow drivers down. Wong noted that the driver who almost killed her was traveling the speed limit: 35 mph.

Although reducing driver speeds along Sutterville Road is included in the city’s 2040 General Plan , Wong said that since her crash, the city hadn’t forced Sutterville drivers to slow. “The roads are built to get cars places faster,” she said, “not to keep the other people safe.”

Though no one has been seriously injured at the crossing since her collision, Wong thinks that the intersection is still dangerous.

Research shows she’s right.

Deadly speeds are standard on Sacramento roads

Speed is a major factor in whether a collision maims or kills a victim, and Sacramento expressly allows drivers to travel at speeds that are lethal.

A study in the public health journal Accident Analysis & Prevention found that when a driver traveling 24.1 mph strikes a pedestrian, the average risk that the pedestrian will die is 10%; by the time the driver reaches 40.6 mph, that risk jumps to 50% . Roundabouts achieve their impressive safety enhancement in large part due to reducing vehicle speeds: The Federal Highway Administration says that with the proper design, they allow drivers to proceed going 15 to 25 mph.

They’ve proven their effectiveness in Carmel, Indiana , where city officials have installed about 150 roundabouts since the mid-’90s. Jeremy Kashman, Carmel’s chief infrastructure officer, said that between 1996 and 2024, the number of people living in the city has almost tripled to more than 100,000 residents , but the number of traffic injuries has gone down, which he credits in large part to intersection designs. During the pandemic, when vehicle-related deaths shot up nationwide, Carmel’s fatality rate “held steady,” Kashman said. “And then we actually saw a decrease in collisions during the pandemic.”

In some cities, officials have called for reducing speed limits to 20 mph in areas where people regularly use public roads while not driving. In the United Kingdom, research has shown that in areas which lowered the speed limit to 20 mph, overall crashes dropped and serious and fatal crashes plummeted . The World Health Organization and the United Nations have jointly endorsed 20 mph as the “maximum speed limit” for urban centers . Zoleka Mandela, a participant in the talks that led to that 20 mph benchmark, said anything faster “is a death sentence.”

The mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, has taken that thinking to heart: The citywide limit is 20 mph. Under Ravi Bhalla, the city has carried out a comprehensive plan to change infrastructure and policy, and as a result, Hoboken has not seen a traffic death in seven years.

“The data shows that the risk of serious injury is substantially less when you drive 20 miles an hour,” Bhalla said. “That data kind of speaks for itself.”

Sacramento has acknowledged this to some degree, too, finding that “ two-thirds of fatal crashes occur on streets with a posted speed of 40 mph or higher .”

But the 20 mph United Nations standard has not made its way to the California capital. In the 2035 General Plan finalized in 2015, the city council approved transportation guidelines that included “target speeds less than 35 miles per hour” on streets deemed pedestrian- and bike-friendly . The 2040 plan that superseded it this year states that the city should slow down drivers, but it doesn’t contain any specific benchmark.

The city, Miller said, also follows the “85th percentile” rule. The California Vehicle Code generally allows counties and municipalities to set their own speed limits within their jurisdictions. The rule followed by most municipalities and counties — including Sacramento — allows traffic engineers to set limits by measuring how fast vehicles at the 85th percentile of speeds are traveling, then rounding that “prevailing speed” to the nearest increment of 5 mph.

Caltrans says that “the 85th percentile speed is the single most influential indicator of what is safe and reasonable .” Bhalla, who had never heard of the rule and did not use it in Hoboken, said it sounded “a little bit counterintuitive.”

Although Sacramento’s General Plan states a vague intention to slow drivers, deadly speeds remain accepted throughout the city. And communities bear the consequences.

A generous man built a house with his son

Juan Ramon Flores was struck on a Friday evening, and local news outlets did not cover the crash. He died of his injuries at the hospital March 3, 2023, seven days later.

His son, Walter, remembered him as a generous man who loved to grow food in the garden. They weren’t close for much of Walter’s childhood — Juan moved to Northern California, and Walter, then in third grade, and his two siblings remained in Los Angeles. They didn’t see much of each other.

But when Walter was in his late teens, he decided to move into Juan’s West Sacramento apartment. “I wanted to spend time with him,” he said. About six months into the new arrangement, Juan bought a house on Walnut Street, and they moved in.

There was a catch: The new place was condemned.

It became their all-consuming project and their home. Juan, a construction worker and carpenter, rebuilt it from the foundation up with his teenage son.

They slept on couches in the living room. “It was funny, because it had no windows,” Walter said. “When it rained in Sacramento, the wind and water would go in sometimes. I slept in the middle of the living room, so the water wouldn’t hit me.”

They worked steadily for a year. In the summer, they ate the watermelons Juan planted in the backyard.

Walter didn’t get a job in construction after they finished the house — he’s an operating room technician at Kaiser Permanente in Downey — but, now 51, he still uses the skills he learned from his father every time he fixes something around the house.

Because he didn’t get to spend much time with his father, Walter’s year in the Walnut Street house was precious to him. “I cherished it,” he said. “Cherished, cherished moments.”

Juan is just one of three people killed at Rio Linda Boulevard and South Avenue since 2019, and that’s how he ended up on Champa’s roundabout spreadsheet, unnamed. Across all 20 intersections that Champa unsuccessfully proposed to Sacramento for roundabout consideration, he tallied five fatal crashes over five years. Six people dead.

The cherished moments were harder to count.