Residents and advocates are pushing for changes to Patterson Street in South Eugene after a University of Oregon PhD student was killed by a driver while bicycling last month.
Police told KLCC they’re still investigating the crash that killed Erick Njue on Jan. 25.
But according to a search warrant filed in Lane County Circuit Court, the vehicle that hit Njue was speeding.
Residents said it’s too easy for cars to speed on Patterson between 18th and 24th where the crash occurred.
PhD student Cristina Manning lives at Spencer View Apartments. She said it’s dicey to try to cross the two lanes of one-way traffic.
“You might think you have a lot of room to cross, and then suddenly the cars speed up and you’re like ‘Oh no!’ and rushing, and it just really shouldn’t be that way,” Manning said.
Manning said she worries for children who live at Spencer View, which is family housing.
Neighbors are calling on the city to make changes so that traffic has to slow down. The city says it’s doing a speed study to evaluate the safety of the road.
“(We) need the data from the speed study and the volume study to let us know kind of what we’re looking at,” said Marion Suitor Barnes with Eugene Public Works. “That will help inform what would be possibly the most effective traffic calming measure.”
Suitor Barnes acknowledged Patterson is not bicycle or pedestrian friendly.
Rob Zako, Executive Director of Better Eugene-Springfield Transportation (BEST), said the stretch of Patterson where the accident happened feels like a racetrack.
“The design invites people to drive faster. Not that it's legal to do so, or not that they should do so, but humans respond to visual cues around them,” he said.
Last August, another UO student, Elizabeth Figueroa, was killed on her bicycle at East 8th and Hilyard—also a one-way two-lane street.
Zako said it’s confusing for both cars and pedestrians on one-way streets with two lanes. He said in the crash that killed Figueroa, one car was stopped for the cyclist to cross the street, and the other one went to pass the stopped car and hit the cyclist.
That’s similar to details of the crash that killed Erick Njue, according to the search warrant KLCC obtained from Lane County Circuit Court.
Better Eugene-Springfield Transportation is holding a Transportation Safety Community Forum on Thursday, Feb. 12 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Roosevelt Middle School in Eugene.
There is a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money to send Erick Njue's body back to Kenya.
It includes this quote to describe the 30-year-old international student: "Erick was a beautiful, full of life, hardworking, life-of-the-party with a ready smile and always active. If not in class or the library, Erick was somewhere jogging, doing marathons in Eugene or on his bike."
