SAN ANTONIO – People in one South Side neighborhood are finding relief in the color orange.
That’s the color of construction cones surrounding a road improvement project that aims to make a stretch of one busy street safer.
The Pleasanton Road Safety Improvement project is a joint effort by the City of San Antonio and Texas Department of Transportation. It runs along a roughly 3-mile stretch of Pleasanton Road and Moursund Boulevard, between Fitch Street and Loop 410.
It involves adding medians, installing three mid-block crosswalks with lights and putting up a traffic signal near the intersection of Pleasanton Road and Rayburn Drive.
Carla Gonzaba’s office is near the area where the new traffic signal is due to be installed.
“It’s a dangerous area, so it definitely is needed,” she said. “H-E-B is right across the street. The bus stop is here, so they get off the bus and they cross the street. There’s no median. There’s no stop light.”
Gonzaba watches people daily putting their lives at risk by crossing in the middle of the busy street. The nearest traffic light, at the corner of Pleasanton and Southwest Military Drive, is a block down the street.
It’s a struggle for some people to walk that far, Gonzaba said.
“Here you see it all the time,” she said. “We’ll come out and we’ll help the elderly people cross the street.”
Bill Young said he routinely has to cross that same road in a wheelchair to get from his bus stop back to his apartment building.
“Yeah, it’s hard,” Young said, mentioning that it often seems as though drivers don’t see him. “You got a lot of people run over.”
Last November, KSAT reported on the death of a man who was hit and killed while crossing Pleasanton Road near Southwest Military Drive. That was one of more than 150 crashes along the section where the work is being done.
“We’re excited about it,” Gonzaba said. “We’re having to deal with the construction, but it’s needed.”
For Gonzaba, the road work is a minor inconvenience which she hopes will make a major difference.
Still, there has been some backlash from others.
More than 500 people have signed an online petition calling for the removal of the medians.
They say it has had a negative impact for businesses and made traffic congestion in the area worse.
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