Berkeley’s budget for street safety is getting a boost in the wake of a crash that seriously injured a young trick-or-treater on Halloween.
The City Council voted this month to fund new traffic calming measures near the site of the hit-and-run that left a 7-year-old with a broken femur and other injuries, as part of a $900,000 package that also increases funding for safety measures such as improved pedestrian crossings and car-slowing “speed tables” throughout Berkeley.
The boy’s mother, who drafted an online petition that gathered more than 17,000 signatures calling for safety improvements in her neighborhood near San Pablo Park, said she has been heartened to see the city take action. Shannon Mitchell said her son has returned to school and is now walking with the help of crutches as his recovery progresses. He joined her on a recent day to watch as city workers installed yield signs and painted new crosswalks at the intersection of Derby and Mabel streets, which a driver barreled through moments before the crash.
“We told him he made that happen, and he was really proud of that,” said Mitchell, who called the changes “a great first step,” though not enough on their own to stop dangerous drivers.
The traffic safety funding was one piece of mid-year budget amendments adopted by the City Council last week. The package includes $100,000 for additional street infrastructure, including speed tables near the site of the Halloween crash; $325,000 for Berkeley’s traffic-calming budget; $450,000 for other pedestrian, bicycle and transit improvements; and $25,000 to buy five trailers that display drivers’ speeds and tell them to slow down.
The one-time funding comes from a 50-cents-per-trip tax Berkeley voters approved in 2020 on ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft. The City Council will also consider adopting a policy to dedicate half of the money generated by that tax going forward — estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million per year — to traffic calming.
“We think this should be used for safety because the ride-sharing cars are on our roads,” said Councilmember Kate Harrison, who wrote the budget and policy referral that was adopted last week.
Residents regularly ask for measures to slow cars on their streets, Harrison said, but the $75,000 Berkeley budget for traffic calming is nowhere near enough to meet the demand. While the city often receives funding from other sources for traffic safety work, those tend to be larger projects that take more time to plan and build; having local funding will allow Berkeley to install safety measures more quickly, she said.
Much like the council has increased its budget for street paving in recent years, Harrison said, “Now we want to make that same commitment to people walking and biking in our city.”
Berkeley police have not made any arrests in the Halloween hit-and-run, and a spokesperson said Wednesday that there were no updates on the case.
Mitchell said she plans to continue advocating for traffic safety. Going past the intersection of Derby and Mabel streets used to trigger her memories of the crash that nearly killed her son, she said, but seeing even the relatively minor changes there now has helped her family’s emotional recovery.
It remains frustrating, Mitchell said, that it seems like it takes “a fatality or a child to be injured in order to put these items at the top of the agenda when we could be proactive rather than reactive.
“Hopefully, that won’t be the way it is going forward,” she said.
