Sacramento may declare state of emergency over dangerous roads as death toll rises

The Sacramento City Council will start the process of declaring a state of emergency over a road safety crisis that has left at least 20 people dead in traffic collisions so far this year

Councilwoman Caity Maple, the vice mayor, shared in a social media post Friday evening her plan to introduce the proposal with Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Councilwoman Karina Talamantes. Maple noted that the announcement came the day after a crash left a woman who’d been crossing Sutterville Road gravely injured.

Sacramento has previously identified Sutterville Road as part of its “high-injury network” — those city streets where the highest numbers of fatal and severe crashes occur. Thursday’s crash happened on the boundary of Maple’s district with that of Rick Jennings’ district.

The Sacramento Police Department said Friday night that the 48-year-old woman remained in critical condition at the hospital. A bystander provided The Sacramento Bee a video from the scene of the crash which showed her lying motionless on the road, halfway underneath an SUV.

A state of emergency would make it easier for the city to draw in state and federal dollars to address the road safety crisis. Councilwoman Lisa Kaplan has previously called for a bond measure to fund infrastructure improvements, but Sacramento leaders have thus far directed little funding toward the problem. In May, Steinberg called road improvements “a top, top priority,” but the council subsequently opted not to include $10 million in the budget to fund the Active Transportation Commission’s nine recommendations for improving city streets.

The state of emergency declaration could also enable Sacramento to go outside its standard contracts process for solutions to help curb deaths and injuries.

Research as well as other cities and countries have demonstrated that the vast majority of traffic deaths are preventable with changes to infrastructure. Following that research, Sacramento leaders made a “Vision Zero” promise in 2017 to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2027.

But the death toll on city streets has continued to rise. This year, The Bee has reported on crashes that killed Mattie Nicholson, 56, Kate Johnston, 55, Jeffrey Blain, 59, Aaron Ward, 40, Michael Kennedy, 40, Federico Zacarias 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, Sau Voong, 84, José Luis Silva, Geohaira “Geo” Sosa, 32, Kaylee Xiong, 18, and Muhammad Saddique, 64, who was killed Sept. 9 walking through the same Natomas intersection where Voong was fatally struck on his morning bike ride June 11.

Of the dead, 13 were pedestrians or cyclists and two were riding electric scooters. The other five were motorists.

Sacramento could get faster road safety fixes

The city council proposal, Maple said, would “direct staff to expedite safety projects.”

Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela has pushed for the Department of Public Works to start a “quick-build” program which could respond urgently to safety concerns. Earlier this month, city spokeswoman Gabby Miller said that staff were still reviewing consultant proposals for the program, but would “need to identify funding to implement.”

Currently, the city rarely responds with urgency to make safety improvements in the wake of severe or fatal crashes. A crash in January 2018 killed a grandmother and left her grandson, Jian Hao Kuang, then 6, with profound disabilities including severe permanent brain damage.

The city settled a lawsuit with the boy’s family and has adopted a plan to move toward safer infrastructure on Freeport Boulevard. It had removed the crosswalk shortly before the fatal collision, telling The Bee in 2018 that the intersection was dangerous for pedestrians. Six and a half years later, the intersection remains unchanged.

Police unsafe drivers while deadly speeds are legal?

Maple — who represents Oak Park, Hollywood Park and the Parkway — said part of the proposal would direct City Manager Howard Chan to work with the Sacramento Police Department “to ramp up enforcement of traffic laws that protect pedestrians, including speed limit enforcement, crosswalk violations, and distracted driving, especially in high-injury corridors.”

Shortly after Silva, a former Marine sergeant, was fatally struck Aug. 25 while riding a motorcycle through the intersection of J and 24 streets, police conducted a sting operation at the same junction. The city reported that in just one day, the undercover action led to 55 citations, many of them for failing to yield to the plainclothes police officer acting as a pedestrian.

However, Sacramento has many streets where drivers are legally permitted to travel at speeds considered lethal. In June, Alena Wong, now 16, said that she was almost killed at the age of 12 when she was hit by a driver traveling 35 mph, the speed limit on Sutterville Road.

A study in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention found that when a car traveling just 32.5 mph strikes a pedestrian, the average risk that the pedestrian will die is 25%. When a car’s speed reaches 40.6 mph, the risk that the pedestrian will die is 50%.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations have jointly said that 20 mph should be the “maximum speed limit” in urban centers.

One participant in reaching that agreement, activist Zoleka Mandela, said anything faster “is a death sentence.”