SAN JOSE — It’s barely a hundred feet from their front door.
The family had walked the crosswalk dozens if not hundreds of times to pick up children from Parkview Elementary School, in full sight of their home on Bluefield Drive in South San Jose.
It’s the spot where 5-year-old Aileen Quiroz Chavez died almost four years ago when an SUV ran into her, her then-2-year-old sister, Arlette, and her aunt, Elena Quiroz, as they walked in the marked crossing.
Aileen’s death came amid a four-year period of spiking pedestrian deaths in San Jose that has reached alarming levels this year. As of May 1, 12 of the city’s 16 traffic deaths were pedestrians, putting the city on pace to record the deadliest year for people walking in the last two decades.
By comparison, three pedestrians have died in San Francisco this year and four in Oakland.
Nationwide there has been an 11 percent increase in pedestrian deaths from 2015 to 2016, and a 22 percent jump going back to 2014.
What’s causing the spike in San Jose pedestrian deaths isn’t clear. Among the possible reasons: more distracted driving and walking, speed-inducing roadways and jaywalking.
Through a campaign they named AileenQ, Aileen’s family has been trying to educate people about traffic safety at community and school presentations, and holding periodic neighborhood safety walks to spread the word.
The city, meanwhile, is trying to reverse the spike in pedestrian deaths through education and roadway improvements.
Laura Wells, San Jose’s deputy director of transportation, helps lead a multitude of city employees whose entire days are spent working to make the city’s roadways safer. San Jose and San Francisco are also two of the 27 cities participating in Vision Zero Network, predicated on the idea that all traffic deaths are preventable.
A lot of that prevention involves educating all road users — whether they’re behind a steering wheel, gripping handlebars or walking the walk — and getting them to break bad habits.
Chief among those bad habits, according to a new report by the Governors Highway Safety Administration, is distraction caused by ubiquitous smartphone use. Researchers suggested that the sharp rise in pedestrian deaths has come in large part from people walking with their eyes glued to their screens.
Vision Zero Network officials disagree, fearing the report could spur “victim blaming” and overshadow what they see as the biggest factor in roadway deaths: high-speed thoroughfares and expressways that help motorists move swiftly across sprawling cities like San Jose but allow cars to rev up to potentially fatal speeds.
But Wells and the Vision Zero folks agree that multiple factors can be to blame.
“Ninety percent of collisions are behavior based: Being distracted, too quick, drowsy, DUI,” Wells said. “Vision Zero recognizes that people do make mistakes.”
Even allowing for those mistakes, Wells contends the results don’t have to be as deadly. She alluded to traffic-safety estimates that find that starting at 20 mph, every 10 mph increase in the speed of a collision that involves a pedestrian can produce as much as a fourfold increase in the likelihood of death.
“We need to do what we can to improve the roadway system so if a collision happens, the severity is minimized,” she said.
Heba El-Guindy, the Vision Zero program manager in San Jose, points to roadway improvements that can be phased in organically, such as using scheduled repaving projects as opportunities to narrow vehicle lanes while creating bike and buffer lanes. Increasing the number of crosswalks in high-traffic areas such as shopping centers, schools and libraries, and replacing old streetlights with LED’s, are also on the group’s broader to-do list.
El-Guindy also stresses the value of outreach, particularly to the elderly and homeless, communities overrepresented in traffic fatality data. “We’re reaching out more and more,” she said.
On May 13, 2013, Elena Quiroz was mindful of the motorists who used Bluefield Drive to bypass a busy stretch of Capitol Expressway west of Snell Avenue. She knew that drivers taking a shortcut didn’t always adjust their speed for the numerous children on the sidewalks around the school.
She had just reached the midpoint of the crosswalk when she and her two nieces, daisy-chained by clasped hands, were torn apart by an SUV barreling down on them far above the school-zone speed limit.
“It was coming at high speed, and it’s like something hit my head,” Quiroz said, fighting back tears retelling the story four years later. “I opened my eyes and my niece is asking me, ‘What’s happening?’ I was looking for Aileen.”
Quiroz finally spotted her, lying at the end of the crosswalk she was so close to finishing. But when Quiroz tried to go to her, she discovered that she was seriously injured herself.
“She was so far away from me,” she said. “I reached for her, but my body was so broken.”
Quiroz lost consciousness. She would only find out days later in her hospital bed that Aileen was gone.
For the Quiroz family, speed is public enemy number one.
Elizabeth Chavez, Aileen’s mother, testified in a state Assembly Transportation Committee to urge legislators to approve a pilot speed camera program.
“If that young gentleman wasn’t speeding, maybe my daughter would still be here,” she said in her remarks.
But in fierce opposition, state police unions, led in part by the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, argued the cameras were inferior to the skills of trained traffic officers, and even went so far as to dispute that speed is a significant factor in deadly collisions. Civil-liberties groups had less vocal but firm privacy concerns. The bill, authored by San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu and co-authored by several Bay Area lawmakers, is expected to be revised and reintroduced in 2018.
But San Jose police Chief Eddie Garcia sees speed cameras as a way to supplement his modest traffic-enforcement unit, much of which has long been diverted to street patrols due to short staffing.
“Speed is a major cause here in San Jose,” he said. “This would enhance our ability to reduce traffic fatalities and traffic accidents.”
For the Quiroz family, they are footsteps away from a regular reminder of the havoc that careless driving — speeding and otherwise — can wreak. Even as the family retold their worst day to this news organization on a recent weekend morning, cars sped by the memorial site. And, as if on cue to demonstrate the value of deterrence, cars slowed down when a police cruiser rolled by.
The family is spreading the word to everyone they can get a hold of as a way to keep Aileen, the doting girl who could elicit smiles on command, alive.
“I look at it as her cause. My daughter is going to save people,” said Jorge Quiroz, Aileen’s father and Elena Quiroz’s brother. “We might not change the world, but I know we can save some lives.”
TRAFFIC-SAFETY RESOURCES
Vision Zero San Jose: Two-year Action Plan
Governors Highway Safety Association report: Pedestrian Fatalities by State, 2016
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