A First-Hand Look At Muirwood Drive and West Los Positas Boulevard Traffic

Having heard the reports of a man standing at Muirwood Drive and West Los Positas Boulevard with a BB gun over the weekend I could totally understand his frustration with the traffic at this intersection.

This morning I walked over to this neighborhood and conducted a count of all the traffic entering the intersection. This included large construction trucks, buses, cyclists, pedestrians and motor vehicles.

From 0715 hours to 0800 hours (45 minutes) this morning on this the first day of school, the numbers are as follows.

                             49 Pedestrians

                              36 Cyclists     

                              4 Large construction trucks

                              6 Buses

                              1,163 Motor Vehicles

I walk and jog through this intersection daily and I am usually cut off while I am in the crosswalk of the intersection. On one occassion, a young person in a Mustang did a "jack rabbit start" from the other side of the intersection and brushed past me.

I observed this same activity this morning. Motor vehicles are entering the crosswalk while they are occupied by pedestrians and on one occassion a cyclist entered the crosswalk and a motor vehicle nearly clipped him.

There was a young mother walking her boy with their pet dog to the elementary school on Highland Oaks. They could not enter the crosswalk because traffic just would not allow them to enter. I interceded and said to her, "Once you enter the crosswalk everybody has to stop."

She entered and the traffic at that corner did stop. Other traffic from across the intersection entered the intersection and slowed until they crossed.

Of course, I am standing there with pen and pad jotting down numbers of all the traffic, drivers are wondering who I am and what I am doing. I witnessed several near misses this morning.

I saw five motor vehicles in the intersection at the same time. One motor vehicle actually passed around another vehicle in the middle of the intersection.

I saw another motor vehicle actually do a u-turn in the middle of the cross walk, drop his children off, then leave the area.