Deaths, Injuries Cloud ‘Walkers’ Paradise’

Late at night, when the chaos of the city streets subsides, Ken Kelton whips his red truck to the curb at an offending intersection.

Working quickly, he throws down a plywood stencil and spray-paints another street memorial to a fallen pedestrian. Resembling the chalked body outlines at crime scenes, the life-size white sketch proclaims the victim’s name and accident date.

“Pedestrian deaths are always cleaned up within hours--the body’s gone, the blood washed away--like we don’t want to know,” said 51-year-old Kelton, a building contractor by day and urban guerrilla after dark. “This way, people remember. They’re reminded that this is a dangerous place.”

The city known worldwide as a walker’s paradise has never seemed so dangerous. Since January, 18 pedestrians have been killed on San Francisco streets and more than 300 have been injured--setting a course to easily exceed last year’s death toll of 28.

Victims have been hit in crosswalks, while waiting for buses, when dashing into traffic. The youngest--a 3-year-old boy--was struck by a cab. The oldest was a 98-year-old man run down by a trolley car.

The deaths have moved police to step up enforcement and prompted city officials to hold a recent emergency pedestrian safety summit.

Supervisor Mabel Teng has vowed to use the summit proposals--such as narrowing streets and increasing fines levied on motorists--to create a safety master plan.

And the San Francisco agency that created the national “Got Milk?” ads is devising a pedestrian safety awareness campaign.

“I’m calling it the ‘Got Brakes?’ campaign,” Teng said. “San Francisco is no longer a walkable city, because people have to take risks just to cross the street. We’ve got to change the behavior of both walkers and drivers. Until then, the streets will not be safe.”

Studies show that San Francisco--where about 10% of people walk to work--has the highest pedestrian injury rate in California. Nationwide, about 13% of traffic fatalities involve pedestrians; in San Francisco the rate hovers around 50%, studies show.

The city’s pedestrian death rate is second only to New York City’s, officials say.

“It’s alarming,” said James Corless, California director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a nonprofit agency that promotes more balanced transportation policies. “It’s gotten to the point where people are literally afraid to step off the curb.”

San Francisco police reviewed 286 car-pedestrian incidents this year, blaming motorists in 123 and finding that 91 were the fault of pedestrians. In the others, the responsibility was unclear.

Experts say there is a third culprit missing from that formula: the streets themselves.

“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on over who’s responsible for all the accidents, the walker or the driver. But the truth is that traffic engineers can share some of the blame,” Corless said.

In San Francisco, there are many blind intersections where vehicles often barrel over hills. And the loss of downtown’s Embarcadero Freeway, torn down after the 1989 earthquake, has turned many downtown surface streets into urban expressways.

The city’s new Internet commerce has added to the problem. Because most products bought online need to be delivered the old-fashioned way--by truck--double-parked delivery vehicles routinely clog downtown streets, city officials say.

Residents and city officials agree that San Francisco needs to rethink the very makeup of many streets. In the 1960s and ‘70s, traffic engineers believed that the fastest way to move vehicles was along wide one-way thoroughfares with few trees or impediments to block a motorist’s vision.

“Back then, engineers figured pedestrians would soon be a thing of the past, that people wouldn’t need to walk,” Corless said. “In fact, until the 1990s, the city engineer’s bible put out by the American Assn. of State Highway and Transportation officials referred to pedestrians as ‘traffic flow interruptions.’ That’s how car-centric the thinking was.”

Now, Teng says, city officials are exploring such “car-calming” street design changes as speed humps, traffic circles and “bulb-outs,” or extensions of the sidewalk into the street to create better visibility for both drivers and pedestrians.

Mayor Willie Brown plans to expand the city’s red light photo enforcement program, which snaps pictures of violators, and begin several pedestrian-friendly projects, such as countdown crosswalk signals that inform walkers how much time they have in an intersection before the light changes.

The downtown bedlam is made worse by other factors officials cannot control. Many busy, stressed pedestrians absent-mindedly talk on cell phones. Motorists take chances behind the wheel.

“It’s a crowded urban environment with too many people and too many cars,” said Michael Radetsky, an injury prevention specialist for the city Department of Public Health. “Frustrated drivers are often stopped at every light on clogged streets. So they tend to race between intersections.”

And many run stop signs.

Just ask Alvin Ja, whose 85-year-old mother was killed last month when a sport utility vehicle did just that and plowed into her motorized wheelchair as Mabel Ja cruised across a crosswalk, smashing her skull.

“People drive too aggressively,” Alvin Ja said. “They whip around corners, make turns into narrow streets, assuming there won’t be anything there. The whole culture says, ‘Screw the other guy. I’ll take whatever shortcuts I have to, to get where I’m going.’ ”

Every day when he sees a reckless driver, Ja thinks of his mother, who for decades ran a Chinatown clothing store. “Irresponsible driving killed my mother,” he said. “It disgusts me.”

That same disgust has led Kelton to stencil scores of body outlines at scenes of fatalities. Working at odd hours, he uses orange barricades and flashing red lights to appear like a city worker and avoid an arrest for vandalism.

But city officials have so far looked the other way, even leaving the white body outlines on the street long after Kelton is gone, as long as there are no complaints.

One city traffic official said the stencils are the kind of graphic reminder of mortality that pedestrians need to see every day.

“In many people’s minds, these accidents are all so isolated,” Kelton said. “I’m just trying to connect the dots.”

Michael Kemmitt also has seen too many pedestrians die. The commanding officer for the San Francisco Police Department’s traffic unit, he visits most pedestrian accident scenes and remembers one recent week in which he began to question his sanity.

The police captain went to where a 50-year-old teaching assistant was struck on his walk to school; where a 69-year-old man was dragged by a bus and lost his left hand; where a 71-year-old woman was hit and killed by a water delivery truck; where a young boy was critically injured as he dashed across the street near his school.

“It was just one after the other,” Kemmitt recalled with a shudder. “And you began to wonder ‘Is this ever going to end?’ ”