Posted by Cuesta Resident, a resident of the Cuesta Park neighborhood, on Mar 14, 2013 at 9:43 pm

This is a tragedy. We need to understand what happened, and then think about changes.

We need to know if the car was speeding. We need to know if the walker was on her phone, or texting, or wearing dark clothes. We need a full investigation, with total clarity on what is known for sure, what's suspected, and what is unknown.

After we have that, we need to look at all options. For example, maybe we should close off Hans so no cars turn from it or onto it. Maybe we should clearly designate this as a no-pedestrian crossing area. Or maybe we should add a pedestrian crossing signal like near Wal-Mart.

Clearly lots of prior steps - narrowing the street, and reducing speed limit did not work in this case. And yet there is a real cost to those measures (extra time, reduced capacity). If they've saved lives then they are worth it - but they did not in this case, and might not be worth it in general.

The keys here are to:

1) Understand the facts first

2) Consider ALL options, not just ones that the Bike/Ped committee prefers

3) Consider all the costs (money, time, capacity, gas, pollution, etc) to make smart choices.