City seeks to address high pedestrian fatality rate

Per capita, New Mexico has the highest rate of pedestrian fatalities of any state, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), and the rate for Las Cruces – which averaged nine pedestrian fatalities a year 2011-20 – is 60 percent above the national average.

Those were among the statistics reported to the Las Cruces City Council during its Feb. 13 work session on pedestrian safety.

“Safety is a community goal,” said Trung Vo of Toole Design, a transportation planning and design company with offices in 18 cities in the United States and Canada. Vo, the director of Toole’s Denver office, and currently contracted with the City of Las Cruces to provide consulting services related to traffic safety.

“People make mistakes,” Vo told council members via Zoom, but those mistakes do not have to result in death or serious injury. “Deaths are preventable.”

The Safe System Approach (SSA) advocated by Toole and USDOT has five “complementary objectives:” safer people, safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds and post-crash care.

To reduce pedestrian deaths and injuries in Las Cruces, he said, the city should focus on its entire traffic system rather than just hot spots.

“We focus on safety for everyone,” Vo said.

As an example, he said, nearly 90 percent of pedestrian fatalities in Las Cruces occurred on streets with speed limits of 35 miles per hour or higher. Streets can be designed or redesigned to prioritize lower speeds, especially where people are walking or bicycling, Vo said.

Street reconfigurations, which can be expensive and time consuming, can include only one lane going in each direction, a turn lane, bike lanes between the roadway and pedestrians and physically separating walkers and bikers from motorists, he said.  

Short-term interventions include speed-safety cameras, traffic calming devices like speed cushions and speed humps, improved crosswalk visibility, repairing broken streetlights, striped and paved street shoulders and sidewalk repair, Vo said.

City Traffic and Streets Administrator Soogyu Lee said street lighting is being studied in five areas of Las Cruces, and the city is also looking at five traffic corridors to find ways to make them safer.

Three of the corridors: El Paseo Road, Roadrunner Parkway and University Avenue, are city streets. The other two, north Main Street and Picacho Avenue, are state roads maintained by the New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT), Lee said.

The city and NMDOT must work together to identify traffic safety issues, plan and design ways to deal with them and find funding to implement changes, he said.

“Speed is an important factor,” said George Pearson, president of Velo Cruces. a nonprofit “seeking to make Las Cruces a more bike and pedestrian friendly community.” Reducing the default roadway speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour would make streets safer, Pearson said, and “would send the message that council is looking at this and raise some awareness.”

“One of the biggest causes of pedestrian congestion is schools,” said Ashleigh Curry, coordinator for Las Cruces Public Schools Safe Routes to Schools Program, one of the most successful walking- and biking-to-school programs in the nation. “If we can make our streets for our kids to be able to walk and bike to school, we can reduce a lot of those conditions around the schools of traffic congestion,” said Curry, who is also a member of the NMDOT’s Pedestrian Safety Workforce.

“We are actively working on identifying the data, analyzing it and creating solutions,” said city Innovation and Strategic Manager Srijana Basnyat. “With better design and long-term thinking we can provide solutions to these problems.”

The city council is expected to look again at pedestrian safety during an April 10 work session.