An 11-year-old girl was struck and killed by a distracted driver while walking in a crosswalk in front of Glendale’s Toll Middle School in October, spurring a series of additional traffic measures around the school, where an elementary school and high school are also located.
“We want to avoid what happened in Glendale,” Cunningham said.
But the infrastructure and traffic patterns surrounding Toll are completely different from the intersection outside Edison, said Kenneth Johnson, the city’s traffic engineer.
At Toll, a series of traffic measures were already in place before the accident, including a crosswalk with flashing yellow lights and sidewalk bump-outs that reduced the distance pedestrians had to spend in the street.
Still, the student was killed because of a distracted driver, Johnson said.
“I don’t think it’s comparative because there are a lot of things in place in Glendale, and that particular time it didn’t work,” Johnson said. “But that location could go for 50 years and not have that same problem. It was a combination of factors that caused that incident.”
Johnson and his staff considered adding a crossing guard at Keystone and Chandler and have evaluated it multiple times, but have found that it does not meet California’s existing standards for requiring a crossing guard, he said.
Most drivers have obeyed the speed limit around the intersection, and although about 35 children crossed the intersection during two recent observations, only three of them were unescorted, Johnson said.
Parents have said they are afraid to let their children cross at Keystone and Chandler alone.
