Cars vs. Humans

We were shocked and angered to learn that our Southern California municipal bureaucrats have decided to remove crosswalks because people are being hit in them by automobiles (“L.A. Crosswalks: Increasingly a Walk on the Wild Side,” July 6). This is a typical reactionary response by our automobile-oriented traffic engineers to automobile overpopulation. Our freeway systems are inadequate to contain them, and now they are overrunning our city streets.

It’s time for our city officials to look ahead, rather than simply react to an existing problem, and start to plan a transportation system for human beings--not automobiles. The automobile has already been given a position of dominance in large cities on the East Coast and in many foreign countries, where pedestrians have virtually no rights. We recently returned from a trip (without our car) to Los Angeles, where the crosswalk removal program is further along. It is apparent that pedestrians have become targets of aggressive, hostile drivers on street systems designed for high-volume, high-speed flow of automobile traffic.

Apparently, the data to support the crosswalk removal policy comes from a study in San Diego. It is undoubtedly true that it is more dangerous to be in a crosswalk than not, but the appropriate response to this data would be to improve the crosswalk system to ensure that drivers should be more respectful of pedestrians. There are some locations where crosswalks are truly unsafe, such as those crossing freeway on-and off-ramps. These problems exist because our traffic engineers originally designed the system for automobile traffic flow. Pedestrians and those using alternate transportation were only accommodated as an afterthought.

San Diego has recently voted to increase its sales tax to improve our transportation system. Some of this money should be designated to make the streets safer for pedestrians, including the necessary modifications to make crosswalks safe or provide viable alternatives for crossing streets.

The city of San Diego has just released a plan for development that would make the downtown area pedestrian-, bicycle-, and public transportation-oriented. Certainly the removal of crosswalks is a direct contradiction of this plan.

What the city should do is precisely the opposite. Crosswalks should be raised to the sidewalk level so that cars would have to cross the pedestrians walks rather than pedestrians having to cross the street. The city should be promoting “slow streets” designed for pedestrians and bicycles--not high-speed, high-volume streets such as those destroying downtown Los Angeles.

JERRY and DIANA ESTBERG

San Diego