Students need safer streets
North County Times – Escondido,CA,USA
We encourage Encinitas residents and leaders to look for cost-effective,
interim solutions that will improve pedestrian safety in this key
intersection. …

Our view: Encinitas teen’s death is tragic reminder of importance of improving walking routes near schools

We mourned with the rest of North County the accidental death of Ryan Hwang on Jan. 31. The 14-year-old was killed by a pickup truck driven by a fellow San Dieguito Academy student as he walked at lunchtime through the Santa Fe Drive underpass below Interstate 5.

By all accounts, Ryan was a fine boy, and we offer our sympathies to his family, friends and neighbors.

Grief for Ryan has been mixed with concern that the lack of sidewalks along the busy roadway contributed to his death. Others have questioned the high school’s open campus policy, which lets students walk or drive to nearby eateries for their midday meals. Still others have lamented the dangerous driving of high school students.

These are all worthwhile questions to ask. Parents, you hardly need reminding, but if you don’t seize opportunities such as this to talk to the kids holding the car keys in your house about safe driving — especially on wet streets — you risk compounding one family’s tragedy with your own.

A recent study by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm Insurance found that teenage drivers greatly underestimate the dangers of distractions like cell-phone use, chatty passengers or their own emotions. Car crashes remain the leading cause of death for American teens; about 5,600 U.S. teens died in automobile accidents in 2005. Our words of worry and wisdom may be destined to go in one ear and out the other, but we have to try for at least the first ear.

Open campus policies also deserve scrutiny. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate the increased risk to students allowed to roam free from adult supervision during the school day. Since so few of their parents are home and so few of their outside eating options healthy, parents can and should ask whether they want their local school to open its campus during the day. It was only 6 1/2 years ago that five students in a convertible were injured in a lunchtime collision with a truck two blocks from campus on Santa Fe Drive.

Finally, everyone familiar with the I-5 underpass at Santa Fe Drive knows it’s a dangerous spot for pedestrians. City officials have said that it would cost too much to cut into the steep sloping concrete beneath the freeway to create sidewalks for pedestrians along Santa Fe. They point to the long-awaited Caltrans widening of I-5, now projected for 2009, as the cost-effective opportunity to address pedestrian safety.

The freeway widening may be the best option, but certainly it’s not the only option. We encourage Encinitas residents and leaders to look for cost-effective, interim solutions that will improve pedestrian safety in this key intersection. A sidewalk may not have saved Ryan’s life; a guardrail might have.

The city’s options are likely limited by the liability it could incur with a half-measure there, such as installing a guardrail but not improving the pedestrian pathway. But if half-measures can keep families and communities whole, there ought to be a way to eliminate risks to pedestrians. Especially when they are our children walking to and from schools.

Encinitas deserves credit for making a priority of improving safety along the routes students use to walk to school. Tragically, Ryan’s death reminds us again of the importance of that effort.