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A recent pedestrian fatality has highlighted the problem of pedestrian safety in Berkeley.  

While there’s no disagreement among policy makers around the importance of the issue, the tension of limited resources ignited a battle about how police forces should be used, and whether new funding is best spent on increasing the number of police. 

Councilmember Polly Armstrong adamantly believes in enforcing current traffic laws to keep motorists driving with caution. 

“Without enforcement even people who mean to do well, don’t,” Armstrong said. “Somehow we just have to raise the amount of enforcement so that even when there’s no cop around they think that there might be.” 

In December of last year the council requested that the City Manager’s Office develop a proposal to decrease traffic violations by increasing enforcement measures. The police presented their proposal at the City Council meeting last week, giving a simple answer: no can do. 

The written proposal said that patrolling is the primary duty of the police department. Because the department is understaffed, traffic officers must support patrol officers. According to the report, of the 157 officer positions available, 33 are not filled with active cops because of injuries, training, or because positions are vacant. To create the necessary enforcement, the police traffic division would have to be increased by three officers, from seven to 10. 

Armstrong was not convinced. 

“I felt it was pretty non-responsive,” Armstrong said. “They said, ‘We have a lot of things that cops need to do.’ That to me was not, ‘Yes indeed we understand.’ It was reasons why we can’t do it, and not ways we could do it.” 

Police Chief Dash Butler said although officers were not ever removed from traffic enforcement, because of the decreased force many officers get called to other activities, including Berkeley’s most famous activity: demonstrations.  

Berkeley is a compact city with large volumes of booth foot and automobile traffic. 

Armstrong said she believes that combination makes traffic enforcement a high priority. “I want people who get up at eight o’clock and give speeding tickets until five o’clock in the afternoon and people who give tickets to people who don’t stop at crosswalks,” she said.  

While disagreeing on some of the specifics – many beat officers also write tickets – Butler agreed on the whole with the council’s attempt to increase traffic safety. “Council is right, it’s a serious serious problem,” he said. “Overall people drive too fast. They don’t understand or appreciate pedestrian right of way; they’re not considerate of others in their driving.” He said that many of the traffic accidents occur when motorists don’t yield to pedestrians, bikes, or other motorists.  

To address the lack of respect for pedestrian right of way, Armstrong said she’d like to see more use of “pedestrian stings,” when undercover officers cross at crosswalks and arrest drivers who don’t stop. 

Although pedestrian safety activists hesitantly supported the call for more enforcement, they all unanimously agreed that new officers would not, on their own, prevent the traffic fatalities that haunt the city. There have been at least five pedestrian fatalities since 1997, according to city records. 

“Enforcement is part of the picture, but not the most important part,” said Zac Wald, executive director of BayPeds, a pedestrian education group. “Berkeley like most places, needs to come up with a vision of how they want cars and pedestrians and bicyclists to share the public right of way. The long term goal should be a change in the culture.” 

Wald urged that enforcement not be looked at as a panacea to the traffic problems. 

“When it’s viewed just a transgression of motor vehicle laws that can be fixed by enforcement, you’re looking at a chronic problem with no solution,” he said. “It’s only when you put enforcement together with education and engineering have there been successes in this field in other cities.” 

The balancing of different approaches to pedestrian safety comes to a head when competing programs start asking for money. Pedestrian safety advocates implied that funding from the city for extra police enforcement may not go to other safety improvements. 

“If you look at spending $500,000 for traffic enforcement, you might want to say, ‘what are our outcomes?’” said Nancy Holland, member of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Task Force. “There are things we could do that wouldn’t be that expensive that would create a real sense that Berkeley cares about safety. I think that’s what we have to weigh.” The three new officer positions carry an estimated price tag of almost $300,000 the first year. 

Holland and Wald support a proposal by the mayor to create a new city position for a pedestrian safety planner, and to re-engineer streets to make them safer and make traffic slower. The proposal was on the City Council agenda Tuesday night. 

Chief Butler had his own solution to the problem of speeding and unsafe drivers – education combined with higher penalties. “Some of them could be brought up to where it really stings when you get cited for some of this stuff,” he said. 

He said a painfully priced ticket may dissuade people from taking the risk of speeding.