Goeiemore, LA
Local officials frequently implement regulations or changes to make the streets safer for pedestrians and bicycles. There’s the Slow Streets program, two-way bike lanes, new walkway signals and more.
But as KPCC / LAist’s transport reporter Ryan Fonseca found while investigating the death of four-year-old Alessa Fajardo, who was fatally hit by a driver while crossing an intersection of Koreatown on her way to kindergarten, changes are not happening fast enough not fitted to prevent tragedy.
Ryan talked to me about who is really wrong in cases like this, and what is being done – or not done – to make sure it does not happen again.
In your article you talk about how more than 100 pedestrians and cyclists died the year Alessa was killed. How did you decide to focus the story on the Fajardo family?
I remember seeing the crucial news and headlines on Twitter in October 2019 that a little girl was hit by a driver and killed when she walked to school with her mother. She was literally just a few feet from her school, and crossed as usual that morning and was killed.
I was not the only one in the newsroom who felt through the news, and it just made me think about how local news discusses it. Immediately, the term it used was ‘tragic accident’. Police said it, and reporters repeated it. And so it just stood out as a striking word to use.
I’ve heard you talk about using the word “accident” to describe such deaths. Can you say more about it?
I think we treat ‘accident’ like a neutral term, because we’ve been using it for so long. But ‘accident’ implies that there is no reason for it; as if it were this inevitable tragedy that could not be prevented, and no one was really responsible for it.
However, if you look closely and see that a large percentage of vehicle collisions are the result of reckless drivers crossing the speed limit, people being distracted, making unsafe turns, not giving in to pedestrians, not following the rules of the road, the word “accident” seems so much more irresponsible.
The other part of this is that LA officials have long known where the deadliest places in the city are a pedestrian, by which I mean the places where drivers are likely to kill people who are not in cars. The city has a plan to address the high percentage of people killed, called the Vision Zero program. But we’ve been working on this program for over five years, and traffic fatalities have actually increased.
From a city perspective, it was not just a freak accident or a random event. To take it all together and name what happened to Alessa Fajardo, an ‘accident’ seems like an injustice.
What tools and solutions can the city implement to make the road safer, or not implement it or roll out too slowly?
It’s everything from relatively inexpensive and easy to do, such as recreating crossroads and turning arrows to the left, to major changes such as redesigning the roads to include protected bike lanes.
There is something called a pedestrian lead, which gives pedestrians a lead of three to seven seconds in a crossroads before cars can start moving. It was about to get a possible improvement on the footpath where Alessa was killed but is still not funded.
That kind of eats me away a bit, because I just think that Alessa and her mother, Erica, would theoretically have been through the intersection for a few more seconds. And they could have cleared the way.
How is the Fajardo family doing these days?
I first met them just a few months after it happened, so it was very difficult for them. Alessa’s toys and all her belongings were still in the apartment. They show me her lunch box she was carrying when she was killed.
They are looking for a sense of change to make their neighborhoods safer for the next little kid. They have a younger daughter, Clarissa, and they pointed out to do with her everything they did with Alessa, to make her memory live that way.
What else do you need to know today
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