Over a dozen Sacramento streets to see speed limit reductions to improve safety
SACRAMENTO – Sacramento city leaders are taking steps to make streets safer as the number of deadly car crashes is on the rise.
In January 2022, Lupe Jimenez Brown was hit and killed by a car outside her daughter's elementary school on Folsom Boulevard in East Sacramento.
"It was very personal to all of us because it happened right in our backyard in front of our school campus," Isaac Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said it's one of the reasons why he founded the group Slow Down Sacramento.
"Traffic crashes are preventable and speeding is unnecessary," Gonzalez said.
Sacramento was recently ranked the 20th most dangerous city in the nation for traffic safety.
"A third of people who die from car crashes is related to speed," Gonzalez said.
Now Sacramento city councilmembers have approved reducing the speed limit by five miles an hour on 14 streets, including that section of Folsom Boulevard where Brown was killed.
Brian Reed lives on Freeport Boulevard, another street where drivers will now have to go slower.
"Probably just every day a couple will go about 40-45 and they're really just racing down," Reed said.
But can lowering the speed limit really help save lives?
"At 25 miles per hour, 95 percent of the time you're going to survive. At 35mph, half the time you're probably not," Gonzalez said.
Some say there also needs to be more police enforcement.
"To just say it's five miles an hour less doesn't address the fact that people are going over the speed limit now, sometimes egregiously so, they have to do more than that I think," Reed said.
Gonzalez said re-engineering streets to influence driver behavior and make it safer for bikes and pedestrians is the key to preventing any more deadly crashes.
"Let's change the way we encourage people to behave on city streets through design because that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week whether a cop is there or not," Gonzalez said.
The city says it already has the money to install new speed limit signs, which will be going up soon.
Sacramento has also received a $5 million grant from the state to reduce traffic flows and widen bike lanes on Folsom Boulevard.
