SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As trick-or-treaters hit up neighborhoods Halloween night, hundreds were petitioning for safety improvements on a busy Sacramento residential corridor.
A petition circulated by concerned neighbors who are fed up with dangerous driving outside their front doors on Land Park Drive shared several security videos of speeding cars, illegal wrong-way passes, near misses and even a collision that sent one car into a neighbor’s lawn and a second car flipped on its side in the driveway next door.
“If it's been a couple of weeks, we're lucky if there's not an accident. It's the norm to have accidents,” said Megan Wicks, who started the petition on Change.org.
A car careened across the 70-foot roadway and hit Wick's garage last September.
Her neighbor, Angela Calderaro, says her car has been hit four times, and her house, struck three times.
“We moved from downtown from 15th Street, which was extremely busy thinking we were moving to a quieter, family friendly neighborhood, and it is really bad how fast cars drive down the street,” Calderaro said.
As mothers, they say they’re concerned for children and families who cross the street to enjoy William Land Park.
“It feels like we're taking our life at, you know, in our hands every time we cross the road, even at the crosswalk,” Wicks said.
The petition urges the city to conduct a traffic study of the residential road that leads to the popular park.
30-year resident Jerry Champa said the initial review of crash data he’s looked at is alarming.
“This is having many more crashes and a much higher rate than is average or expected for a road like this,” Champa said.
Under Vision Zero, the city has identified five priority corridors that see the most deadly crashes, including Stockton Boulevard. Land Park Drive is not one of them. Champa said what makes Land Park Drive unique is that it is a completely residential street from Broadway to William Land Park.
“The problem now is that they're comparing Land Park Drive, a two-lane road in a residential neighborhood with large, wide commercial high volume roads,” Champa said. “It's one of the things that slip through the cracks of the city’s program.”
Champa and Wicks said they hope the petition will draw attention to the problem before a deadly crash occurs.
Champa said the Land Park Traffic Safety Committee plans to meet with city leaders on Wednesday. They want a traffic study and hope for quick traffic calming measures.
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