Pedestrians at four intersections along San Antonio Road will see yellow instead of red next fall if the city stays on track with safety measures approved last week.
The first leg of the safety plan is to count the pedestrians crossing at each of 14 intersections along the road from Loucks Avenue to Cuesta Drive. The second leg is to determine which three intersections most need warning lights embedded in the crosswalk to grab motorists’ attention. The traffic commission recommends installing the warning lights at Yerba Buena Avenue, Pine Lane and Loucks Avenue. Traffic engineer Tom Ho, however, favors making Angela Drive/Mt. Hamilton Avenue the fourth intersection to receive the warning system.
The Los Altos City Council voted in October to install a strip of the small, yellow, flashing LED lights in the asphalt at the Pepper Drive intersection but will count pedestrians there anyway. Ho hopes to see the crosswalk lights at Pepper and San Antonio in place by summer and the rest by the end of summer.
Jon Baer, who lives on Pepper, urged the city council to choose the best time for counting pedestrians to “get the right data at the right time,” suggesting that teen volunteers count pedestrians to save an estimated $240 per intersection. The traffic experts of the Mineta Transportation Institute suggested in a Nov. 21 conference call with staff and councilmembers that Foothill College students gather the data. The traffic commission, reluctant to devote staff time to coordinating a student effort, recommended hiring a professional firm. After some discussion, the city council agreed 3-1 last week to hire a consultant. Mayor Ron Packard was absent from the Jan. 10 regular meeting, and Kurt Colehower dissented.
City staff members are putting together a scope-of-work proposal to be sent out for bid in a couple of weeks.
“The beginning of March would be a good time to start counting,” Ho said. “The weather will be nicer and there’ll be more people out. We’ll get more pets, too.”
The solar-powered warning system will be activated by a push button on a utility pole. Ho estimated the cost of installing the pole and the lights at $20,000-$30,000 per intersection. Each intersection will use about $20-$30 of electricity per month, he said.
Despite the number and speed of the vehicles moving through town on San Antonio, the road has traffic signals at only four crosswalks and none between Edith Avenue, at the northern entrance to downtown, and Cuesta Drive, the last intersection before Foothill Expressway. Vehicle counts and speeds, pedestrian counts, accident history, street characteristics and sight distance of pedestrians are the criteria the city uses in deciding whether to mark a crosswalk at an intersection.
A staff review of vehicular accidents involving pedestrians on San Antonio from 1996 to 2005 noted four such accidents at Angela Drive/Mt. Hamilton Avenue and one each at Hillview Avenue, Pine Lane, Loucks Avenue, Lyell Street and Hawthorne Avenue. An accident at the Hawthorne intersection last April was the only fatality in the 10-year review period.
