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Will 540 New Stop Signs Improve Safety on Berkeley’s Streets?
On Thursday night, Council will consider adding 540 “No Right Turn on Red” signs at every intersection in Berkeley with a traffic light (Item 27: Budget Referral: No Right on Red Signs).
The stated goal of this item is to decrease carbon emissions by de-prioritizing cars and incentivizing cycling.
While I applaud the authors of this item, Councilmember Taplin and Councilmember Wengraf, for addressing pedestrian and bike safety, this item may result in unintended consequences.
The Council will be moving forward with this decision without any local injury data to support it. The only data provided are from a 1981 Department of Energy study which could not be accessed because the link wasn’t functional (in fact, four of six links in this item didn’t work). Suffice it to say, having to use >40-year-old data to change policy isn’t persuasive.
If Berkeley drivers must wait longer at a traffic signal than they normally do, they are bound to get very impatient; and many will try to make up for lost time by gunning it once they do get through a stoplight.
Each day, there are hundreds of delivery trucks making thousands of deliveries with very tight timelines. There are painters, landscapers, and plumbers driving long distances, often in a rush. There are parents dropping off their kids at school and then racing to their jobs or Zoom sessions at home. Because of traffic, many of these folks are stressed and they're not about to switch their mode of transportation to cycling given the various demands in their lives.
Worse, some drivers might ignore the 540 new signs (at 135 intersections) altogether because there’s minimal or no traffic enforcement in Berkeley. Thus, I would not expect safety to improve with this item. In fact, the dangerous conditions of our streets could be exacerbated.
Are there any recent crash data in Berkeley that could support this item? Yes, there are data, but they weren’t analyzed to determine what percentage were at a right turn on red intersection. Berkeleyside published the raw data of pedestrian collisions in 2021:
Perhaps placing a limited number of signs at busy intersections or where there have been documented accidents would be appropriate, but certainly not at every single stoplight in Berkeley. That is clearly unwarranted and will generate a lot of discontent. Plus, it is a waste of money.
We all want to achieve our Vision Zero goals, but it will take increased traffic enforcement and analyzing more recent crash data so that we make sensible data-driven decisions.
