HOLLYWOOD — The morning a delivery van clipped the front wheel of a stroller in the crosswalk and kept going, the parents waiting on the corner decided they were done asking politely.
Since February, families whose children attend a public elementary school in the flats south of the Boulevard have circulated a petition asking the city for two things they call overdue: speed humps on the residential street that runs past the school, and a marked crosswalk with flashing beacons at the corner where children cross to reach the gate.
The street, they say, has become a favored shortcut for drivers dodging the signal-heavy arterials nearby, and the morning drop-off window is exactly when the cut-through traffic peaks.
“People come off the boulevard doing forty on a street where kids are crossing to school,” said Aracely Bustamante, 38, whose daughter attends the school and who started the petition. “There’s no light, no beacon, just a faded crosswalk somebody painted years ago. We flag drivers down with our hands. That is our safety system right now — a parent’s arm.”
A retired resident who volunteers most mornings as an unofficial crossing helper said the near-miss in February was not the first. “I’ve stepped into that street more times than I can count to stop a car that wasn’t slowing,” said Warren Oyelaran, 71. “One of these mornings I’m not going to be fast enough, and I don’t want to be standing there when that happens.”
Requests like the parents’ go to the city’s transportation staff, who score each location against a formula that weighs speed, crash history and traffic counts, then rank it against every other request in a queue that residents across the district describe as glacial. Families point out that their street has no formal crash record precisely because the close calls, so far, have stayed close.
An aide to Councilmember Alicia Rendón said the office had received the petition and forwarded it to the department with a request that the location be evaluated, but cautioned that speed humps in particular move slowly, requiring surveys, neighbor sign-off and funding that competes with the same backlog that has left stretches of the district waiting on basic repaving.
Not every neighbor is sold. A few residents on the block worry that speed humps will slow the fire engines and ambulances that use the street, or simply push the cut-through traffic onto the next street over. Others say they would take the trade without hesitation.
“Move the speeders to my block, I’ll start a petition of my own, and good,” said Delphine Marchetti-Ross, who lives two doors from the school and signed. “That’s not a reason to do nothing here. That’s a reason to keep going until every one of these streets is fixed.”
Bustamante said the petition had gathered more than two hundred signatures and that the families planned to bring it to a neighborhood council meeting this month. She would rather not wait for the crash that makes the paperwork move faster, she said, but she has started to suspect that is exactly what the queue is waiting for.