In wake of recent fatality, safety upgrades urged on Eureka’s Broadway corridor

After two nonmotorists were recently struck by vehicles on Broadway in Eureka on the same night, a local advocacy organization continues to call for safety improvements along this highly used thoroughfare.

Colin Fiske of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities told the Times-Standard the two cases make the group’s calls for Broadway corridor safety improvements for nonmotorists feel more urgent than ever.

“It’s so sad, it’s frustrating. It’s infuriating, really. We’ve been saying for the last several years we need to make these (nonmotorist safety) improvements now so people don’t keep being killed. It hasn’t happened yet and people keep being killed,” he said.

As detailed in a Eureka police news release on Oct. 8, officers responded to two separate incidents. Officers arrived at the first site around 8:12 p.m. on the 3300 block of Broadway, where a male pedestrian was struck in an incident involving multiple vehicles, one northbound and two southbound, according to preliminary investigation findings.

Officers later responded to a separate incident at the intersection of Broadway and West Henderson streets at around 9:15 p.m. where a semi-truck was reported to have struck 49-year-old Eureka resident Michael Wray Robinson. After life-saving efforts, the cyclist was pronounced dead.

In a news release, the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities lamented the episodes and called for action to prevent similar incidents from occurring.

“When tragedies like these occur, it is incumbent upon the community not just to publicly grieve our losses, although this is important, but also to take action to prevent future tragedies of the same kind. Appallingly, we have failed to take action many times before,” the release states. “Caltrans is responsible for building, repairing and maintaining Broadway. As transportation planning research makes clear, the built environment significantly influences the rate of pedestrian strikes, and changing it offers the clearest path for reducing similar tragedies in the future. Caltrans deserves credit for planning safety improvements to parts of Broadway, but the improvements are not comprehensive enough, nor are they coming fast enough.”

The coalition has previously spoken in favor of safety improvements along the Broadway/U.S. Highway 101 corridor and began to circulate a petition Aug. 27 calling for several key safety improvements.

More specifically, the petition calls for various safety improvements to be made in the near-term including building additional safe pedestrian crossings, improving safety of signal intersections with new infrastructure and reprogrammed signals, building protected bike lanes, supporting the city’s efforts to provide pedestrian-scale lighting and providing landscaping and raised medians on Broadway.

The petition was launched at a time in which Caltrans has begun to initialize projects designed to address some of the dangers for cyclists and pedestrians expressed by the petition.

Caltrans District 1 public information officer Myles Cochrane responded to a request for comment saying the state agency remains focused on safety.

“I cannot stress enough that safety remains our No. 1 priority as Caltrans continues to initiate projects in Eureka that benefit pedestrians and cyclists. We encourage public input and have been making moves both short-term and long-term to improve the experience for all along U.S. 101 in Eureka,” he said. “We also recently moved forward on a new mid-block crossing between Cedar Street and Clark Street as well as improving the location of a bus stop near Hawthorne Street and installing a new crosswalk at Hawthorne Street. Lighting improvements are also in the works in coordination with the city of Eureka.”

Caltrans is currently working on local projects.

The Fourth Street Safety Project is building bulbouts, a type of curb extension, at intersections to help calm traffic and shorten crosswalk distances for pedestrians.

Meanwhile, the Broadway ADA project, which runs from 14th Street to the south of the old Kmart signal, is upgrading curbs and driveways which were not ADA compliant as well as constructing new sidewalks where gaps exist.

Caltrans plans on starting work on a pedestrian crossing near Del Norte Street in 2022 and the Fifth Street Safety Project, which will add bulbouts and upgrade curbs and ramps to meet ADA compliance standards.

Fiske did credit Caltrans for its involvement with stakeholders in the projects but would like to see the projects address more of Broadway and be completed sooner than later.

“I should give Caltrans credit for the fact that they are planning a couple of projects on Broadway that would substantially improve safety for people biking and walking. But the issue that we continue to have is that those plans don’t include the whole corridor,” he said. “We need there to be a sense of urgency that is treated as an emergency, and the safety improvements get done now and not in five or 10 years.”

Following the two vehicular strikes, Fiske said the petition remains unchanged in its demands and reiterated the importance of making safety improvements.

“You can never say in any particular incident that something would or wouldn’t have happened under other circumstances, but (the petition’s demands) are the kinds of things that evidence shows will reduce fatalities and the number of people injured while walking and biking,” he pointed out.

As of Friday afternoon, around 400 people have signed the petition, Fiske said.

Humboldt County is generally ranked among the most dangerous counties in California for pedestrians and cyclists, with several fatal incidents happening on Broadway.