At a Boise crosswalk, 4 people hit by cars this year. One died. How officials responded

06/08/2023

The last thing Bridget Anderson remembers from the morning of June 20 is parking her car.

What the 63-year-old Boise resident told the Idaho Statesman she can’t recall is stepping into the crosswalk at 11th and State streets ^[1]. She had been parked in the lot across the street from the Downtown Boise YMCA and was on her way to a 9 a.m. weights class when an SUV turned left and hit her. After the crash, she spent a week at the hospital recovering followed by another week at a rehabilitation clinic.

Over a month later, Anderson said she still feels the effects of the crash, which caused a brain bleed and fractured her right clavicle, left thumb and both feet. Her short-term memory remains foggy, and it may take six months or more for her brain to recover, she said. Today, Anderson spends time going to appointments for physical, occupational and speech therapy to try to recover from the collision. When she talks about the impact of the accident, she is unable to hold back tears.

The spot where Bridget Anderson, 63, of Boise, had stitches on her forehead is visible after weeks of recovery. She was injured by a vehicle while in the crosswalk of State Street at 11th Street to go to the Downtown Boise YMCA.

In fact, Anderson was one of four pedestrians hit in nearly identical crashes at that intersection just since January. Others with connections to the YMCA have been hurt, too. One longtime member was killed ^[2].

The Ada County Highway District oversees and maintains the county’s roads and recently made pedestrian safety improvements at the busy intersection. Anderson questions whether those upgrades came soon enough.

“I think it’s sad that it’s taken four people to get hurt in order for them to finally act on doing something,” she said in an interview with the Statesman.

David Duro, president and CEO of the Treasure Valley Family YMCA, first expressed concerns in late January about the high-traffic intersection to ACHD leadership after the collisions, he told the Statesman. The day after Anderson’s injury, Duro emailed ACHD Director Bruce Wong again to renew his request that the agency make changes at 11th and State, according to his correspondence obtained through a public records request.

Story continues

Timing of the stop lights has been adjusted so pedestrians are crossing while all lanes are at a stop at the intersection of 11th and State streets near the Downtown Boise YMCA. New signage alerts drivers turning left or right to yield to pedestrians.

“Without intervention there (is) no doubt in my mind that these events will continue to happen,” Duro wrote to Wong. “We need to do everything we can to get this stopped!”

Wong responded that he was aware of the latest incident. ACHD would explore all options that could be installed as soon as possible, he said.

Two weeks later, Duro shared more bad news in another email to Wong, this time adding Alexis Pickering, president of ACHD’s five-person board.^[3]

“As you know we had another pedestrian hit today — 73-year-old man,” Duro wrote. “It was the exact same scenario as the previous three.”

YMCA concerned about danger to members

Duro has worked at the downtown YMCA for more than 30 years, including the past eight as its president and CEO. He said he’s not sure what, if anything, has changed at the adjacent intersection and led to the sudden rash this year of cars hitting pedestrians as they walk to or from the public health and fitness organization.

Traffic figures from the Idaho Transportation Department, for example, show mostly flat vehicle counts at the intersection from January 2019 to September 2022. The totals indicate limited changes in traffic, despite fewer people driving to work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[4] Duro also said the YMCA still hasn’t returned to the same level of activity since before the public health crisis.

From 2018 to 2022, four pedestrians were hit by vehicles at the intersection of 11th and State streets, according to data from the Local Highway Technical Assistance Council, a public agency that helps local districts maintain the state’s transportation corridors. Each crash involved a driver making the left turn from 11th onto State Street and failing to yield to a pedestrian.^[5]

In January, when the young driver of a white hatchback hit and injured a YMCA employee in the crosswalk, Duro and others viewed it as an unfortunate accident, he said. The 40-year-old employee was taken by ambulance to St. Luke’s with minor injuries, and Boise police issued the driver a citation for failing to yield.

But two weeks later, a longtime YMCA member named Henry Reents, 79, of Boise, was hit in the crosswalk ^[6] by a man driving a pickup truck. He died the next day ^[7] at a hospital. The driver, Kellen Tutt, 39, of Meridian, awaits trial on a felony vehicular manslaughter charge after police suspected he was driving under the influence ^[8] of alcohol.

Henry Reents went to the YMCA that day because he wanted to exercise before a trip to see friends in Tucson, Arizona, his wife, former state Sen. Sue Reents, told the Statesman by phone. After parking in his usual spot in the lot across State Street, he was hit while in the crosswalk, she said.

“He had massive head injuries because he went flying through the air and landed on his head,” Sue Reents said. Those injuries caused his death, she told the Statesman.

In response to a public records request, Boise police denied release of the report for the crash that killed Reents, citing the ongoing criminal case against Tutt. Tutt’s attorney declined to comment.

Sue Reents said her husband usually parked in the lot across State Street, but she was afraid of doing so because she didn’t think the pedestrian walk light was long enough. She contacted ACHD a decade ago about the issue, she said, and came away understanding the agency didn’t plan to make any changes at that time.

After Henry Reents was killed, Duro said he sent a request to ACHD and Boise Mayor Lauren McLean’s office for a meeting to discuss actions for making the intersection safer. Even then, he acknowledged, the incidents weren’t seen as a trend, in part because the YMCA didn’t track a number of anecdotal near-misses. Regardless, he said, he was increasingly concerned.

Timing of the stop lights has been adjusted so pedestrians are crossing while vehicles are at a stop at the intersection of 11th and State streets near the Downtown Boise YMCA. New signage alerts drivers turning left or right to yield to pedestrians.

At the meeting, which Duro said included Wong and Pickering, the group settled on the YMCA installing highlighter orange flags for pedestrians to hold as they crossed the street. ACHD didn’t make any “firm commitments” going forward, Duro recalled, though he felt confident the intersection was now on the agency’s radar.

“There was just a realization in the immediacy of it that it’s what could be done,” Duro said of the pedestrian flags. “So I think it felt like progress, but knowing that wouldn’t be enough.”

The Andersons said they may be facing huge medical bills because the driver who hit Bridget only had a $25,000 liability policy, said Peter Anderson, her husband. The hospital bills alone could be as much as $150,000, depending on what their insurance decides to cover, he said.

In June, after the crash that injured Anderson and Duro’s email, ACHD pursued more significant safety improvements at the intersection, agency officials told the Statesman.

But in the interim, while ACHD made plans to prioritize upgrades to the intersection, another person was hit and seriously injured.

“I’ll tell you, we react when we hear about these things, but we don’t hear about every crash that happens,” Ryan Head, ACHD’s deputy director of development and technical services, told the Statesman in a phone interview. “I think when we heard there were additional crashes there, that’s when we started talking about it and started pulling the trigger on some of these changes that were recently made.”

ACHD takes steps to keep pedestrians safe

Today, new pedestrian safeguards protect those who use the crosswalks on 11th and State streets. On top of the poles that hold the traffic lights, metal signs bordered by blinking lights warn drivers to yield. Those crossing State Street also get a head start in the crosswalk before the traffic light for cars turns green.

The flashing lights are part of a piece of equipment called a Turn Lane Pedestrian Indicator. It’s a metal traffic sign that hangs between traffic signals, has pedestrian and yield icons and is surrounded by a ring of strobes. When a person presses the button to cross the street, it sends a wireless signal to the sign, said Tony Brennan of PedSafety, the manufacturer, in a call with the Statesman. Once the traffic signal turns green, lights around the sign flash quickly. The strobing is designed to alert drivers to pedestrians crossing the road.

The costs for the improvements at 11th and State streets were about $6,000 for the signs, ACHD said. The total does not include the roughly 16 hours of labor to install the signs, which was completed during normal staff time. The pedestrian buttons had already been installed.

“This is a high-traffic area for pedestrians and bicyclists, and it is crucial for all users to be able to navigate this area safely,” Pickering said in a July news release announcing the upgrades. “I am proud of our team members who quickly implemented these improvements.”

PedSafety still needs to test the blinking sign, which is new to traffic safety, Brennan said. The company plans to document how effective it is by stationing someone at intersections to count how often drivers yield after pedestrians press the crosswalk button. The research will be included in a report the company plans to publish this year about the product, he said.

Leading pedestrian intervals, which turn the walk sign on 3-5 seconds before a green traffic light, increase the likelihood of drivers yielding and enhance safety for slow-moving pedestrians, according to a fact sheet ^[9] published by the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Safety. The authors of a 2021 study ^[10] sponsored by the agency found that collisions with pedestrians dropped by 13% at intersections with pedestrian intervals in New York, Toronto, Charlotte and Chicago.

ACHD plans to program these intervals into all 457 signalized intersections in the highway district and so far has installed 51, said Paige Bankhead, an ACHD engineer who’s leading the initiative to install the intervals. The project will likely take several years to complete.

The agency is gathering data on which intersections will require other improvements before programming pedestrian intervals. Some will need ramps or push buttons with audio prompts for pedestrians with disabilities, and engineers will prioritize adding intervals to intersections that already have required accessibility features, Bankhead said.

Other intersections, like those along State Street, are part of signal corridors timed to move traffic inbound or outbound without stopping at particular times of the day, she said. The agency must analyze how adjustments to signal timing at one intersection for a pedestrian interval will affect the rest of the network.

“We’re trying to get as far as we can as fast as we can,” Head said.

Another victim before upgrades made

The changes to improve safety at the intersection didn’t come soon enough to help Boise resident Stephen Allgeier, 73, who was heading to his regular group fitness class at the YMCA on the morning of July 6.

As he made his way across the intersection of 11th and State streets, a car turning left onto State hit him, according to a Boise police report. He hurt his head and his shoulder and broke his ankle, Allgeier said. Nearly a month later, he still feels the impact of the crash.

Stephen Allgeier, 73, of Boise, sustained bruises on his leg and arm and a broken foot after he was hit by a vehicle at 11th Street and State streets in July. Now he is dependent on medical transportation for doctors appointments and family to help him with chores.

Allgeier said his broken ankle makes it hard for him to function. He can’t walk to get a cup of coffee near the house he shares with his daughter and her family on the North End. He is unable to really leave the house, because it’s difficult to get down the porch stairs. That means he can’t do his part-time job as a behavioral therapist for autistic kids.

Instead, he spends his days in a gray recliner, watching TV, reading news articles and playing games on his phone. And when he goes to his doctor’s appointments, he summons a medical transport van, which costs $110 per ride.

“I never knew I could be so incapacitated,” he told the Statesman in a recent interview.

But he did know that intersection was dangerous. A few weeks before he was struck, another driver almost hit him but stopped just in time, he said.

Stephen Allgeier, 73, of Boise, is homebound with a broken foot after he was hit by a vehicle at 11th Street and State streets in July. Allgeier was crossing State Street to attend his regular group fitness class at Downtown Boise YMCA.

From the get-go, ACHD tries to limit the possibility of myriad elements out on the roadway creating unsafe situations, Head said. And the agency attempts to make changes as they are warranted, he added.

“It wasn’t for lack of trying or lack of desire to make the effort,” Head told the Statesman. “It really was (that) we offered the improvement we felt like would address the concerns we were seeing at that time, and as we continued to see more (crashes), we thought there might be more that could be done there to try and address that.”

ACHD considers many factors when they review a road for potential safety enhancements, including an intersection’s configuration, lighting and driver sight lines, Head said. However, agency officials said they can’t say whether the improvements chosen for 11th and State streets would have prevented the spate of recent crashes.

“We do not know, and we probably would be dangerous in hazarding even a guess at that,” Head said. “But what we can know is that the improvements that we made, we believe, can make it safer for the situation at that location.”

Duro will continue to push for even greater pedestrian safety at the intersection next to the YMCA, he said. He plans to make it a priority as the nonprofit nears breaking ground on a new parking garage and health and fitness facility in early 2024 — on the south side of State Street — and the city moves forward with a long-term infrastructure redesign of the State Street corridor.

The pedestrian crashes, which affected “the big YMCA family,” are personal to Duro, he said.

“The Y is always a busy place, and that’s what we’re built for — to bring the community together,” Duro said. “We’re going to have more people in the area. … I’m looking to the experts to really incorporate all of that new density, new traffic flows, increased traffic all in the design so we have the best city ever.”

References

^{^} 11th and State streets (www.idahostatesman.com)
^{^} member was killed (www.idahostatesman.com)
^{^} president of ACHD’s five-person board. (www.idahostatesman.com)
^{^} the COVID-19 pandemic. (www.idahostatesman.com)
^{^} Local Highway Technical Assistance Council (www.idahostatesman.com)
^{^} hit in the crosswalk (www.idahostatesman.com)
^{^} died the next day (www.idahostatesman.com)
^{^} driving under the influence (www.cityofboise.org)
^{^} fact sheet (highways.dot.gov)
^{^} a 2021 study (journals.sagepub.com)