Ann Arbor officials looking into parents' concerns about safety of King School crosswalk

Mayor John Hieftje and 2nd Ward City Council members Tony Derezinski and Stephen Rapundalo stood and watched on a recent morning as students negotiated with passing traffic to cross Waldenwood Drive to get to school.

Ann Arbor City Council Members Tony Derezinski and Stephen Rapundalo meet with students at the crosswalk. The students agreed it isn't as safe as it should be.

Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com

The crosswalk is located in the middle of a residential block where there are no stop signs and, as concerned parents point out, it's only a matter of feet from where cars and buses turn into the school's entrance driveway.

"People are driving straight, turning into the lot, you've got buses turning into the lot, and you've got 10-year-olds trying to cross the kids and they're not allowed to stop traffic," said Susan Gechter, who has a daughter in fourth grade at King School.

"The bottom line is you've got 10-year-olds who do not know the rules of the road and they can't cross the kids safely. And when you have drivers who aren't looking for stop signs, they're not looking necessarily for kids. There's constantly near-misses."

While the addition of stop signs would be an improvement, what Gechter and others are pushing for is a relocation of the crosswalk to a four-way stop at the end of the block. That would require an extension of a stretch of blacktop or sidewalk south down Waldenwood to Penberton Drive, as well as reengineering of handicapped-accessible curb cuts at the corner.

Hieftje said he didn't see anything overwhelmingly alarming about the current crosswalk, and it appeared most students were being dropped off by parents. But he said he'll take the idea of relocating the crosswalk back to the city's engineers.

Kathy Griswold shows Mayor John Hieftje the four-way stop where she wants a new crosswalk constructed to replace the less-safe one.

Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com

"I think we need to do a little sorting out — we didn't see a whole lot of kids coming down to cross the street," he said. "The safety patrols didn't have a whole lot to do, but I recognize how the problem might be different (on other days) because a number of kids were walking on the other side of the street. If you had a snow-covered area over there where it's grass, and nobody was taking care of it, there would have been more kids crossing (at the crosswalk) because it would have been very difficult for them to navigate that."

Kathy Griswold, a resident who sits on the Ann Arbor Public Schools Transportation Safety Committee, has heavily lobbied the City Council in recent months to take action.

Griswold said the project has gone through a lengthy evaluation process, has been recommended by the Transportation Safety Committee, has written support from the school principal and the school district's transportation director, and now it just needs a resolution from the City Council. She said she hopes it is approved before there's a serious accident.

King School Principal Kevin Karr went on the record back in November stating that he continues to see the mid-block crosswalk as less safe than it should be. He said he would support moving the crosswalk to the corner of Waldenwood and Penberton.

Griswold, who has said she's willing to hire a lawyer if that's what it takes, has a long history of championing safety improvements in Ann Arbor. Back in 1994, when she was making plans for her daughter to begin walking to King School, she said she discovered there was no sidewalk along Penberton near Waldenwood.

Despite the lack of a sidewalk, these students follow their parents' advice and cross at the intersection of Penberton Drive and Waldenwood Drive where there is a four-way stop.

Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com

"And so I worked with the city and they put the sidewalk in and that is very similar to what needs to be done now," she said.

Griswold said the only reason the crosswalk wasn't located at the corner of Penberton and Waledenwood to begin with was because it never used to be a four-way stop. Stop signs were added in the last decade after complaints by residents, she said.

Diane Fingar, the mother of two children in third grade and kindergarten, has come up with an interim solution. She has instructed her children to forget crossing at the crosswalk and instead cross at the four-way stop and walk on the grass to school. She said while her children are in the habit of doing that now, it's not the practice of other students who still cross at the crosswalk.

As witnessed by Hieftje and other city officials, it can take up to five or six minutes sometimes for a long enough gap in traffic for students to safely cross Waldenwood at the official crosswalk.

"The fifth-grade crossing guards are told not to allow any children to cross if they can see a car coming because the cars are not required to stop," Fingar said. "They're also told not to believe turn signals because people sometimes don't use turn signals properly. When everybody's coming to school, there are rarely times when there are no cars in sight, so you can wait a long time to cross down there."

Griswold said the school can't move the crosswalk without council action.

"Unless it's an official crosswalk, the school can't move the safeties, and they can't move the safeties unless there's a continuous path of some type, either blacktop or sidewalk," she said. "And having safeties with almost no one crossing doesn't really make sense."

Ryan J. Stanton covers government for AnnArbor.com. Reach him at ryanstanton@annarbor.com or 734-623-2529.