Community Voices: Three Neighbors Lost In One Weekend. Our Streets And Our Trucks Are Both To Blame.

Editor’s Note: The following article was printed in the June 27, 2026, issue of The Bakersfield Californian. You can read the newspaper version or read it online at The Bakersfield Californian’s website.

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Community Voices: Three neighbors lost in one weekend. Our streets and our trucks are both to blame.

By Chris Hagan

It was a brutal weekend on Bakersfield’s roads. In the span of about two days, three of our neighbors were killed in separate crashes across the city, two people walking and one riding a bicycle. A 44-year-old man, Paul Richard Gonzales, was struck and killed while walking on South H Street near White Lane in the early hours of Saturday morning. A cyclist died in a hit-and-run at Stockdale Highway and Calloway Drive. And on Sunday night, a woman was hit and killed by a pickup truck as she crossed Brundage Lane on the east side of town.

Three families. One weekend. And if we are honest with ourselves, the only surprising thing is that we keep acting surprised.

Bakersfield has an auto-versus-pedestrian problem that runs far deeper than any single weekend. A national study by Smart Growth America ranked the Bakersfield-Delano metro area the third deadliest place for people on foot in the entire country, with roughly five pedestrian deaths for every 100,000 residents. We are not an unlucky city. We are a predictable one.

In the wake of this weekend’s deaths, a Bakersfield Police Department traffic sergeant reminded the public that road safety is a shared responsibility, that pedestrians sometimes cross outside of marked crosswalks or while distracted, and that drivers are increasingly distracted too, especially by the large touchscreens built into newer vehicles. A local advocate with Bike Bakersfield made a similar point: safety, she said, is a two-way street. They are both right, and I won’t pretend otherwise. At least one of this weekend’s crashes appeared to involve alcohol. People on foot and people behind the wheel both make fatal mistakes, and both owe each other more care than we tend to give.

But “shared responsibility” cannot be where the conversation stops because it quietly leaves out the single biggest thing that has changed on our roads over the past two decades. Not our phones. Not our crosswalks. The vehicles themselves.

This past Sunday, the very weekend our neighbors were dying, The New York Times published a sweeping investigation titled “The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s.” Drawing on federal crash data, previously untapped vehicle dimension records, and detailed crash simulations, the Times documented something most of us have sensed in our gut every time we step off a curb: American roads had been slowly getting safer for pedestrians for years, until around 2009 when the trend sharply reversed. Annual pedestrian deaths have since climbed by roughly 75%. The analysis estimated that the nation’s shift toward taller, heavier vehicles alone has contributed to about 3,000 pedestrian deaths since 2016, somewhere between 200 and 400 lives every single year that might otherwise have been spared.

The reason is grimly mechanical, and the Times spelled it out. A traditional sedan rides low. When it strikes an adult, it tends to hit the legs, below the body’s center of gravity, and the person is often thrown up and onto the hood, a terrible outcome, but frequently a survivable one. A modern pickup or full-size SUV, with a hood that can stand nearly chest-high, strikes higher: the torso, the chest, the vital organs. Instead of being carried up onto the vehicle, the victim is knocked down and pulled underneath it. The investigation also showed how the thicker roof pillars and wider side mirrors on today’s trucks have enlarged the driver’s blind spots to the point that a person, especially a child, can stand directly in front of a vehicle and be completely invisible to whoever is behind the wheel. Researchers used 3-D scans to compare best-selling trucks like the Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado and Toyota Tacoma against their 1990s ancestors. The newer models block dramatically more of the road. And tellingly, the Times noted that most other wealthy nations did not see anything like America’s spike in pedestrian deaths, which makes it hard to pin all of this on smartphones.

It is worth sitting with one detail from this weekend in that light. The woman killed on Brundage Lane was struck by a pickup truck. We do not yet know everything about that crash, and no one should pretend to. But we do know the general rule the data keeps confirming: a collision that might leave a person bruised but alive if the vehicle were a small car becomes far more likely to be fatal when the vehicle is a tall, heavy truck. The size of the thing that hits you is, increasingly, the difference between a hospital visit and a funeral.

This should land especially hard in Bakersfield. Look around any parking lot in town and count the lifted trucks and full-size SUVs. We are a truck city in a truck state, and our roads are built to match: wide, straight, fast arterials including Stockdale, Brundage, Rosedale, Ming, and White Lane, all engineered to move vehicles quickly across a flat, sprawling city. Now combine three ingredients: roads designed for speed, long distances between safe places to cross, and the tallest, heaviest passenger vehicles in American history. The result is exactly the weekend we just lived through. This is not fate. It is design, and design can be changed.

Here is the uncomfortable part for those of us who instinctively put the burden on the person on foot: a pedestrian crossing the street has no say in how tall the hood of the truck bearing down on them happens to be. They can wear reflective clothing, cross at the corner, and put their phone in their pocket, all genuinely good advice, and still be killed by a vehicle whose own design turned a survivable crash into a deadly one. Personal responsibility matters. But you cannot reflective-vest your way out of physics.

So, what would actually move the needle?

Slow the cars down.  Speed is the single biggest factor in whether a struck pedestrian lives or dies. Narrower travel lanes, better-timed signals, median refuge islands, and curb extensions all calm traffic on precisely the kind of wide arterials where our neighbors keep dying. These are proven tools, not pipe dreams.

Build for people, not just cars.  Close the sidewalk gaps. Add lighting.  Two of this weekend’s deaths happened in the dark. Put crosswalks where people actually need to cross, instead of a quarter-mile apart and then blaming people for not walking to them.

Take vehicle size seriously.  This is the hard one, because hood heights and bumper standards are set in Washington, not Bakersfield. But Europe already rates new vehicles on how dangerous they are to people outside the car, and U.S. regulators are finally beginning to weigh similar design standards. Our representatives should back that effort. And the rest of us can at least ask an honest question before signing for the biggest, tallest truck on the lot: when this thing meets a person, who pays for that choice?

None of this brings back the three people we lost this weekend. Paul Gonzales and the others were not statistics. They were somebody’s child, perhaps a parent, and somebody’s neighbor.  They were people who left home and did not come back. They deserve more from us than a moment of sympathy and a reminder to look both ways. They deserve streets, and vehicles, built as though the lives of the people outside the car count as much as the lives of the people inside it.

We laid out these roads. We bought these trucks. That means we are not helpless.  We can choose differently. The victims of the next bad weekend are counting on it. They just don’t know it yet.

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If you or someone you know is injured in an accident at the fault of someone else, or injured on the job no matter whose fault it is, contact the attorneys at Chain | Cohn | Clark by calling (661) 323-4000, or fill out a free consultation form, text, or chat with us at chainlaw.com.