HOLLYWOOD — The corner is not marked, and that is most of the problem. Twice a day, when the bell rings at a neighborhood elementary school in East Hollywood, children move toward a crossing that has no painted lines, no signal, and on most mornings no adult to hold up a hand and stop the cars.
Parents who walk their children to school have spent the winter keeping a private tally of near-misses. A driver who rolled through as a kindergartner stepped off the curb. A delivery van that clipped the back wheel of a scooter. The rain, several said, has made the corner worse — puddles push children toward the middle of the street, and windshields fog while drivers hurry through.
“I walk my daughter with my arm out like a gate, because I don’t trust that corner and I’ve stopped pretending I do,” said Marisol Vega, 34, who has two children at the school and helped circulate a petition. “We’re not asking for much. Paint and a guard. That’s the whole list.”
The petition, which organizers say has gathered more than four hundred signatures since December, asks the city for a marked crosswalk, a flashing beacon and a funded crossing guard at the intersection. A representative from Councilmember Alicia Rendón’s office said the request had been forwarded to the Department of Transportation, which weighs such corners against traffic counts, collision records and sightlines before a crossing is approved and scheduled. Staff could not offer a date. Crossing guards, the office noted, are funded through a separate program with its own backlog.
That answer has landed poorly with the parents, who point out that the criteria reward corners where crashes have already happened. “The city wants a body count before it paints a line,” said Hector Almanza, who lives across from the school and has watched the morning rush from his porch for nine years. “We are trying to hand them the problem before it becomes a tragedy, and the form doesn’t have a box for that.”
School staff, reached briefly, said only that they encouraged families to use a nearby signalized intersection two blocks away, a detour that parents say adds ten minutes and, for the youngest children, its own risks. The petition organizers have asked to address a neighborhood council meeting next month and say they will keep the signatures coming until someone with authority reads them.
For now the families improvise. A few parents have taken to standing at the corner in shifts before and after school, wearing borrowed reflective vests, waving cars to a stop with their arms. It is not official, and it is not enough, but on a wet January morning it was the only thing standing between a line of second-graders and the traffic.