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<\/p>\nBAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KBAK\/KBFX) \u2014 When a street or intersection sees repeated crashes or safety concerns, City traffic engineers say the solution is not always as simple as adding a stop sign or speed hump.<\/p>\n
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Gavin Grimes, a Civil Engineer III with the City of Bakersfield, said engineers examine several factors before deciding whether a roadway change may help. Those include vehicle counts, vehicle speeds, pedestrian and cyclist activity, lighting and crash data from the Bakersfield Police Department.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want to be too rash and just, you know, \u2018Oh yeah, let\u2019s just throw a stop sign’ or throw a new crossing here at the mid-block, because that can also lead to other accidents or other unsafe factors,\u201d Grimes said.<\/p>\n
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The City uses information from police crash reports to understand what may have contributed to a collision. Grimes said engineers consider the type of crash, whether it happened at night, whether there was a lack of lighting and whether speeding was involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to make sure that, yeah, we understand why the crash happened, what the other factors around the crash were and then start to look at the actual engineering solution,\u201d Grimes said.<\/p>\n
Grimes said the City does not wait for a set number of crashes before looking into a location. The timeline can vary depending on the type of change being considered.<\/p>\n
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\u201cFor something as simple as a speed hump or a speed table, you know, if we do our speed studies and look at the street and deem that that would be an effective solution, then, you know, we can mobilize our streets team within a few weeks,\u201d Grimes said.<\/p>\n
Larger corridor projects can take longer. Grimes pointed to the H Street Improvement Project as an example, saying it took close to two years to design the corridor.<\/p>\n
The project calls for H Street to change from four travel lanes to one lane in each direction with a center turn lane. It also includes curb extensions, new lighting and landscaping, a roundabout at 28th Street and new pavement striping.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see a lot of vehicle traffic, but also a lot of pedestrian traffic, and so we thought it would be a good candidate to implement some of these complete streets designs as well as there being a number of accidents,\u201d Grimes said.<\/p>\n
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Grimes said the City\u2019s approach is tied to Vision Zero, an effort focused on eliminating traffic-related deaths through roadway changes designed for different types of users.<\/p>\n
\u201cVision Zero is essentially the idea that through complete streets and multimodal transformations to existing corridors, we can look to have zero traffic-related deaths,\u201d Grimes said.<\/p>\n
After a project is completed, the City can compare pedestrian and bicycle counts, vehicle speeds and crash rates to determine whether the changes are working.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe work with BPD, wait six months to a year for those improvements to kind of settle, and then we can look at our accident rates and see if we\u2019re seeing a reduction in accidents,\u201d Grimes said.<\/p>\n