Local school leaders are pressing San Diego city officials to prioritize improving safety near campuses, including more than 100 requested upgrades such as speed bumps, crosswalks, lighting and stop signs.
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City officials are praising a new 35-page by the San Diego Unified School District that includes the requested upgrades, which are based on a comprehensive survey of principals at each school campus.
But Fabi Bagula, the SDUSD superintendent, said Tuesday that praising the report and promising to make changes are not enough.
“The concerns raised by our principals are not theoretical, they reflect the daily realities our students and families face as they walk, bike or drive to school,” Bagula said. “We appreciate the conversations that have taken place with city leaders, but conversations alone are not enough. We must work together to take meaningful action before another tragedy occurs.”
The report was spurred by a tragic crash last October at Pershing Middle School near Lake Murray, where a 12-year-old boy was killed and his two sisters were seriously injured crossing a busy four-lane road. Just days after the crash, the city installed stop signs at Jackson Drive and Lake Badin Avenue.
School officials said the goal of the report is making such changes before people are hurt, not afterward.
Bagula said she was encouraged by recent one-on-one conversations she has had about the report with each San Diego City Council member and with Mayor Todd Gloria.
“We are sharing this report as a tool for collaboration and coordinated action,” she said Tuesday. “Student wellness is imperative and a shared civic responsibility. We committed to partnering with the city of San Diego and community stakeholders to advance solutions that protect students, support families and create safer neighborhoods for all.”
San Diego approved a plan in February to lower speed limits on 680 miles of city streets — roughly one-fifth of the city — to help make car crashes less frequent and less deadly.
The lower speed limits are called for in a long-awaited speed management plan that prioritizes safety near schools, in business districts and at intersections deemed dangerous because of their history or other risk factors.
Those efforts are on top of Vision Zero, a decade-old program that aims to reduce traffic fatalities to zero across San Diego.
As part of that effort, the city is also planning hundreds of new roundabouts, refuge islands, flashing beacons, countdown timers, widened crosswalks and pedestrian-friendly “delayed green” stoplights.
But the city has not come close to achieving its Vision Zero goals. Annual crashes with severe injuries have remained mostly flat since San Diego launched the initiative in 2015, hovering around 150 with a high of 184 in 2018 and a low of 113 during the pandemic in 2020.
And deaths have actually risen — from 46 in 2014 to 67 in 2021, 69 in 2022 and 70 in 2023, the latest year for which data is available. It mirrors a nationwide trend, as the number of pedestrians killed each year rises steadily.
The city’s budget crisis has limited how aggressively San Diego can tackle upgrading dangerous intersections, including ones near schools.
On Tuesday, city Transportation Department officials said city traffic engineers reviewed the locations identified by the school district and entered each school’s requests into the city’s traffic service request system for evaluation.
They said roughly 40% of those evaluations have been completed and another 40% have begun. They did not reveal the results of the completed evaluations.
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“Staff have been actively working through those requests and evaluating each location to determine whether improvements can be made and what treatments may be appropriate,” the Transportation Department said in an emailed statement.
They said 22 safety requests made by San Diego Unified were determined to be the responsibility of the school district.
Some critics say city officials don’t work closely enough with school officials when the city plans upgrades to intersections and pedestrian infrastructure near schools.
Councilmember Raul Campillo, whose district includes the site of the Pershing Middle School crash, vowed Tuesday to work closely with school district officials.
“Working alongside our school district and the community, we must continue improving dangerous intersections and high-traffic areas, especially those near our schools,” Campillo said. “I am committed to working closely with the school district, parents and community partners to make sure every child in my district and across our city can safely walk or ride to and from school.”
More than 40% of the safety requests from campus principals come from within Council District 2, which spans from Clairemont to Point Loma, or Council District 4, which includes much of southeastern San Diego.
Councilmember Henry Foster, who represents District 4, said Tuesday that the San Diego Unified report is a call to action.
“This report makes it clear that there is more work to do and that the city must do a better job prioritizing safe routes for students,” Foster said. “That is why I brought the report to the attention of the mayor’s office and the Transportation Department.”
Foster said it’s crucial to have recommendations and suggestions directly from campus principals who thoroughly understand what’s happening near their schools.
“We now have clear, firsthand information from our school principals, and I am going to push to turn this information into safer routes for students across District 4,” he said.
Circulate Planning and Policy, a local advocacy group for pedestrian safety, praised the new report Tuesday.
“Traffic safety is public safety — our communities need to be places where children feel safe walking and biking to school,” said Aria Grossman, Circulate’s policy manager. “As this report demonstrates, there is much more work that needs to be done to get us there. Circulate is glad to see the superintendent making this progress a priority.”
In the new San Diego Unified report, the top three priority areas identified by principals include the need for signage, school zones, crosswalks, parking and regulatory signs at 23.5%; speed control, speed bumps and slow-down signage at 19.3%; and pedestrian safety, flashing lights and signal upgrades at crosswalks at 19%.
An example of a requested upgrade includes Ocean Beach Elementary asking for 16 “state law” crosswalk signs, four speed-reader devices, “no parking — bus zone” signs and three new crosswalks with flashing lights.
At Penn Elementary in Paradise Hills, the principal is requesting several new signs and six new speed bumps.
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