Columnist Susan Snyder: This sting is no walk in the park

Friday, Feb. 22, 2002 | 8:52 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

Larry Loder watched the morning traffic on East Charleston Boulevard whiz past for several seconds before gingerly placing one foot on the roadway.

Each time his toe touched the pavement, he drew his foot back. He looked as if he was testing bath water, rather than trying to cross the road. He finally gave up and walked east on Charleston, away from Lamb Boulevard and toward the light at Marion Street.

"You've got a light there at Marion and one at Lamb and that's it," said Loder, who works at Goodwill. "It's busy as hell."

Scary, too. Less than two months ago, 42-year-old Linda Spiller was killed when she was struck three times by three different vehicles as she tried to walk across the same stretch of road, mid-block.

"It happened right up here," Loder said, pointing ahead of him.

I should mention that Loder and I weren't talking like normal people. We were shouting, so we could be heard above the traffic that roared past us at freeway speeds.

Welcome to walking in Las Vegas -- outside the "planned communities."

No one has been charged in Spiller's death. Police say she was jaywalking, a swift and capital crime in Las Vegas. But local transportation experts say it's not a lack of education but personal experience that keeps pedestrians from using crosswalks.

"Pedestrians have told us they don't use crosswalks because (motorists) don't stop for them," said Maggie Saunders, pedestrian and bicycle safety program coordinator for the Traffic Research Center at the University Nevada, Las Vegas.

Motorists are always supposed to stop for people in crosswalks, Saunders said, marked ones or legal, unmarked ones, which occur any place one street intersects another.

So now valley motorists are going to help people feel better about using crosswalks by getting tickets when they fail to stop for people in crosswalks.

Saunders' office, its Safe Community Partnership and the Nevada Office of Traffic Safety are spending about $150,000 over the next three years on a sting in which plain-clothes police officers will pose as pedestrians.

Motorists who fail to stop for them in the crosswalks -- marked or unmarked -- will be ticketed by uniformed officers waiting beyond the intersection.

The first stings were set up today on Maryland Parkway at Del Mar Street and Dumont Boulevard.

Fret not. You'd have to be an idiot (or messing with the cell phone or CD player) to miss them. Signs and traffic cones warn of each sting's existence.

Still, some motorists will goof up. We're pretty good at hitting people around here. State figures show that eight pedestrians have died on Clark County roads so far this year, compared to two this time last year.

Dan Burden, director of Walkable Communities Inc., is a national consultant who helped set up the sting. It was his 12th visit to Las Vegas, one of 1,198 cities he has studied.

"Las Vegas is the most-challenged community in the country," Burden told a group of planners, engineers and police officers Thursday night."You're right up there with Houston, Atlanta and Detroit."

Oh, yay for us.

So find the brake pedal. That pedestrian ahead might give you a ticket instead of the single-finger salute.