NOW can we get a stop sign?

The BBQ Pit
1

Six hours later I’m still twitching.

Flashback to about 5pm tonight, just before dusk.

Working in my driveway, look up just in time to hear the horrible thud of man on bicycle speeding downhill crashing into the side of the car that was just driving through the cross-street.

I clearly remember seeing the man actually flying through the air. I was up and running before he hit the pavement, I think. He’s screaming, loudly, and I’m yelling “I’m calling 911! Hang in there!” Old joke about “anyone making those noises sure ain’t dead” goes through my head.

Come out with phone in one hand. Man is lying in the middle of the street and some of my neighbors are starting to appear. He’s moaning and says “I don’t want to die like this” which doesn’t help anything but it’s pretty understandable. Then I notice he doesn’t have a helmet. Look around, no helmet in sight. I’ve dialed 911 and gotten a recording. Phone to my ear waiting for a human being, ask the man if he was wearing a helmet. Nope. Plus he was wearing dark clothes. Look over and the woman he hit/who hit him (let the police sort that out) is getting out of her car, horrible look on her face.

911 dispatcher is on the line, I’m talking pretty fast and pretty loud, give him the intersection and description, wait for him to tell me that paramedics are on the way. Another guy has stopped, turns out to be an ER surgeon. Victim is conscious, pretty cogent now, stopped screaming and talking about dying. He is moving his head and arms but says that his legs hurt. He’s missing one shoe which I find later on top of the hood of the car by his busted up bicycle. He asks us to call his wife, gives us his name and her phone number. I think having us there, knowing that help is on the way and nobody is now screaming helps him stay calm. I’m telling him to just stay calm, don’t move, checking him out for visible trauma. He says that he didn’t hit his head (relief) and he can feel all of his limbs. Legs hurting seems like a good sign, if he couldn’t feel them at all I’d be worried. Can’t see anything like obviously broken limbs and the guy doesn’t even have a scratch on his head. I’m not religious but this guy sure had a guardian angel. Wave my neighbors down, tell them to turn traffic back or onto side streets.

Police pull up, followed shortly by paramedics. He’s in good hands, I’m now sitting with the driver of the car, she’s about 70-something and scared that she just killed somebody. I’m holding her hand and rubbing her shoulder and trying to keep her calm, nothing much else for me to do.

Despite all four directions being blocked with police cars, fire engines and flares, idiots keep trying to drive through the scene of the accident. Police have to stop working time and time again to make people go someplace else. They’re exasperated, me too. What is going through somebody’s brain that they think that it’s OK to weave through all the emergency vehicles? A detour will take them an extra two minutes? Fucking idiots. There’s another rant for the Pit.

Talking to the office who responded first, he looks at me and says “You called me about that last accident here, didn’t you?” “The one with the SUV and the RV?” I ask. “Yeah, that was it.” He’s a nice guy but I tell him that I would really rather never meet him again this way. He’s of the same opinion.

Paramedics have the guy in the ambulance, his wife arrived and is amazingly calm…I’m still shaking a bit and kind of hopped up on adrenaline, she didn’t actually see the accident which probably helped, she got there when the paramedics did. They’ve got him on a backboard and are taking him to the trauma center out in Walnut Creek but they say it looks like he will be OK. Lucky, lucky, SOB. Suggest to his wife that a nice bike helmet would make a good Christmas gift. One of my neighbors says that a bus pass might be more like it.

So, City Council, my question to you - what will it fucking take to turn this into a four-way stop? In the two years that I’ve been here I have seen three accidents and been the first responder on two of 'em. It can’t cost that much to have two stop signs installed, and even if it does it’s hard to say that 4-5 police cars, a fire engine, ambulance, medical bills, increased auto insurance, loss of work, new bicycle and body work on the car and everything else - all that sure as hell didn’t come cheap! Christ, if it’s a couple hundred bucks and the city doesn’t have it in the budget I bet I can raise that from the neighborhood in a week.

Evidently this is one of the more accident-prone intersections in the immediate area. The officer who’s case it is mentioned some kind of traffic detail meeting with the city, I will call him and find out when/where so that everyone who lives here can provide some feedback. Dunno if anyone has been killed yet but there have sure been a lot of injuries and a lot of property damage.

Time to put a dent in my beer supply now :slight_smile:

2

Damn. Glad I don’t live where you live. Good luck with the sign, but if the doofus was riding a bike in dark clothes at night with no helmet… well, what are the odds he’s going to stop at a stop sign? Then again, maybe this incident will knock some sense into him. Sometime, the hood of a Buick is almost as good as a clue-by-four.

Oh, and good for you for being Johnny-on-the-Spot with the phone and helping to calm down all the parties involved. Hope you don’t have to do it again any time soon.

3

Thanks and here’s hoping I don’t have to do it again either. “Never again” will still be too soon. I don’t think I’m gonna forget those sounds soon.

A lot of the accidents have been with cars. The problem is that the main street runs uphill (only the cross-street has to stop currently) so people going downhill tend to be flying, and people going uphill floor it. Crossing the main street, especially when it’s getting dark, you’ve got to be careful. Stop signs in all directions would really help with automotive traffic and hopefully a few bike riders (when I rode I didn’t blow through stop signs, but I was also wearing a helmet and lots of lights and reflective stuff).

4

Oh, man… between living at a similar intersection for ten years (was at least on wreck there every year I lived there) and my own recent auto accident, reading that thread made me shiver a time or two. There’re few things more chilling than hearing the squealing of brakes and the crunching of metal.

I hope you get the stop sign installed eventually. They never put one at mine.

5

Can you get a stop sign? It depends on your local government. Sometimes it takes a death or two to get it done.

When a woman in a Ford Exploder zoomed across 3 lanes of traffic to total my wife’s car, there was no change. Two weeks later, an almost identical accident; a Ford Exploder totals a car, same broken-foot injury, happened at the same crossing. Then the DOT announced they were putting in a traffic light.

Have you talked to your city councilperson? Sometimes, that helps.

6

I wonder if the policeman who recognized you on the scene would be willing to go on record with you asking for a 4-way stop sign. I don’t know if he could or would co-author a request to the city council but it might get more attention that way.

Good luck. I know that is not how you want to spend your Sunday evenings.

7

You really should take the OP as written, with its raw, powerful content, remove the profanity, and mail it as a letter to the City Council.

8

I second that, but I’d CC it to the local newspaper too.

9

I say leave the profanity in, and send it that way. Lack of editing would give an even greater feel of shock and alarm. If it got printed the paper would do it’s own editing anyway.

10

There is an intersection in my hometown that has a problem. It’s a deceptively hairpin turn that is always wet due to drainage and water main problems. A friend of mine was driving through and as she approached the turn she realized she was going too fast, so she slowly hit the brakes, spun out and wrapped her car around a light pole. She was unhurt, thank god.

The guy who owned the house on the corner came out with a phone. We were talking to him as my friend talked to the paramedics and he told us he put in a second phone line for 911 calls, since they got at least three accidents a week at that intersection. The city told him he couldn’t put up a fence to protect his kids in the backyard because it posed a danger to drivers.

As we were sitting there with the police, another car came around the corner and skidded, luckily missing all of us standing in the yard, and popped both front tires as she hit the curb ten yards down.

11

Maybe you should petition the city to rename that street to Sunset Boulevard.

Sunset Boulevard near UCLA’s Drake Stadium is the site of the infamous Dead Man’s Curve. Or at least was, I think the city of Los Angeles did some reconstruction there to make it less dangerous.

12

Be sure to keep the part about two accidents in three years. Or perhaps the bit with the bicyclist, because if there is something I always see, it’s bicyclists respecting stop signs.

Stop signs in the wrong places make the world a more dangerous place. That is a fact of life. The OP is exactly the sort of emotionally-clouded thinking that gets ever more highspeed traffic going where it doesn’t belong. I’ve seen this happen when I was the guy doing traffic studies for a city’s engineering department for three years. If the OP really cares about safety, he will talk to the city (or county, whomever the controlling authority is) engineer and find out about what warrants which traffic-control signing. Getting the politicians involved is the absolutely worst possible thing a person can do if safe, effective roadways are what she wants.

13

There was an intersection like that near my last house.
It was an absolute nightmare at all times of the day. It was so bad I never drove that way, preferring to go the other way around the neighborhood.
Then one day four stop signs turned up. Exactly one week after a woman had been killed crossing the street, in the crosswalk, in daylight, at that intersection.

14

Hi JS;

  1. Three accidents in two years, not 2 in 3. Note that those are the ones that I have personally seen. And on two of 'em it’s extremely lucky that people were not seriously injured or killed, including three small children.

  2. Per my neighbors, some of whom are home during the day and most of whom have lived there for many years, there are A LOT of accidents at this intersection. Lots of accidents in one spot = problem with intersection. Also per the various police officers onsite, lots of accidents at this intersection, and they are going to be talking to the city about it.

  3. Yes, it’s definitely an emotional reaction. If there’s a better way to prevent this from happening again I am all ears. I know that they shouldn’t just randomly block off the street or something to prevent crashes, but SOMETHING needs to change.

  4. This is a residential street, not the Main Drag. There should not BE any “high speed traffic” unless 30mph qualifies. That’s the limit. It’s still plenty fast enough to smash vehicles and kill people but the design of the intersection exacerbates the problem.

Since you’ve had some exposure to this problem, what would you suggest? Can’t reroute traffic, so cutting back vegetation to improve visibility and slowing or stopping through traffic are the about the only options I can see.

15

Installing a stop sign at the foot of (or part way down) a steep hill as you describe would result in an increase of rear-end crashes involving those going downhill.

Installing all-way stops signs for speed control is a non-standard practice and is in violation of the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. [So are yellow crosswalk lines, but SF has their own policy on that.]

See http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov for a totally traffic control device “discussion area”. (no “pit”, just GQ and maybe some IMHO.)

As js_africanus advises, write or send an email to the city traffic engineering department (without the cussing) explaining your knowledge of the crash history of the intersection. Ask them to do a crash analysis of the site for 2 or 3 years and see if that might warrant the installation of 4-way stops. Write them every time you know firsthand of a crash there. Keep a copy of your correspondence. They will have to build a location file and then you can check on the progress periodically.

As other posters have pointed out, the biker was probably very hard to see and may have been morally, if not legally, at fault in the cited crash. If corner foliage is a factor, advise the city of that as well. Most of such obstructions are fairly obvious and can create tort liability problems for cities if not addressed.

16

Thanks Ignatz. Yes, when I communicate with the city about this I will be oh so polite, I know how these things work :slight_smile:

Interesting about the rear-end collisions. There is a much steeper street in Berkeley (Marin, for those of you who live around here) which has a number of 4-way stops.