Bakersfield ranked most perilous for pedestrians
| Sunday, Nov 15 2009 12:00 PM
Last Updated Sunday, Nov 15 2009 12:00 PM
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Kathy Marroqin looked up and down River Boulevard and ticked off a list of the problems it presents for walkers, wheelchair users -- and anyone else not in a car.
No sidewalks. No crosswalks. Fast cars. Dark streets at night.
"When I was in a wheelchair for eight months, I couldn't cross here," she said. "It's too dangerous."
As she spoke, Marroqin stood near the Height Street location where last August, mother of eight and grandmother of 15 Maria Esperanza Rodriguez was struck and killed by a speeding driver as she tried to cross the busy boulevard.
One car had stopped to let her cross, but another driver on the four-lane road swerved around and hit Rodriguez.
Unfortunately, pedestrians, bicyclists, skateboarders and wheelchair users are too often injured or killed by motorists on Bakersfield and Kern County streets. Thirty-nine died in 2007 and 2008.
According to Transportation for America, a transportation advocacy group based in Washington D.C., Bakersfield and Kern rank as the state's most dangerous area for walkers.
The Stockton area ranked second worst, with Redding and Fresno rounding out the four most perilous areas for those on foot. The safest, according to the study, is San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles.
"I'm a little disturbed to find we are No. 1 now," said Peter Smith, a senior planner for Kern Council of Governments, a regional transportation planning agency. "We've had very serious challenges in Kern County, but we've funneled a lot of money and effort into pedestrian safety projects."
Miles of sidewalks, safe-route-to-school projects, curb cuts for wheelchair users, bike lanes and other improvements over the years have been made to make walking and biking safer, Smith said.
But there's no getting around it, Bakersfield and Kern County have deep roots in America's automobile culture, and more sidewalks isn't going to end the carnage anytime soon.
"In the last 15 years, more than 76,000 Americans have been killed while crossing or walking along a street in their community," according to "Dangerous by Design," a report by Transportation for America. "This is the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down roughly every month, yet it receives nothing like the kind of attention that would surely follow such a disaster."
The group ranks the relative risk of regional areas by establishing a Pedestrian Danger Index. It is calculated by dividing the average pedestrian fatality rate in 2007-08 by the percentage of residents walking to work, according to the 2000 Census. The higher the PDI, the higher the relative danger.
Bakersfield, which for the purposes of the study is really all of Kern County, was given a Pedestrian Danger Index 128. Fresno was listed at 92.8 and the apparently safe sidewalks of San Luis Obispo earned a PDI of 15.4.
Think golf. Low score wins.
According to the study, 14.4 percent of Kern's traffic fatalities were pedestrians. And 1.9 percent of residents said they walked to work.
Is it a sound formula? A valid methodology?
Smith says yes.
"Kern County has a very bad problem," he said. "There are a lot of different types of dangers."
Wide arterial roads like Rosedale Highway in Bakersfield and Weedpatch Highway in Lamont are tough to get across in a short amount of time. Add big trucks, heavy traffic and you have a recipe for danger, especially for people who may be physically impaired or disabled.
Freeway offramps and drivers turning right into pedestrians are common problems.
Lack of sidewalks on rural or even inner-city streets force wheelchair users and some walkers onto the blacktop, Smith said.
"Dirt on the side of the road -- it's a very serious problem."
Just weeks after the death of Maria Rodriguez, Clara Bolinger, 77, was being pushed in her wheelchair on Redbank Road by Karen Kimball, 57. With no sidewalks, the pair may have had little choice but to skirt the edge of the roadway.
Both women were stuck by an SUV, killing Bolinger and critically injuring Kimball.
For a transportation planner like Smith, stories like these are painful to hear. Kern is a huge geographical area with lots of places where urban sprawl meets rural roads. And there's just not enough money to fix every problem everywhere.
At least not immediately.
"It's devastating," he said. "And it's a problem that's not going to go away."
