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Safety for All Road Users

by Larry Hogue

Larry Hogue is a writer. He lives in San Diego.

Imagine you’re standing at the corner of Governor Drive, waiting to cross Genesee Avenue. You’re waiting, and waiting, and waiting, as traffic rushes by at 45-50 miles an hour. When you get your walk signal, you have to wait as two or three of those left turners run the red light. Then a driver in the right-turn-only lane next to you decides to play “beat the pedestrian into the crosswalk,” nearly hitting you. As you’re waiting to cross Genesee on your return trip, you notice that drivers making a right turn on red onto Governor rarely come to a complete stop, and few of them check for pedestrians about to enter the intersection.

Or, imagine you’re biking eastbound on Governor, waiting at that same red light on Genesee. You’re positioned in the right through lane because it’s really too narrow to share safely. You can sense the impatience of the drivers stacking up behind you, who are just as tired as you are of waiting more than three minutes for a green light. The instant the lane becomes wide enough to share, the driver behind you hits the gas. You feel the backdraft as the car passes within a foot of your handlebars, then the driver slams on the brakes and turns right in front of you into Vons parking lot.

This is daily life at the intersection of Genesee Avenue and Governor Drive: a quiet, walkable neighborhood collides head-on with infrastructure that privileges auto-dependent commuters traveling quickly through on their way to somewhere else.

In that respect, it’s not much different than a lot of other intersections in San Diego, sharing many of the same problems: freeway-like speeds, signal timing that turns the major arterial into a barrier to cross-traffic, a refusal by city personnel to approve safety measures. Add to the mix three nearby schools, and the safety issues become even more complex.

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by BikeSD Staff