Keeping Sandpoint Safe for Pedestrians

By Cate Huisman, 12-16-09

Idaho’s approach to license plate numbers makes it easy to tell where a car’s home is, because the prefix to all the licenses in a county refers to the first letter in the county’s name. Hence plates on cars registered in the two northernmost counties always start with 7B or a 9B—the former is for Bonner County, the state’s seventh county (in an alphabetical list) starting with B, and the latter is for its northern neighbor, Boundary County. (Bonneville County, somewhere down south, has the 8B that falls between.)

So for a pedestrian in Sandpoint, it’s easy to tell where passing cars are registered, and there has been a noticeable change in drivers of 7B vehicles since a second pedestrian was killed in town a few weeks ago. On the whole, 7B cars and local pedestrians have both become quite cautious, and now when their paths cross, an Alphonse-and-Gaston-like “you first, no you first” kind of interplay occurs. Cautious pedestrians step timidly off curbs and then back on, while the 7B drivers that see them slow way down and just wait.

This dance is exaggerated at night; it was nighttime when both pedestrians were killed (the other occurred in 2006). In a recent attempt to cross 5th Avenue in the dark, I stepped off the curb and then retreated, seeing headlights off in the distance. The headlights must have seen me, however; they stopped a half block away and wouldn’t start again. Then they flashed. Only after I had crossed the street did they risk coming any closer, so I could see the 7B plate. Earlier, a 7B pickup on Oak Street, east of 5th where there are few streetlights, had done the same thing—it just wouldn’t move until after I was well on the opposite side.

This is a good thing, of course, and one wishes that all the visiting vehicles with license plates from other counties and states and Canadian provinces would do the same thing, although we could end up with a bit of a traffic jam in which all the vehicles are half blocks apart, waiting for wandering pedestrians.

A better approach would be to reconsider how we want to configure 5th Avenue, which was a normal street once but has turned into a five-lane thoroughfare as traffic has increased along US 95—of which 5th Avenue is a segment—through the panhandle to Canada. Non-7B drivers, unfamiliar with the area, can easily continue driving as though they are on a federal highway, not a city street that pedestrians might cross.

Although some changes were made after the first pedestrian death, the second makes it evident that these changes were not sufficient. City council member Steve Snedden proposed some further changes in Sunday’s Bee, and the city and Idaho Transportation Department should take them to heart. We need to quite wiping out our walkers.