The path not taken

On the afternoon of Feb. 11, 39-year-old Razy Tufnell was riding her bicycle south along Oleander Avenue—one of Chico’s most well-traveled bike routes—and attempted to cross the intersection at East First Avenue.

After Tufnell stopped at the intersection, she misjudged the speed of oncoming traffic, Chico Police Sgt. Cesar Sandoval said during a recent phone interview. Tufnell pulled into the intersection and was struck by a westbound car driven by 20-year-old Amber English, whose attempt to stop left skid marks on the pavement. Tufnell was treated for minor injuries at Enloe Medical Center and released; the police report determined her to be at fault.

The accident took place mere feet from where 20-year-old Butte College student Janee Nickerson was fatally injured by a vehicle as she rode her bicycle along East First Avenue last Nov. 1. At the time, the death of Chico State nursing student Kristina Chesterman—who was hit by an allegedly drunken driver on the night of Sept. 22 as she was biking home on Nord Avenue, and died at Enloe Medical Center days later—was still fresh in the community’s collective consciousness. The two tragedies prompted outcry from cycling-safety advocates who urged improvements to Chico’s biking infrastructure, particularly for more separated bike lanes along busy thoroughfares.

So, in light of the second serious cycling accident at East First and Oleander avenues in recent memory, the question arises: Is the intersection dangerous? An abandoned city effort to mitigate traffic there several years ago suggests it is.

Oleander is a recommended route listed in the Chico Bike Map, connecting the downtown area to the bike path that begins near Eleventh Avenue and the State Route 99 Corridor Bikeway Project via mostly quiet residential streets. The trickiest crossing point along the route for cyclists is unquestionably the intersection of East First and Oleander, though it may not appear that way to those unfamiliar with the area.

“It’s a more dangerous intersection than it seems to be,” said Janine Rood, executive director of Chico Velo Cycling Club. “It seems like it’s a quiet street with houses, but it’s actually an arterial road with a bike-route crossing, which makes it more dangerous than people think.

“When you cross East Avenue—that’s a big, busy street—you know you’d better be careful,” she continued. “[First and Oleander] seems more benign, but that isn’t necessarily so.”

Nani Teves lives in the Avenues neighborhood and regularly rides her bicycle across the intersection at Oleander and East First with her young children. During a recent interview, Teves explained how, prior to crossing, she tells her kids to stay well back from the roadway as she creeps into the intersection in order to see past the cars parked along East First. Teves also noted that the crossing is particularly well traveled by Chico Junior High School students whom she has often seen “leap-frog” around passing vehicles.

Given the poor visibility, fast traffic and high ratio of “teenagers who aren’t thinking straight,” she said, the intersection is a dangerous one in need of improvement.

The city of Chico apparently agreed as recently as December 2009, when it installed temporary rubber curb extensions at the intersection of East First and Oleander avenues and West First and Magnolia avenues.

Former City Traffic Engineer Brian Mickelson explained to the CN&R at the time that the extensions served to narrow the crossing distances for pedestrians, slow vehicle traffic and allow pedestrians and motorists to see each other when their views would otherwise be blocked by parked vehicles. The extensions were recommended by the Chico Avenues Neighborhood Association as part of the Avenues Neighborhood Improvement Plan, which was adopted by the City Council in April 2008.

Installing the extensions achieved the desired traffic-calming effects, but also had an unforeseen consequence: Because vehicles could no longer turn left off of East First onto Oleander, bus routes were diverted to East Sacramento Avenue, a residential side street lined with historic homes.

Homeowners along East Sacramento were unenthusiastic about the heavy bus traffic, and following a multitude of complaints, the Internal Affairs Committee decided to remove the extensions about two months after they were installed, and the traffic-calming project was abandoned.

Some locals believe that both recent cycling accidents at East First and Oleander might have been avoided had the extensions remained in place. Teves said that Nickerson’s accident, in particular, “really affected me because it seemed very preventable.”

Following Nickerson’s death, Teves began “doing some research with the idea that I would approach the City Council with some data, so they might revisit the idea of traffic-calming at [First and Oleander],” she said. “The sticking point for me is that the city thought [the extensions] were a great idea; they were going to fund it, until those few neighbors said they didn’t want it.”

From the time Matt Johnson, currently the city’s senior development engineer, was hired as a traffic engineer in 1999, “there was always some discussion about that intersection,” he said during a phone interview. Having spent about a year collecting data on the intersection in 2000, Johnson maintains that whether or not the intersection is truly dangerous is “debatable.”

“When you or I say something is ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe,’ to some degree that’s perception,” he said, adding that, when accounting for the thousands of cars that safely drive through the intersection every day, the rate of accidents is actually quite low. And while the city is well aware of the intersection’s faults, he said, addressing them isn’t necessarily a top priority.

“There’s only so much money we have to spend on roads,” Johnson said. “Whether we like it or not, we have to develop some level of criteria. It’s important we use our limited resources to correct the most glaring problems.”

After Johnson and his colleagues compiled their report and presented it to the Internal Affairs Committee in 2000, the panel determined there “was nothing to be done for [East] First and Oleander,” he recalled, suggesting not much has changed in well over a decade.

“The city wants solutions; they want happy citizens,” he said. “Believe me, if there was a solution for First and Oleander that actually made people happy, the city would be all over it.”