At a Sacramento-area school, students learn to question dangerous roads — and change them
Del Campo High School math teacher Nicole Miller worked out a real-world use for a math problem: If a driver is traveling at 20 mph and brakes, how many feet will it travel before it stops?
On average, she told a group of students gathered for the “Crash Analysis Studio” club on Monday morning, a vehicle traveling 20 mph can stop in 40 feet. At 30 mph? It’s already 75 feet.
More math: When a driver traveling at 30 mph hits a pedestrian, some research has found that the odds that the pedestrian will die are 50%; at 40 mph, only one out of 10 pedestrians survives.
Miller presented to the high school students about a two-way stop in Citrus Heights between Interstate 80 and Roseville Road, right in her neighborhood, where multiple crashes have occurred. Instead of talking about bad drivers or the need for more police enforcement, she asked the room how the intersection itself could be changed to make it safer for all users.
Carl Perricone, another math teacher, advises a safe streets and urban design club at the school and organized the Crash Analysis Studio following the model of the civic engagement nonprofit Strong Towns. He told the students that it was a “misconception” that vehicle collisions can be fully explained by driver error.
The question that onlookers, drivers, police and insurers ask after a crash, he said: “Who should we blame?”
He encouraged the students to instead ask a different question: How can we prevent this from happening again?
As the capital region faces an ongoing crisis in preventable traffic fatalities, the question is urgent.
Solving for the root of crashes
Miller said she knew her neighbor had asked for the city to turn the intersection of Carmelwood and Summerplace drives into a four-way stop rather than a two-way stop, and the city had denied the request. It seemed to her that was the end of it, and so Miller hadn’t thought much about fixing the problematic intersection.
Then, “Mr. Perricone sits with me at lunch,” Miller said. Over time, the safe streets evangelist made her believe that the status quo is a choice — one a neighborhood can reject.
To prepare a presentation for the Crash Analysis Studio, Miller spent two hours by the corner of Carmelwood and Summerplace drives measuring vehicle speeds and counting the number of cars on Summerplace (224).
She’s lived right at the two-way stop for nine years. Most motorists obey the speed limit, but visibility at the intersection is poor, with cars usually parked right up to the crossing. Traffic on Summerplace, which has no stop signs, can’t see those crossing on Carmelwood until they’re fairly close to the crossroads. And although drivers typically aren’t exceeding the speed limit, those using the residential neighborhood as a cut-through are producing more traffic than Miller would have expected in what seemed like a sleepy area.
As a result of the traffic, her children — now 5 and 7 — are not allowed to ride their bikes outside.
Adults took the lead on Monday’s Crash Analysis Studio, but Perricone hopes to have a student-led event in the spring and, ideally, an actual class in the 2025-26 school year. Del Campo High already had a construction class, and his safe streets club has a few members enrolled in it who could, he said, put their skills to work making planters, temporary barriers or other road safety interventions.
To discuss the problem intersection on Monday, Perricone invited Natalee Dyudyuk, the safe routes to school coordinator for the San Juan Unified School District; Todd Sanderson, the community safety specialist for the school; and Scott Schneider, the school’s fire tech instructor, who has experience with crash investigations.
Dyudyuk suggested that engineers — or students with paint, cones and planters — could extend the corners at Carmelwood and Summerplace to create “bulb-outs” so that pedestrians would have a shorter crossing distance in lanes of traffic.
Dyudyuk has lobbied for infrastructure changes near schools, including the changes to Bell Street between Dyer-Kelly Elementary School near Edison Avenue and Greer Elementary School near Hurley Way in Arden Arcade. The Sacramento County Department of Transportation funded sidewalk extensions, new curb ramps and curb extensions, new pedestrian signals and re-striped bike lanes and crosswalks, among other improvements.
Plus or minus safety?
A road is a public space that everyone — including people outside cars — has the right to use. Even the concept of jaywalking, Perricone said, is “car-manufacturer propaganda.”
And, as the teacher who leads the financial literacy class at Del Campo, he also has another reason to ride bikes. “I’ve always been cheap,” he said, and a bike is so much cheaper than a car. If his students could divert car payments into retirement accounts, he said, “They’d be millionaires.”
But riding a bike seems too risky to many people, for good reason. “Pedestrians and cyclists are routinely hit by cars,” Perricone said.
Since the first day of school on Aug. 15, the public database of the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office shows that the coroner has investigated the deaths of six cyclists and 11 pedestrians on local roads.
The world could be better for Perricone’s students. Once the teens learn what’s possible, he thinks, they could begin to make it a reality.
