Pasdena

City Councilmembers Say More Should Be Done to Prevent Pedestrian and Bicyclist Fatalities in Pasadena

From PasadenaNow.com

BY KEITH CALAYAG

While Councilmembers agree that the Department of Transportation’s Traffic Safety Campaign could help get drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians to follow traffic laws, they also believe more should be done to prevent traffic collision fatalities in the city.

During the Municipal Services Committee meeting on Tuesday, City Associate Engineer Donson Liu reported that Pasadena has reported a consistently high number of pedestrian/bike crashes in each of the last four years, with 2-6 fatalities per year.

55% of those who were killed or injured were seniors while 13% were homeless people.

According to Liu, cars in Pasadena are traveling 2 miles per hour faster overall when comparing 2021 to pre-pandemic 2019 conditions.

Aside from an uptick in speed, the DOT has also seen “blatant disregard for signages,” according to DOT Director Laura Cornejo.

Liu said that the previous campaigns on road safety were “well received” by residents but “do not appear to have a correlation to crash, injury and speeding data.”

Photo by Martin Magnemyr on Unsplash

Read More

Over-engineering the Rose Bowl Loop’s closure to cars

From PasadenaStarNews.com

By Larry Wilson

 

When you’ve got a problem, there are solutions — and then there are belt-and-suspender solutions.

When you need to figure out the hardware, there’s engineering — and then there’s over-engineering.

Last week, with the problem being the desire for people to exercise in the great outdoors around the Rose Bowl Loop, a recreational pursuit fallen victim to the coronavirus shutdown, the city of Pasadena’s solution was so radically over-engineered that it was bound to fail.

So it failed, and will be scrapped right away.

Yes, it was a good idea to ban motor vehicles from the roads around the stadium so as to allow walkers, runners and cyclists social distance while they exercised.

It was a great idea, in fact, and I’ve been touting it for decades, not just during the pandemic. There’s no reason for cars on the Arroyo floor at all except during stadium events and for golfers parking at Brookside Golf Course, who could be routed on one street into the lot.

But such a plan doesn’t require overdoing it. Block off the streets with hydraulic bollards that can be opened up for firetrucks and on game days and you’re done.

There was no time  to get such fancy bollards in during the current public-health emergency. But temporary barricades could easily be put up.

Instead — and this is the crazy-making part — the city installed Archer 1200 Anti-Vehicle Barriers, built by Meridian Rapid Defense Group, billed by the company as “an HVM (Hostile Vehicle Mitigation) solution deployment,”  to keep cars from driving into the Arroyo.

 

Read More