Community members wait for Santa Rosa to act on crosswalk after 3 serious collisions, multiple close calls

“They (drivers) want to move through there as quickly as they can,” he said. “Unfortunately, because they have been doing that for so long, the city set up the road to try to accommodate that.”

And because Hoen runs east-west, the sun can affect visibility. Drivers often speed along the road, said Santa Rosa resident Dan Lennox, who was hit at the crosswalk Oct. 31, 2013.

“People speed all the time,” Lennox said. “It almost advises you to. It is such a wide-open, free-looking road.”

Previous studies by the city revealed foot traffic is not particularly heavy across the crosswalk.

‘Always appeared unsafe’

Sonya Randrup, who lives near the Pearsons, said she repeatedly told her kids not to use the Hoen Avenue crosswalk because she felt it was dangerous, mainly due to the lack of visibility because many cars parked in the area.

“It just always appeared unsafe to me,” she said.

Each of the three people hit by vehicles at the crosswalk had head injuries and spent time in the hospital. Two of them were critically injured.

On Halloween night 2013, Lennox went to drop off some letters at a mailbox just west of where Hoen Avenue intersects Summerfield Road. He crossed Hoen using the crosswalk.

On his return trip, he looked both ways ― no vehicles were heading west but one was driving east. He walked to the middle of the crosswalk and waited for the vehicle to pass.

When he turned to check the westbound traffic again, he saw a vehicle right behind him. Lennox arched his back to avoid it, but it clipped his heel. He crumpled and hit his head on the vehicle’s side mirror.

In shock, he crossed to the other side of Hoen and sat down on the sidewalk. When he wiped his forehead, he saw blood. The driver stopped and called 911.

Lennox had a broken fibula and a fractured skull. He stayed in the hospital for a week and had to re-learn how to take a shower during physical therapy.

“I looked pretty bad,” he said. “I had a black eye, and it was pretty ugly.”

Atticus fared much worse.

He underwent surgery to remove a portion of his skull to relieve brain swelling. He was placed on a ventilator and remained in intensive care for five weeks, then moved into a rehabilitative unit.

It wasn’t until March 28 when he was fully able to breathe on his own.

He was moved to a Kaiser facility in Oakland on April 4 for three additional surgeries ― he has had seven total.

During his final three procedures, surgeons replaced the piece of skull they had removed, installed a shunt to help drain fluids from his brain and put in a device to pump muscle relaxers around his spine.

A GoFundMe started to help Atticus’ family with medical bills raised just under $88,000 as of Wednesday. The bill for the initial helicopter ride was about $94,000 before insurance, said Margaret Amanda Pearson, Atticus’s mom.

He was able to return home April 19 — 90 days after he was hit.

Gonzalez-Valencia, who lives in Santa Rosa, was almost to the other side of the crosswalk when she was struck March 3 by a white Honda Civic traveling west.

The driver, who was ultimately found at fault for the collision, stopped and cooperated with officers, according to Santa Rosa police. The driver was not speeding.

Gonzalez-Valencia’s skull was fractured and she experienced a brain bleed, Santa Rosa police said.

As of April 4, Gonzalez-Valencia remained in the hospital.

In addition to the collisions recorded at the intersection, there have been a number of close calls.

Santa Rosa resident Jack Walton said he was using the crosswalk to grab a newspaper one morning about 15 years ago.

Before entering the Hoen crosswalk, Walton had waited until the vehicle moving west had stopped. As he was crossing the street, another driver swerved to get around the stopped motorist.

“He pulled into the turn lane and swung around and just about ran me over,” said Walton, who sometimes refers to the road as “Hoen Highway” because of how fast people drive.

About a year ago, a vehicle stopped for Lennox in the crosswalk and was rear-ended by another driver, he said.

City declines safety addition

Sprinkle, the city’s traffic engineer, said the city had previously taken steps to reduce traffic and collisions along Hoen Avenue.

In fall 2003, Hoen was reduced from four lanes — two west and two east — to its current configuration, and the speed limit was lowered to 35 mph. Sprinkle said he could not locate direct data to show whether collisions decreased after the reconstruction but that he remembered reviewing data in the past.

From April 2018 to August 2018, the city began making improvements to crosswalks citywide. At the crosswalk on Hoen, the city added two signs that say, “Yield here to pedestrian,” re-striped the crosswalk and put in triangle markings in front of it, Sprinkle said.

On Sept. 4, 2018, Lennox filed a service request asking the city to add a flashing beacon to the crosswalk. He told the city about being hit there in 2013, according to the document recording his complaint.

During an investigation for the request, the city installed a camera to monitor the area and determined the crosswalk had limited foot traffic — about 12 people per hour.

That didn’t meet the city’s minimum of 20 people per hour, Sprinkle said, and the request was denied.

The investigation also turned up “no history of pedestrian crashes at the location,” even though Lennox referenced his in his request.

Sprinkle said the worker who completed the report is no longer working for the city, therefore he didn’t know why the collision was missed. However, he said the crash would not have changed the denial of the request because it still did not meet the requirements for a beacon.

After Atticus was struck, the city extended the red curb on the southeast side of the crosswalk, eliminating two adjacent parking spots.

“We are adding the red curb out of an abundance of caution,” Sprinkle said.

And the traffic engineering division will finally add a flashing beacon in July, which the city said will make it easier for drivers to spot someone crossing and encourage pedestrians to check traffic before activating the crossing lights.

Parents and advocates, however, don’t think it’s soon enough.

Guenther asked the city if it were possible to move faster, during a March pedestrian safety collaboration meeting organized and attended by city and school leaders.

Bronwen Arthur, parent of a Spring Lake Middle School student, emailed the city Feb. 12 asking if it could install the beacon earlier than July to prevent further collisions.

Sprinkle responded, saying it would not be possible until then, when funding through the state’s Transportation Development Act becomes available.

Arthur said she expected this response, but she wished something could be done sooner.

Students, teacher realize danger

Ethan Cosgrove, a history and math teacher at Spring Lake Middle School, went out to the crosswalk in the days after Atticus was hit.

“It is not a very safe place to cross,” he said. “You have to flag down or just start walking in the road and hope that the cars will stop because there’s cars parked on each side of the street.”

Cosgrove said he has spoken with multiple students who expressed concerns about walking to school, and not just at the Hoen Avenue crosswalk. During a class discussion on the topic in fall 2022, students mentioned not having sidewalks in their neighborhoods and witnessing drivers both staring at their phones and stopping in crosswalks.

Atticus’ experience became another reason for students to not walk to school. One student told Cosgrove she never wanted to get behind the wheel of a car.

“A lot of them have just been kind of scarred by this event,” Cosgrove said shortly after Atticus was hit. “I think the way that they relate to cars has changed dramatically.”

Another of Cosgrove’s students, Asher Marshall, 13, said he wished the city would add more crossing lights throughout Santa Rosa for a safety barrier between pedestrians and vehicles.

Cosgrove started to participate more in pedestrian safety education in 2022 after two students collided with vehicles ― one of them on Hoen Avenue ― while riding their bikes. He began speaking with local groups, such as Bikeable Santa Rosa and the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, an organization that works with community leaders to make the area safer for bicyclists and pedestrians.

He had routinely encouraged students to walk to school to prevent congestion on the roads during school pick-up and drop-off and ultimately create a safer environment.

The risks were real, he recognized, but he didn’t fully know how terrifying it could be until Atticus was injured.

“As someone who promotes kids walking to school and biking to school,” he said in February, “obviously I feel in some way responsible and it’s also really heartbreaking moving forward to continue to promote that.”

Cosgrove said he wants the city to take a more aggressive approach: Get to these crossings before someone else gets hurt. That sentiment is echoed by community members and advocates, who call for greater pedestrian safety across the city.

Guenther said area officials have big goals for helping bicyclists and pedestrians, including those in line with Sonoma County Transportation Authority’s Vision Zero initiative, which aims to reduce traffic deaths and severe injuries in the county to zero by 2030.

However, he said, some of the strategies and plans, including those outlined in the city of Santa Rosa’s 2018 Bike and Pedestrian Master Plan, are not aggressive enough.

Sprinkle said the city had adopted a method of being more receptive to areas with more community support rather than simply going off a list of requirements that needed to be met to trigger certain traffic enhancements.

Yet, the Hoen Avenue crosswalk was not high up on the traffic engineering division’s radar. Officials didn’t even know about the shortcut through the Southeast Greenway until after Atticus’ collision, Sprinkle said.

The city met with the Bike and Pedestrian Advisory board Jan. 19 to determine how to allocate funds from the Transportation Development Act, which become available July 1.

One of the projects proposed was to add flashing beacons to at least seven — potentially nine — crosswalks within the city as determined by specific criteria, such as its distance from a school and pedestrian traffic.

The Hoen Avenue crosswalk wasn’t included until Atticus was hit and hospitalized.

Moving forward

While the beacon will assuage some feelings about the area, some factors still remain uncertain.

There are still problems on the street that need to be addressed, including the issue of speeding, the width of the road and overall visibility, community advocates said.

Additionally, Hoen Avenue could see more traffic in the area if a building complex proposed in 2021 and modified in 2022 that offers 65 parking spots for 50 units, of which only 16 are one-bedroom apartments, is built.

The amount of required parking spots was lowered from 115 to the current number because of the low-income units proposed, according to the project description.

The plan suggests that multiple residents will use street parking, which could worsen traffic and visibility, though the project’s traffic evaluation by engineering consultants W-Trans says there is “enough on-street parking available to accommodate any excess parking demand that may occur.”

As the city waits to get the funding administered under the Transportation Development Act to put a beacon in place, kids and community members continue to use the crosswalk.

Meanwhile, Gonzalez-Valencia is left with a traumatic brain injury and Atticus still has to blink to communicate.

“It’s always been a danger zone. Always,” said Margaret Amanda Pearson, Atticus’ mother. “It should not have taken this to get to the point of putting lights up.”

You can reach Staff Writer Madison Smalstig at madison.smalstig@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @madi.smals.