Vehicles travel along the northbound lanes of Marysville Boulevard near Nogales Street and the William J. Kinney Police Facility in North Sacramento on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
Daniel Hunt
dhunt@sacbee.com
The Sacramento City Council approved Tuesday the contractor for a $1.2 million quick-build project on a North Sacramento roadway — the first large-scale development in the city’s new program to accelerate road safety improvements.
Marysville Boulevard is one of the most dangerous roads in the city, and four men — Jordan Nicolas Rodriguez, 38; Alfred Ramirez, 23; Zachery Ryan Taylor, 20; and Bee Lao, 46 — have died in crashes there since January 2024. The quick-build project will cover a stretch of Marysville between Harris Avenue, just south of Interstate 80, and Los Robles Boulevard near Hagginwood Park. Although none of those four fatal crashes occurred within the project’s limits, four separate collisions in this half-mile stretch have killed people since 2017.
The quick-build project is a cheaper, half-mile version of a longer-term, mile-long plan on Marysville. The $1.2 million version will use materials that are less permanent and less expensive.
Through the quick-build effort, the city will reduce the number of lanes from four to two and use some of that space for buffered bike lanes. Narrowing the space allotted to cars has been shown to reduce driver speeds. Safety experts say speed is the biggest factor in whether a crash becomes fatal. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that if a driver strikes a pedestrian at 42 mph, the average risk that the pedestrian will die is 50%: five times the risk of death if the collision occurs at 23 mph.
In 2017, the Sacramento City Council made a Vision Zero pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries by 2027. Since then, data from UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System and reporting by The Sacramento Bee show that at least 11 people have died on Marysville Boulevard alone, including three at one intersection: Marysville and Los Robles Boulevard, the project’s southern limit. One of the victims was a motorist, one was a pedestrian and one was riding a bike.
The new North Sacramento project will run through Del Paso Heights, East Del Paso Heights and Hagginwood. It was on the City Council’s consent calendar, meaning it was not automatically scheduled for discussion, but Roger Dickinson, who represents those neighborhoods, commented on the matter during the meeting.
“The community is very, very pleased to see (the quick-build project) reaching us for approval of the contract,” Dickinson said. “They’re anxious to have this quick-build project done. It is the realization of the policy that we adopted last year to move more quickly, and I thank other council members for supporting that, and the leadership on that. So, looking to increase safety for drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, just as a start on Marysville Boulevard, but it’s an important start.”
Dickinson referenced the quick-build safety program, which was approved by the City Council last year. The council reallocated $4.6 million to the program to speed up improvements on dangerous roads and advance its Vision Zero goals.
Looking at the death toll, Sacramento surface roads have become more dangerous since the council made that pledge. Data from the Transportation Injury Mapping System showed that in 2014, 2015 and 2016, Sacramento recorded an average of 28 traffic deaths per year. In 2024, 33 people died, and in 2025, at least 32 have died — markedly higher than that pre-Vision Zero average.
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Ariane Lange reports on regional transportation for The Sacramento Bee. She was a USC Center for Health Journalism 2023 California Health Equity Fellow. Previously, she worked at BuzzFeed News, where she covered gender-based violence and sexual harassment.