California street safety changes could prevent more fatalities

One of my dearest friends, Julia Elkin, was struck and killed by a car last month.

Julia was exceptional. She was the kind of person you wish the world was full of — a generous, hilarious, creative soul whose life’s work in climate adaptation centered around improving our lives.

Julia’s death has devastated everyone who knew her, and it was entirely preventable. As in many other traffic fatalities, the street where Julia was hit is notoriously dangerous. But to be clear, no one is safe from traffic violence, as cars and trucks get bigger and more lethal to pedestrians, as more people speed or make mistakes due to distracted driving, and because streets are almost always designed for cars to move quickly.

This makes crossing the street and driving a car the most dangerous things you’ll do today and every day.

Julia’s death was avoidable, and the next ones are, too, if the Legislature chooses conscience over convenience. California lawmakers made progress last year by passing Assembly Bill 413, which prohibited parking near crosswalks, but there is vastly more work to be done. Right now, legislators have two opportunities to get closer to ending these senseless deaths: Senate Bills 960 and 961.

SB 960 would require Caltrans to execute on its own policies to build state roads with sidewalks, crosswalks, narrower lanes and other components that make roads work for all users. Caltrans adopted a policy in 2021 to plan for so-called “complete streets” (with designated space for cars, pedestrians, bikes and safe access to mass transit), yet only about 20% of the agency’s projects meet the criteria.

SB 961 would limit how fast cars can go above the legal speed limit since speeding is the No. 1 factor that determines if a collision is fatal. This bill would also require new trucks to have side underride guards, so people don’t get pulled underneath a truck, which increases the deadliness of an accident.

The reality is that driving behavior is getting worse. Speeding and distracted driving are leading factors in traffic collisions: A car that hits a pedestrian at 35 mph is five times more likely to kill them than at 20 mph. Speeding also increased during the pandemic (speeding-related fatalities in 2021 were almost 25% higher than in 2011), and experts say the change appears to be lasting.

Adequate street safety is both a national problem and an acutely California problem — in 2021, for example, pedestrian accidents were 17% of national traffic deaths but 26% of California’s.

Often, a small number of local streets account for a high proportion of serious traffic injuries and deaths — and that’s where we must start. A single stretch of Marin Avenue, where Julia’s collision occurred, was responsible for over 20% of Berkeley traffic deaths between 2012-2022.

Streets are not designed to prioritize safety, and that needs to change. This means streets with slower speeds, shorter and more visible crosswalks, lower turning speeds, protected bike lanes and other physical changes — many of the core tenets of Caltrans’ complete streets policy.