Oct 23 2026

Pasadena Calls Road Safety a Top Priority. City Hall Isn’t Acting Like It

Pasadena Calls Road Safety a Top Priority. City Hall Isn’t Acting Like It

Fatal crashes are up, the motor unit is short, and DOT keeps offering reasons it can’t act. Here’s what the city should do now.

On Wednesday night, the City Council’s Municipal Services Committee sat through a “Citywide Traffic Safety Update” from the Department of Transportation and the Pasadena Police Department. Everyone in the room agreed that traffic safety matters. Councilmembers asked good questions. Staff showed slides. And because the item was listed as informational, the committee took no action.

That sums up the problem. Pasadena has agreed for years that traffic safety matters. What it hasn’t done is act like it.

The numbers should alarm us

The city recorded four fatal collisions in the first six months of 2026. That is already one more than in all of 2025. Two of the people killed were pedestrians.

Over the past decade, pedestrians were involved in just 7 percent of Pasadena’s collisions but made up half of the people killed. And the city’s own designated safety corridors, which are only 13 percent of our streets, account for 80 percent of collisions. We know exactly where people are getting hurt and who is getting killed.

A year ago, in October 2025, the Council adopted a Focused Local Roadway Safety Action Plan and a goal of zero traffic deaths by 2035. Halfway through the first full year under that goal, we are moving in the wrong direction.

The city’s own slides show how long this has gone on. From January 2021 through June 2026, Pasadena recorded 31 fatal collisions, and 16 of them involved a pedestrian. The worst year was 2021, with nine fatal collisions, six of them involving pedestrians. After a low of two in 2023, the count jumped to eight in 2024, and the first half of 2026 has already passed 2025’s full-year total.

The statewide picture offers little comfort. DOT’s presentation cited a projection of 828 pedestrian deaths in California in 2025. That’s down from 1,067 in 2024, but the state’s pedestrian death rate of 2.13 per 100,000 people is still above the 1.97 average the presentation cited for comparison.

Enforcement works, and we’ve let it wither

I’ll say it plainly: Pasadena needs more traffic enforcement, especially on the corridors where people are dying.

The police department’s own examples make the case. When motor officers returned to Washington Boulevard last week, they wrote about 14 citations in roughly an hour, almost all for speeding. That isn’t a city with a minor speeding problem. During a directed enforcement push near Allen Avenue and Orange Grove Boulevard in July, officers wrote 105 citations, and no collisions were reported at that location that month.

And for anyone who thinks this is about revenue: it isn’t. Lt. Matt Campeau told the committee he doesn’t believe the department sees any money from citations. Enforcement here is purely about changing behavior.

Yet the traffic unit has been allowed to shrink. It is authorized for nine motor officers but, by the lieutenant’s account, has operated with seven for several years. When Officer Raymond Hsu retires on Dec. 2 after nearly 30 years, the unit will drop back to seven, and the next motor school class isn’t until March. Campeau recalled that around 2012 and 2013 the unit had two sergeants and 15 officers. Today a city of 135,000 people is covered by seven or eight officers on motorcycles.

“Not a budget issue” — then what is it?

The department told the committee that filling these spots isn’t about money and that Chief Gene Harris fully supports it. The problem, we were told, is that there are no trained motor officers available. Officers who already hold the qualification moved to the helicopter unit, to robbery-homicide, or were promoted.

I respect the difficulty of motor training, which has one of the highest failure rates in police work. But a vacancy that lasts for several years is not an accident. It is a priority decision. Every one of those transfers was a choice to staff something else first. If traffic safety were truly at the top of the list, the department would have built a pipeline into motor school years ago instead of starting to recruit trainees now.

The Council has already spoken on this. At a budget workshop on Dec. 1, 2025, councilmembers narrowed 21 possible budget items down to five priority themes:

  • Making City Roads Safer: street and pavement improvements, traffic enforcement, and pedestrian, bicyclist and motorist safety
  • Investing in Housing People and Homelessness Prevention: a year-round shelter and transitional housing
  • Fire Preparedness: fire department facility upgrades and a training center
  • Community-Centered Economic Development: the economic development strategic plan, business retention and neighborhood specific plans
  • Climate Change: the transition to carbon-free electricity

Road safety is listed first, and staff estimated the enforcement piece alone would take $1.2 million to $1.5 million a year in new funding. Ten months later, the motor unit is still short, the Transportation director says many safety improvements have no funding, and the street program still runs on grants. Residents deserve a clear answer: what has the city actually spent on its own top priority, and on what?

The directed enforcement program launched this summer is a good start, but it is modest: two two-hour windows per operating day, in the morning and mid-afternoon. And the results are mixed. On Washington Boulevard between Lake and Altadena, officers wrote 32 citations in August and there were still four collisions.

The department’s 30-, 60- and 90-day plan reads well on paper: set a baseline, find peak violation times, adjust deployments, then evaluate and decide which locations to keep. Its education effort is thinner. The slides list five safety events between October 2025 and July 2026, mostly walk-to-school, bicycle and pedestrian programs, plus a Citizen Motor Academy planned for December. Five events in nine months is not a campaign.

The data itself needs work. According to the table in the city’s agenda packet, the Traffic Section wrote 662 citations in May, before directed enforcement began, then 310 in June, 626 in July when the program launched, and 462 in August. Counting patrol officers, total citations in July (839) were about the same as in March (844) and May (838). The month the new program started looked like an ordinary month, not a surge. Patrol officers across the entire city added only 156 to 213 traffic citations a month. The figures reported from the meeting don’t even match the packet, and the department describes its numbers as snapshots of whenever they were run. Councilmember Rick Cole rightly asked whether enforcement keeps working months after officers leave. We can’t answer that without clean, consistent, location-by-location numbers published regularly.

Where was the chief?

On an issue the Council calls one of its top priorities, with fatal crashes rising, the Police Department’s presentation was left to a lieutenant who has run the Traffic Section for 10 months. Chief Gene Harris didn’t address the committee. Councilmember Lyon ended up directing his remarks to the chief in case he happened to be watching.

We were told the chief fully supports filling the motor unit. If so, the record is hard to square with it. Harris has led the department since January 2023, and the unit has run two officers short for several years, which covers essentially his entire tenure. He assigned an eighth motor officer this Monday, two days before the committee meeting, and that gain disappears when Officer Hsu retires in December. Over the same period, the department’s operating budget has kept growing while its authorized staffing stayed flat, meaning the choice of where officers go has been his to make.

Support that lives in a lieutenant’s slide deck isn’t leadership. The chief should come before the Council himself, explain why traffic enforcement has been allowed to shrink on his watch, and commit to a date when the motor unit will be at full strength.

Follow the money

Pasadena’s budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 totals about $1.41 billion across all funds, including a $383 million general fund. The Department of Transportation’s operating budget is about $54 million, up from roughly $50 million the year before, with 67.5 full-time positions. The Police Department’s operating budget is about $132 million, roughly $10 million more than last year’s adopted budget, yet its authorized staffing of 382.25 positions hasn’t changed since fiscal 2025.

Look at what got added at the end. Among the final adjustments staff proposed when the budget came up for adoption in June, DOT got an extra $600,000 to start bringing parking enforcement in-house with 12 new positions, plus $90,000 for body cameras for parking officers. None of the final adjustments touched traffic enforcement. Parking tickets got a dozen new positions. The motor unit got a recruiting effort and a March motor school date.

Capital money tells the same story. The budget recommended just $1.63 million in new capital appropriations for Transportation this year, compared with $44.8 million for Public Works. The capital program does put $8.6 million into the annual street paving program, which addresses the pavement part of the Council’s road safety priority. But for the safety projects themselves, DOT keeps going back to grants. Even police traffic operations lean on outside money: PPD received a $545,000 state Office of Traffic Safety grant for enforcement and education that ran through September.

DOT: more excuses than action

The Transportation Department deserves credit for the projects it has finished: curb extensions and wider sidewalks near the Allen Avenue Gold Line station, a pedestrian beacon at Locust Street, speed tables on Mountain Street, flashing-beacon crosswalks and a hardened centerline on Orange Grove at Lincoln. These matter.

But they are spot fixes against a citywide problem, and the pace is too slow.

The pipeline is short, too. The slides list two flashing-beacon crosswalks underway on Green Street, at Chester and Michigan avenues; pedestrian hybrid beacons coming to Lincoln Avenue at Toolen Place and Lake Avenue at Elizabeth Street; a leading pedestrian interval program; a citywide continental crosswalk upgrade; and neighborhood traffic plans for Boylston Street, Lincoln Avenue and Avenue 64. All worthwhile. None of it matches the scale of a network where 13 percent of the streets produce 80 percent of the crashes.

Even the vocabulary is retreating. What cities across the country call quick-build projects, low-cost posts, paint and curbs installed fast and made permanent if they work, Pasadena’s Transportation director now calls demonstration projects. The city’s solicitation for the El Molino Avenue Demonstration Project describes the same tools: painted curb extensions, hardened centerlines with vertical posts, speed humps and buffered bike lanes. Words matter. A quick build is the first step toward a permanent fix. A demonstration is something you take down when the show is over.

The safety plan adopted a year ago lets the city lower speed limits by an extra 5 mph on safety corridors under Assembly Bill 43. A year later, staff are still conducting the required traffic surveys, and a proposal won’t reach the Council until late winter or early spring.

Red-light cameras? Transportation Director Joaquin Siques acknowledged the city’s earlier program reduced collisions but became too costly, and said bringing it back would require a comprehensive study. Speed cameras? Pasadena isn’t among the cities in the state’s automated speed enforcement pilot under AB 645. Siques also told the committee that the city has many safety improvements with no funding at all.

Cole pointed out that the city’s roughly $160 million in planned street improvements depends almost entirely on grants, with little general fund money behind it, at a time when state and federal dollars are shrinking. Meanwhile, a traffic signal at Cordova Street and Oak Knoll Avenue, where someone was killed last year, is funded, but its funding agreement is still months from reaching the Council.

As Cole put it, “If you want a safer city, we’re going to have to invest in a safer city.”

A director who manages the problem instead of solving it

Joaquin Siques is not new to any of this. He has worked in Pasadena’s Department of Transportation for roughly two decades, became deputy director in 2020 and was named director in March 2024. When he took the job, he promised data-driven solutions and a focus on the most vulnerable people using our roads.

Two and a half years later, the department is bigger and better funded. It had 56 employees and a $44 million operating budget when he was appointed. This year’s budget calls for 67.5 positions and about $54 million. What residents have to show for it is a handful of beacons, some speed tables and a growing list of studies.

The results on the street are what matter. In 2024, his first year in charge, Pasadena had eight fatal collisions, up from two the year before. This year passed 2025’s total by June. Not all of that is the director’s doing. Crashes have many causes, and he doesn’t control the police department. But the director’s job is to change the trend, and the trend hasn’t changed.

Listen to how the department answered the committee on Wednesday and a pattern emerges. For every problem, there is a reason it can’t be fixed yet:

  • Lower speed limits on the deadliest corridors? State law has allowed it since 2021 and the Council designated the corridors a year ago, but staff are still doing surveys, so it won’t come back until next year.
  • Red-light cameras? They reduced collisions, but cost too much, so they need a comprehensive study.
  • Speed cameras? Pasadena isn’t in the state pilot.
  • Safety improvements? Many are unfunded.
  • Street projects? They depend on grants.
  • A signal at Cordova and Oak Knoll, where someone died last year? It’s funded, but the funding agreement is still months away.
  • Quick builds? They’re demonstrations now.

Any one of these might be reasonable on its own. Together they describe a department that has become better at explaining why it can’t act than at acting. That’s a leadership choice.

To be fair, Siques has delivered real projects. The city’s first pedestrian-activated beacon, at Washington Boulevard and Hudson Avenue where two people were killed, went live in February, and the Allen Avenue improvements are done. But describing what is unfunded is not a plan. A transportation director who believed the city was in a safety emergency would put a price tag in front of the Council, ask for general fund money in public and push for faster timelines, not slower ones. That is the leadership Pasadena needs, and so far it isn’t getting it.

Speed signs are a suggestion, not a strategy

When Pasadena does act on speeding, its go-to tool has been the electronic speed feedback sign, the kind that flashes your speed back at you. Since the city’s Arterial Speed Management Program began in fiscal year 2021, it has installed 68 of them, including six added this January on El Molino Avenue, Los Robles Avenue, Del Mar Boulevard and Green Street.

This isn’t new. Back in 2014, after traffic deaths more than doubled the year before, the city added 10 feedback signs to the 18 it already had. Even then, a Pasadena police traffic lieutenant acknowledged that drivers who use the same roads every day eventually stop noticing them.

That’s the flaw. A sign that flashes “35” at someone doing 48 has no consequence behind it. Federal and state transportation guidance finds these signs bring only modest speed reductions, and says they need regular enforcement and maintenance to stay effective. Pasadena has been installing signs while letting the enforcement behind them shrink. More than a decade and dozens of signs later, motor officers can still write a speeding ticket every few minutes on Washington Boulevard, and the city’s fatality count is going up, not down.

Speed signs are cheap, visible and easy to announce in a press release. That is exactly why they can’t be the city’s answer. Yet the city’s own capital budget, which keeps installing them this year, describes them as a way to lessen the need for ongoing police enforcement. Every sign should be paired with enforcement where it shows the worst speeding, and the speed data these signs collect should be published so residents can see whether they are working.

What Pasadena should do now

  1. Get the motor unit to nine and keep it there. Then plan to rebuild toward historical staffing. Create incentives for motor duty, since officers working five or six days a week year-round is a recruiting problem the department itself identified.
  2. Spend the money the Council already prioritized, and report publicly where the $1.2 to $1.5 million went.
  3. Put pedestrians at the center of enforcement. Focus directed enforcement on safety corridors, failure-to-yield violations at crosswalks and speeding in school zones.
  4. Publish the data monthly, by location: citations, collisions and before-and-after comparisons, so we can answer whether enforcement lasts.
  5. Fast-track the AB 43 speed limit reductions and adopt Councilmember Tyron Hampton’s call for 15 mph school zones.
  6. Lobby Sacramento to add Pasadena to the automated speed enforcement program, and start the red-light camera study now rather than later.
  7. Fund quick-build safety projects from the general fund and build them to stay, as public speaker Mish Takemoto urged, instead of waiting on grants for every crosswalk and curb extension.

Priorities are measured in action

Councilmember Jason Lyon said at the meeting that traffic safety is one of the Council’s five priorities, and that money should follow it even if that means less flows somewhere else. He’s right. So is Cole when he says this comes down to political will.

But priorities are not measured by what gets said in committee. They’re measured by how many officers are on the street, how fast a deadly intersection gets a signal, and whether the death count goes down. By those measures, Pasadena isn’t there yet.

The committee took no action on Wednesday. Next time, it should.

Want to weigh in? Write to the Council at publiccomment@cityofpasadena.net, and watch the full Oct. 21 Municipal Services Committee meeting on Pasadena Media’s YouTube channel.

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