Four people have suffered violent, brutal deaths in San Rafael in the past nine months. Each one was entirely preventable, each one caused by what should have been a simple mistake that happened to have been made in traffic.
Traffic is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, and San Rafael's wave of pedestrian deaths shows the city is not immune.
Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, San Rafael should take a page from cities that have adopted Vision Zero, a plan to cut annual pedestrian and bicycling deaths to zero, returning what is a too-routine fact of life into the shock that it really is.
If it does, it will follow the far-more congested cities of Chicago, and San Francisco, but especially New York.
New York's pioneering transportation director, Jeanette Sadik-Khan, laid the groundwork during the last mayoral administration. Many of New York's roads had overly complicated intersections or simple dead spaces of asphalt, which confused drivers and pedestrians alike, and she adopted a Keep It Simple approach to make these notorious streets safer.
Sadik-Khan directed her staff to clearly define pedestrian space, driver space, bicycle space and the areas where they need to share.
She expanded the use of the Leading Pedestrian Interval, which gives pedestrians a head-start on walk signs, and reconfigured intersections to allow for more direct pedestrian crossings.
Though the city's drivers at first complained about a so-called "War on Cars," the result was actually smoother-flowing traffic and — shockingly — faster drive times through Manhattan.
Safety, too, went up dramatically, with some intersections posting a 45 percent drop in injury crashes.
A report from her office summarizes the approach: "The fundamental characteristic of the successful projects is that they create the opportunity for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists to move through the street network simply and easily, minimizing the unexpected, the confusing, and the potential for surprises."
In other words, make the street easy to use by minimizing complexity and allowing people to go where they want to go.