At Sacramento school where a mom was killed, officials beg drivers to slow down
State and local officials gathered Thursday at Phoebe Hearst Elementary School in East Sacramento to urge drivers to remember that even small speed increases while driving can dramatically increase the danger to pedestrians and cyclists.
One study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that the average risk that a pedestrian will die in a crash is 10% when a vehicle is traveling at 23 mph; if a driver accelerates to just 32 mph, the risk of death more than doubles — to 25%.
Using a safe driving campaign slogan, speakers at the event encouraged all drivers to “slow the fast down.”
“Lives are on the line,” said Stephanie Dougherty, director of the California Office of Traffic Safety. “People biking and walking are not wearing seatbelts. They don’t have airbags. They’re not traveling with the same protection as drivers and passengers inside vehicles.”
Later, she called fatal crashes a “public health crisis.” She pointed out that about 11 people die in California vehicle crashes each day. “Eleven people who are not making it home,” she said.
In addition to Dougherty, officials from Caltrans, the California Highway Patrol, the Sacramento Police Department and the city’s Transportation Division spoke. The event took place at Phoebe Hearst Elementary in part because Lupe Jimenez, 45, was fatally struck while standing outside the school in 2022. She was waiting to pick up her daughter from school. The campus sits right on Folsom Boulevard, which is part of the city’s “high-injury network” — those city streets with the highest numbers of fatal and severe crashes.
In addition to the crash that killed Jimenez, the one-mile stretch of Folsom between 48th and 65th streets saw 15 crashes that injured cyclists or pedestrians between 2019 and 2023.
“Speeding is not just a violation of traffic laws,” CHP Valley Division Chief Tyler Eccles said. “It is a choice that puts other individuals in danger.”
Sgt. Ken Collier of the Sacramento Police Department’s Traffic Enforcement Division told reporters that the department had used a grant from the Office of Traffic Safety in an effort to step up punishment for unsafe driving.
Fatal crashes with pedestrians ‘mangle their bodies’
In 2023, over 1,300 people died in California in crashes that were determined to involve speeds over the speed limit or speeds that were unsafe for the current conditions. That represented about one-third of the total number of traffic deaths that year: more than 4,000.
In Sacramento, city officials have determined that two-thirds of crashes take place on streets with a posted speed limit of 40 mph or higher. On those streets, drivers legally travel at speeds that would likely be lethal in the event of a crash with a pedestrian or a cyclist.
Megan Carter, the Transportation Division manager in Sacramento’s Department of Public Works, highlighted the city’s efforts to make Folsom Boulevard safer through changes to infrastructure that force drivers to slow down. The city is currently in the environmental clearance and preliminary design phase of a project to reduce the number of lanes on that stretch of Folsom Boulevard from four to two, also adding in bike lanes with more separation from cars.
Isaac Gonzalez, the founder of Slow Down Sacramento, was also a parent at Phoebe Hearst Elementary when Jimenez was killed on Folsom. When Gonzalez stepped up to the podium, he focused his remarks on her.
“We are just feet away from where a mother was simply waiting for her sixth-grade daughter to get out of school so they could go home, do homework, have dinner, do the normal things that people do,” Gonzalez said. “That never happened. Because while Lupe Jimenez was standing just over here, in an appropriate spot, a car that was driving too fast ran a red light, hit another car, which landed on Lupe and killed her in front of other parents who tried desperately to pick that car up off her body before she succumbed to her injuries.
“Now, that’s a pretty gruesome and morbid thing to describe. But I don’t want to sugarcoat what vehicular violence does to people. It mangles their bodies. It takes away their lives. It leaves, in the wake, the mourning children, parents, brothers, sisters, spouses, who must stay behind, and ask, ‘Why? Why did this have to happen to us? Wasn’t this preventable?’”
At least 21 people have died in collisions on Sacramento streets this year.
