One of Sacramento’s most dangerous roads moves a step closer to pedestrian improvements
The City Council voted at Tuesday’s afternoon meeting to accept $381,000 from Caltrans to plan safety improvements on Fruitridge Road, one of Sacramento’s most dangerous thoroughfares.
In 2024, three men were fatally struck on Fruitridge: two pedestrians — David Rink, 51, and James Lind, 54 — and a 36-year-old father on a bike, Jose Valladolid Ramirez. Seventeen more pedestrians and cyclists were fatally struck on other city streets last year, along with two young women riding electric scooters.
A scope of work document said the Fruitridge plan would prioritize the safety of people traveling on foot or by bike, as well as transit riders. Sacramento’s 2040 General Plan outlines a goal that pedestrian and cyclist safety be placed ahead of driver convenience, and many people walk or bike to buses and trains. Fruitridge’s Route 51 bus is Regional Transit’s highest-ridership line, with nearly 3,000 daily riders.
The plan area would span from Interstate 5 to Stockton Boulevard, more than four miles of critical city infrastructure.
Like this Fruitridge project, the vast majority of road safety projects in the capital region rely on competitive state and federal grants. At Tuesday’s meeting, Councilmember Caity Maple singled out the Fruitridge grant from the consent calendar — which does not automatically get publicly discussed by the council — and said, “It takes an enormous amount of work from our city team to make these grants a reality, and many of these are very, very competitive.”
The reliance on grants significantly slows down the timeline for safety projects. First, the city has to wait for the appropriate grant application period to open; that may be a one- or two-year wait. Once an application is submitted, the city usually learns three to six months later whether it won. If the city wins, then the relevant portion of the project could begin six months to a year later. If the city loses, the process returns to square one to compete with hundreds of other cities and counties in the state and elsewhere.
Typically, each project is broken into multiple stages, and one grant would cover only one stage. The Fruitridge grant will pay for the initial planning. Engineering and construction would generally require separate grants. The city currently has no established mechanism to pursue “quick-build” projects, which aims to rapidly and cheaply improve infrastructure.
In January, the Active Transportation Commission urged the City Council to step up its pool of grant-matching funds, since local governments have to kick in some of the cost of the project. The city put up $176,000 as a match for the Fruitridge plan, almost a third of the total cost. For the Caltrans program, the state highway agency required cities to pay for at least 11.5% of the total cost of their proposals.
In the coming months, the council will vote on whether to declare a state of emergency over pedestrian and cyclist safety.
The Fruitridge plan would be in line with city leaders’ “Vision Zero” pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries by 2027. With two years left to meet the deadline, Sacramento remains far from achieving the council’s stated goal. Council members made the original pledge in 2017. In the eight years since, Capital Improvement Plan documents show that the city’s elected leaders have scarcely directed any more project money to the Department of Public Works, which was tasked with fulfilling that promise.
The next fiscal year’s budget will come for a vote in June.
This story was originally published January 15, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
