One year after a 15-year-old Brazilian exchange student was killed at a notorious Burnaby crosswalk, the city has finished installing a full traffic signal there.
Fernanda Girotto was hit and killed at the crossing on Cariboo Road near the Highway 1 overpass on Jan. 17, 2018. Police have since laid motor vehicle charges against two drivers.
A day after her death, a cyclist was hit near the crossing, and another pedestrian was seriously injured there in a hit-and-run two days after that.
The accidents sparked outrage from neighbours who had been raising concerns with the city about the crossing for years.
Staff had assessed the crosswalk a few months earlier but determined it didn’t get enough foot traffic to warrant a light.
The public uproar after the three crashes, however, prompted an about-face, and the city rushed to install safety improvements, including a pedestrian-activated flashing light.
Council then approved $450,000 to fund a full traffic signal.
That signal has now been installed.
“I’m just happy to see they followed through and that they’ve done it. I really am,” said Kay McDonald, a Cariboo Heights co-op resident who first petitioned the city to get a traffic light in the area in 2004.
“I hope it’s put an end to problems out there,” she said.
Alexander John, comptroller at Cariboo Christian Fellowship next to the crosswalk, had lobbied the city for a pedestrian-controlled light there for a year before Girotto’s death.
“We’re grateful that finally the city has installed this, and it seems to be working well,” he said of the new full traffic signal.
Coun. Pietro Calendino, chair of the city’s public safety committee, said he hopes the light will prevent more accidents and make the crossing safer "for the few pedestrians that do use that crosswalk" but added “traffic lights by themselves are not going to save any lives unless drivers and pedestrians will take care in crossing and going through crosswalks.”
When asked if the city had learned anything from the problems at the crosswalk, he said, “What’s there to learn? There was an accident. A young lady was killed and the motorists have been charged with negligent driving. Those are things that no council, no committee can prevent when you have drivers that do not observe the laws of the road. It doesn’t matter how many laws we put in and how many regulations and how many lights, if you have drivers that don’t observe those regulations and laws, what’s any person going to do?”
When asked if installing the full traffic light was the right thing to do, Calendino said, “That’s a silly questions, isn’t it? Of course it’s the right thing.”
