![\"Seth](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SAC_RCB_20240821_ShawnsDad_0014.JPG\" "\\"Seth")
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Seth Jordan wipes tears on Aug. 21, 2024 while grieving for his son Shawn Jordan, 18, who died after being hit by a vehicle on Walerga Road in June. The teenager was walking home on section of a bridge with no sidewalk. Aubrey Fong, Shawn\u2019s stepmother, stands at right. Seth was hospitalized for pancreatitis earlier that month. He said he almost drank himself to death after the loss of his son.<\/p>\n
Ren\u00e9e C. Byer<\/p>\n
rbyer@sacbee.com<\/p>\n
Two years after a North Highlands teen was fatally struck while walking on a dangerous stretch of road with no sidewalk, experts and the teen\u2019s family are challenging Sacramento County\u2019s contention that the roadway cannot be improved.<\/p>\n
The California Highway Patrol report shows that a driver veered into Shawn Jordan, 18, on Walerga Road in the early evening of June 15, 2024. At the time of the hit-and-run, the purple-haired teenager was walking home from the bus stop in an area of the viaduct with no sidewalk. He died of his injuries in the hospital five days later.<\/p>\n
Since the death of the aspiring musician, his parents have advocated for the county to install pedestrian safeguards on the Walerga Road overpass in North Highlands, which many children use to get to and from a cluster of schools north of the train tracks. There is no sidewalk along most of the bridge, which was built in the 1960s. Pedestrians walk in a \u201cmulti-modal\u201d bike lane with just a painted white line between them and vehicles.<\/p>\n
The legal limit on the road is 40 mph \u2014 a speed that research has shown is likely to kill a person on foot in the event of a crash<\/a>.<\/p>\n At a memorial for Jordan on June 20, 2025, his father, Seth Jordan, and his stepmother, Aubrey Fong, displayed a posterboard with smiling photos of the purple-haired young man. Next to the photos, they wrote a message to local officials urging them to take action.<\/p>\n In large letters, they wrote, \u201cNobody else should have to die.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the Sacramento County Department of Transportation, Matt Robinson, said that any change to the roadway would require a large, expensive construction project. He said that because there are so many dangerous roads in the county, engineers would need to see more deaths or injuries<\/a> before prioritizing Walerga Road for intervention.<\/p>\n \u201cWe haven\u2019t had a string of fatalities on that road; we\u2019ve just had one,\u201d he said. \u201cOne is too many, but in the grand scheme of things, is it enough to bump it up?\u201d<\/p>\n Experts said that statement exposed faulty logic. They said they believed the injury and death rates were only low because most pedestrians and cyclists would go miles out of their way to avoid walking right next to high-speed cars on the bridge \u2014 just as Jordan did most of the time, Fong said, by taking a less direct bus route.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople see the risk, and if they have any alternative at all, they\u2019ll take it,\u201d said Amelia Neptune, director of the Bicycle Friendly America program at the League of American Bicyclists. \u201cThat\u2019s a failure.\u201d<\/p>\n Rebecca Sanders, who has a PhD in transportation planning and has extensively researched street safety, said, \u201cThey\u2019re sort of relying on the fact that this is so dangerous that people are self-selecting out to justify not doing anything.\u201d<\/p>\n On the two-year anniversary of his son\u2019s death, Jordan\u2019s father thought about the county\u2019s explanation for doing nothing to improve the bridge. He blamed the county more than the hit-and-run driver who killed his son.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there was a barrier,\u201d he said, \u201cmy son would be alive.\u201d<\/p>\n The as-built plans for the viaduct show that the vehicle travel lanes are 12 feet wide. Jerry Champa, a retired Caltrans engineer who now advocates for street safety, said that\u2019s the lane width often used for freeways. Passenger vehicles on a surface street, he said, simply don\u2019t need that much space.<\/p>\n Robinson said the county couldn\u2019t remove a lane to slow down traffic and to reallocate the space to pedestrians \u2014 the traffic volumes, he said, are too high. Beyond that, the lanes on the overpass must be wide enough to accommodate semi trucks, he said, which are allowed to use the road.<\/p>\n But Champa said that \u201cfor decades,\u201d engineers have found it acceptable to leave one lane wide enough for trucks while narrowing inside lanes. It was \u201cawfully conservative,\u201d he said, to suggest that all four lanes in this mostly residential area needed to be wide enough to accommodate a semi.<\/p>\n Champa added that narrowing just one lane in each direction by a foot or two would give the county more space to allocate to vulnerable road users and to potentially add in physical protections such as the concrete Jersey barriers or K-rails often seen shielding construction workers on road projects. A Jersey barrier, Sanders said, typically requires 18 inches of road width \u2014 one and a half feet.<\/p>\n After reviewing the as-built plans, Champa suggested eliminating the painted median and narrowing the inside lane to 11 feet, 6 inches; trucks could use the far-right lane on each side. The median alone was 4 feet and an \u201coptional\u201d element. Champa said his recommendation was based on \u201cstandard practice.\u201d Before adding in a physical barrier, the county would have to analyze whether the bridge could withstand the weight, but certain barriers or curbs with vertical separation could improve the status quo, too.<\/p>\n Putting safety over lane width was possible, he said. For creative, evidence-based engineering, he liked to point people to the safety-over-lane-width redesign of the Golden Gate Bridge.<\/p>\n Sacramento County has pointed to engineering guidelines about lane size to explain why the lanes cannot be narrowed to give more of the space on the viaduct to people outside cars. An engineer from the Golden Gate Bridge told The Bee that such guidelines can be flexible when human lives are on the line.<\/p>\n John Eberle, the district engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, said that more than a decade ago, engineers decided to narrow lanes to prevent deadly head-on crashes. On that bridge, the engineers ultimately reallocated the space they took away from cars to a physical median separating north- and southbound traffic.<\/p>\n Up until 2015, the Golden Gate had six 10-foot lanes \u2014 two feet narrower than the lanes on Walerga. It has long had a speed limit of 45 mph \u2014 5 mph faster than the limit on Walerga. The 10-foot lanes were standard in the 1930s when the bridge was originally constructed. Although speeds had increased dramatically since the \u201930s, the roadway lacked a median.<\/p>\n \u201cThe speed limit was 45 mph, but you just had a little plastic tube between northbound traffic and southbound traffic,\u201d Eberle said.<\/p>\n The plastic tubes were a visual cue, but they couldn\u2019t actually stop a drifting vehicle. Repeatedly, drivers would cross over the line and end up in devastating head-on collisions.<\/p>\n The district decided to act.<\/p>\n In order to install a one-foot-wide solid median to stop head-on collisions, the engineers made a plan to shave six inches off of the inside lanes, bringing them down from 10 feet wide to 9 and a half feet wide. The 10-foot width was already pretty slim, and engineers wanted to cut them down even more.<\/p>\n Those narrower lanes would go against design standards, and the board of directors for the bridge district had to review the plan to make a formal exception at a public meeting. The board weighed the pros and cons.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pros \u2014 having a safety barrier \u2014 outweighed the cons of having a 9 and a half foot lane,\u201d Eberle said. \u201cThe pros are, since we installed the barrier, we haven\u2019t had one crossover incident. And a crossover incident \u2014 they can be very bad.\u201d<\/p>\n The cons, Eberle said, didn\u2019t seem as important: He expected people might sideswipe the barrier in the narrowed center lanes, and that they might increasingly sideswipe other drivers. Those crashes would be unfortunate but much less serious than any head-on collision.<\/p>\n Did narrower lanes cause more problems?<\/p>\n The bridge sees close to 100,000 vehicle crossings a day. But despite the high volume of traffic and the engineers\u2019 predictions about the tradeoff they made, Eberle said that the \u201ccons\u201d of taking away space from cars never materialized.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really haven\u2019t seen an increase in people on the roadway either impacting the barrier itself or sideswiping other vehicles,\u201d he said. He attributed it to drivers paying more attention due to the obviously narrower space for their cars.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re in a nine-and-a-half foot lane, and you know that,\u201d he said. \u201cSo they\u2019re taking care.\u201d<\/p>\n The results delighted him.<\/p>\n \u201cThis project here, it really was very successful, in that there was an issue that was identified, people came together and agreed that something should be done,\u201d he said. \u201cYou look out there now and say, \u2018How could we have had a 19-inch cone, spaced 25 feet, as the only barrier?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Two years after Jordan\u2019s death, Robinson confirmed that Sacramento County engineers had looked at the Golden Gate model. He said they determined that on the northbound side of the bridge, the lanes could be narrowed between one and two feet without getting into a major, costly construction project. However, in general, he said that \u201cnarrowing the width would cause problems for larger vehicles\u201d and thus was not possible.<\/p>\n Neptune, the cycling advocate who\u2019s lobbied for safer infrastructure nationwide, was not surprised by that type of thinking.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not uncommon in the U.S. for transportation engineers and planners to solely be thinking about people in cars,\u201d she said. \u201cInstead of starting with safety, we\u2019re continuing to start with and lead with vehicle volumes.\u201d<\/p>\n Neptune said she wished that county officials would take a walk along that viaduct right next to 50 mph traffic so they could see the conditions that children on their way to school continue to face \u2014 and that Jordan experienced the day he never made it back to his dad\u2019s house.<\/p>\n![\"Jahison](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SAC_0075_RCB_20241022_Walegra.JPG\" "\\"SAC_0075_RCB_20241022_Walegra.JPG\\"")
Jahison Tracy, then a junior at Creative Connections Arts Academy, talks about the dangers of walking on Walerga Road in North Highlands on Oct. 22, 2024. Many students walk, bike and ride scooters along the path, which he says makes it even more dangerous along traffic. \u201cIt feels very unsafe and very stupid to have this walk here right next to a high school,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how that went through.\u201d Ren\u00e9e C. Byer rbyer@sacbee.com Does bridge have space for pedestrian safety?<\/p>\n![\"On](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SAC_RCB_20240719_RoadDeath_0028.jpg\" "\\"SAC_RCB_20240719_RoadDeath_0028.jpg\\"")
On July 19, 2024, Marie Martinez holds a picture of her son Shawn Jordan, 18, who died that June after he was hit by a car on Walerga Road in North Highlands. The mother of four died in November 2025, a week and a half after learning that the California Highway Patrol had finished its investigation and the driver suspected of fatally hitting her son would be charged with a crime. Her family believes that grief contributed to her death. Ren\u00e9e C. Byer rbyer@sacbee.com How did Golden Gate stop deadly crashes?<\/p>\n
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