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Participants fight pollution, traffic congestion 

Volunteers for Berkeley’s Safe Routes to School Program encouraged more than 3,000 elementary school students to walk, bike, carpool or bus to school Friday – the day before Earth Day – to help cut traffic congestion and air pollution in the city. 

Washington School, across Martin Luther King Jr. Way from Berkeley High, was one of six elementary schools where volunteers set up a smorgasbord of free fruit and bagels to reward kids arriving via environmentally-friendly transport. 

“Cars pollute the air,” said Washington student Ryan Neal, when asked why he chose to ride his scooter to school during an unrelenting rain shower Friday morning. 

Fourth grader Cidnee Bess agreed, but she said she prefers carpooling to school because it makes her feel safer. 

Walking to school, “You don’t know if you’re going to get kidnapped or not,” Bess said. 

A more immediate danger, according to Safe Routes to School volunteers and others, is the risk of being hit by a car.  

“Any transportation besides cars is hard,” said Washington parent volunteer Nicole Welch Friday. “(Drivers) are to the point where they don’t really care about people walking across the streets.” 

According to a May 2000 report by the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Task Force, Berkeley ranks first among 44 California cities of similar size in the number of pedestrians an cyclists injured through  

collisions with cars.  

Pedestrians and bikers between 10 and 17-years-old are twice as likely to be hit by cars as other age groups, the report said. More than half of all such accidents take place within a quarter mile of schools, and students attending schools located on arterial streets – such as Washington School – are even more at risk.  

Along Martin Luther King Jr. Way alone there were more than a dozen cases of 10- to 17-year-olds being hit by cars between 1994 and 1998, according to Berkeley Public Health Department statistics. 

“Almost anywhere along Martin Luther King Jr. Way people have problems just because of the traffic volume,” said Safe Routes to Schools program director Sarah Syed. “People run lights, drive erratically.” 

The problem may be compounded for Washington students because of the preponderance of teenage drivers in the area traveling to and from the high school across the street, said Oakland resident Barbara Davis, who works near Washington and often walks her godson to school there. 

“Young people driving to the high school are looking for parking spaces, like we all are,” Davis said. “The first thing on their mind is, ‘Oh, there’s a space, I’d better hurry up and get it.’” 

Until the city makes streets around schools more pedestrian and bike friendly, argued Syed, most parents will probably opt to drive their kids to school each day, contributing to street congestion. 

A recent study by the Berkeley Safe Routes to Schools program found that 57 percent of Willard Middle School students are driven to school every day, not counting car-poolers. That compares to 15 percent who walk everyday. 

“We just haven’t invested in making walking and biking attractive to people,” Syed said . 

The Safe Routes to School program received a $25,000 planning grant from the California Department of Health Services last fall to, among other things, reduce school-related traffic congestion by improving the safety of students who walk to and from school. 

Program volunteers are working with a number of school sites to identify dangerous intersections and possible ways of making them more pedestrian friendly. Some possibilities include: using strategically-placed concrete islands that keep traffic as far as possible from sidewalks and shorten the distance pedestrians must cover when crossing streets; or using a sort of “smart” traffic light that would spot pedestrians waiting to cross streets and warn approaching cars with a flashing red light. 

Known as Hawkbox Crosswalks, these lights have been proven 93 percent effective in stopping cars in other states, according to a study by the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center. If the city of Berkeley installs such lights in would be the first city in California to do so, according to Syed.  

With grants totaling nearly half a million dollars from the city, the Safe Routes to Schools Program is already working with Willard Middle School and LeConte Elementary School to improve dangerous crossings along Telegraph Avenue. Syed said the program plans to apply for another $400,000 from the California Department of Transportation to help other schools make similar improvements.  

In the meantime, the group is focused on less capital intensive strategies for making it safer to walk and cycle to school, such as encouraging parents to take turns accompanying groups of students. 

“It really turns into something where you need a community effort of walking people to school,” said Washington parent volunteer Philip Morton, who often bikes to school along side his fifth-grade daughter.  

Describing the ordeal of crossing traffic-laden arterials such as Sacramento Street and getting through intersections such as the one at Allston Way and California Street on Friday, Morton said: “You sort of peak out and make sure the cars see you. You make eye contact to make sure they stop.”