Efforts to protect pedestrians still fall short of needs

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 | midnight

Dozens of men, women and children are run over by cars and killed each year in Southern Nevada. And hundreds more are injured.

It's a problem that seems to defy solution: Last year, the death toll in Clark County was 37 — another 34 had been struck and killed this year as of Aug. 31.

Local traffic safety advocates and police deserve some credit for undertaking periodic safety campaigns aimed at reducing the toll of death and injury.

As part of a campaign announced Sept. 5 by UNLV's Safe Community Partnership, the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) and the group Joining Forces, police were given funding to temporarily place extra resources into ticketing violators of pedestrian-related laws; and ads were launched urging pedestrians and motorists to watch out for each other.

Any effort to save lives is laudable. But this effort falls woefully short of what's needed to resolve the problem.

Metro, for instance, didn't have enough money to conduct a valleywide campaign, so it involved just two of its seven area commands in this month's enforcement campaign. Because of the funding issue, pedestrians and motorists in places like Silverado, the West Valley, Summerlin and Northwest Las Vegas received no extra attention.

It's doubtful the ad campaign, either, will do much to reduce the death and injury count.

It urges motorists and pedestrians to pay more attention to each other. That strikes us as being a no-brainer, and a message that dodges the real issues.

The real issues in Las Vegas are these:

• Police agencies either don't have enough money to properly enforce pedestrian safety laws or need to rethink their priorities so that pedestrian safety moves up on the to-do list.
• • The design of the valley's wide, high-speed roads — think Las Vegas and Rainbow boulevards and Boulder Highway — and the lack of traffic signals and signal-protected crosswalks on those roads make them particularly dangerous for pedestrians.

What's needed is a commitment by the state and local governments to redesign our most dangerous roads and intersections, install signal-protected crosswalks wherever needed and lower the speed limit where needed. Police should aggressively enforce these lower speed limits.

The July 25 death of Verlaine May Powless illustrates why local policy makers need to get more serious about this problem. The 19-year-old was struck in the poorly marked, poorly lit intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard at Wigwam Parkway. Her death has prompted an outcry among nearby residents who say a stoplight is needed there to better protect the large number of pedestrians who use the intersection.

Clark County is now speeding up plans for a stoplight and is proposing a lower speed limit there.

That's great — but why wait for the next tragedy before taking such measures at every similar dangerous intersection lacking a stoplight in the valley?