According to the report:
“A black minivan traveling westbound on Fifth Street collided with a white Toyota Corolla traveling northbound on E Street, pushing the car onto the curb and knocking over the hydrant. The drivers of both vehicles and a 4-year-old passenger in the van were wearing seatbelts and were not hurt.”
Steve Tracy last night on Vanguard radio reported that the accident occurred right in front of the main branch of the Davis Fire Department. In fact, Chief Rose Conroy walked out of her office and observed the accident in person.
According to Mr. Tracy’s data, roughly one-tenth of all accidents in Davis occur along the Fifth Street corridor between B Street and L Street.
At this particular corner, there are stop signs on E Street at the intersection with Fifth Street, but the traffic on the four-lane Fifth Street does not stop.
As Steve Tracy wrote in a special commentary on the Vanguard in May:
“Year after year ten percent of the accidents in the entire City of Davis occur on 5th Street. Thirty-five in 2007. Thirty in 2008, eight of them involving bicyclists and pedestrians. There were six accidents in just January and February of this year. Of those, four involved people who were not in motor vehicles, and all four were injured. Many of these accidents would not have occurred if this street had been reconfigured four years ago.”
Furthermore:
“Because the cross streets come at frequent intervals (every 320 feet) and 5th Street provides access to densely populated residential neighborhoods and our thriving downtown, drivers make a lot of left turns off of 5th. As they sit at the intersection waiting for oncoming traffic to clear, they completely block traffic flow in the left lane.
This creates multiple hazards: those drivers may impatiently make an unsafe turn and get hit, they may be rear-ended by an inattentive driver behind them, an impatient driver may make an unsafe lane change to avoid the stopped vehicle and hit a car in the right lane, or the stopped car may block the view of a driver coming the other way who makes a left turn into the path of an unseen vehicle in the right lane.”
Steve Tracy said that there have been no fatalities on this stretch, but it seems likely that with over 30 accidents a year, many involving non-motor vehicles, and with the speed of the vehicles on this stretch, that a fatality will unfortunately occur.
He said during the interview that at 25 MPH, a pedestrian hit by a car has roughly a 20% chance of being killed. When the speed goes up to 35 MPH, they have just a 20% of surviving and if they do survive their life is forever altered. He said that 10 MPH is a critical threshold and that the average speed right now on Fifth Street through that corridor is 35 MPH.
I have shared many times the accident that we suffered last year in May at Farmer’s Market. We were loading the car to pack down from Farmer’s Market when a car came careening around the corner turning left from westbound Fifth Street at over 30 MPH. They encountered a car pulling out and instead of hitting the brakes, they panicked and hit the gas, believing it to be the brake, they accelerated through the first impact and caused a six car pile up. Ours was the last car hit and the only vehicle not totaled.
A minute earlier I was between two of the cars that were impacted. Luckily no one was hurt, but it is a matter of time before someone is seriously injured if not killed in this stretch.
You can listen to my one hour interview with Steve Tracy by clicking here.
You can sign the petition in support of the Fifth Street Redesign by clicking here.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
I have signed the petition, and strongly favor the new calming measures proposed. For me, this is a question of safety, first and foremost.
For years and years, I have heard the screeching tires at D and 5th and E and 5th and watched pedestrians and bikes dodge cars.
The traffic signal improvements at F and G helped a lot, but the Steve Tracy plan for 5th Street itself will finish the project and make it nice, pleasant to cross, and much safer.
If you build it . . . we will [u]still [/u]come!
Thanks to Steve Tracy’s informative back and forth posts with me, a bit of research on my own to understand the relatively high number of accidents on this stretch of road, and the idiot woman yesterday in the newer model gold color hybrid Toyota Highlander that raced from the left lane of East bound Fifth Street as the light turned green at the B Street intersection to dangerously cut in front of my very large and SLOW-TO-STOP truck to make an tire screeching right-hand turn on C Street, not only did I just sign the petition, but I have started a new special interest group to encourage public flogging of idiot drivers… especially uppity mothers who think getting their kids to the park on time is a matter of life and death… and drivers of hybrids… double flogging if they are both.
By the way, eastbound Russell at A Street is also a bit of a problem. The left turn lane at A street is in a funky position where the road turns, and lazy or idiot drivers on Russell naturally drift left instead just turning their damn steering wheel to stay in the middle of their lane. The result is the left lane driver nearly clipping any car waiting to turn on A Street. I had the fun of this happening when the car in the left turn lane was a big city works truck and I nearly lost a side view mirror or worse. Of course the steering-wheel-lazy idiot driver in the hybrid to the right of me that drifted into my lane was oblivious to the near accident she caused as she turned right on B Street to make her way to some upper-division college-related event… I’m sure. She needs to be flogged too.