Columnist Susan Snyder: Our roads are fatally flawed

Friday, Nov. 7, 2003 | 8:36 a.m.

Ashlee Marie Bicknell, Adriana Lauzon and Tabatha Speas deserved better.

All three teenagers were struck by cars while crossing streets in crosswalks. And all were held accountable for the crashes -- at least, as accountable as one can hold dead teenagers.

"Dead teenagers." That sounds awful. But "pedestrian fatality" strips the humanity from the crashes that kill people who walk. And too much humanity already is missing from our roads and our attitudes toward building and using them.

Speas, 13, died at home Thursday, 22 days after she and Lauzon, 13, were struck while walking in a legal, unmarked crosswalk in Southern Highlands. Lauzon died Oct. 21.

Bicknell, 15, died Monday after she was struck while walking in a legal, unmarked crosswalk at Bonanza Road and Wardelle Street in Las Vegas.

Their deaths bring to 38 the number of people killed while walking in Clark County this year.

The intersection of Bonanza and Wardelle is a four-way crossroads that used to have a marked crosswalk. Las Vegas City traffic workers obliterated the lines recently when they placed a traffic light and marked a crosswalk at 28th Street, which intersects Bonanza about 100 yards west.

It's amazing what people who drive are willing to ask of people who walk. We travel in some kind of two-class feudal system where lords in cars have priority over peasants who walk.

"When I do community presentations, I love to ask, 'How many of you park as far away as you can when you go to the store?' " said Erin Breen, executive director of the Safe Community Partnership.

"I tell them, 'I've seen you driving up and down looking for a closer parking spot. You're not willing to walk an extra 10 feet to go to the store, yet you want the people who ride the bus to walk an extra half mile,' " Breen said.

If it's human nature to cross in a certain spot, why isn't it human nature to place the crosswalk there? We treat crosswalks as if they are first designed to keep people on foot from interfering with the speeding, unobstructed travel of people in cars.

Why can't motorists ever be the ones who must stop, wait for everyone else to go about their business and backtrack under the desert sun or in the bitter cold?

O.C. White, a Las Vegas City traffic engineer, told Las Vegas Sun reporter Ed Koch that city officials "didn't want to send a mixed message" by painting two crosswalks on that section of Bonanza. So rather than placing the new light with an existing crosswalk favored by residents who use it, engineers moved everything up the road.

The resulting message: People who walk count most often when traffic deaths are tallied.

Nevada law says a legal crosswalk occurs any place two streets intersect. Stripes don't make it more legal. Yet, local traffic safety officials repeatedly have said stripes still don't make it safe. Paint doesn't stop motorists, White said.

People who designed this system and the ones who enforce its laws freely admit it isn't safe for an entire segment of the population, even when they use it legally. Are you content to pay for that?

You can be certain we all do.

Bicknell, Lauzon and Speas simply paid more.