No one should cross Nimitz Highway near River Street where a 63-year-old man was fatally struck by a pickup truck Sunday, area residents say.
But people continued to cross there Monday.
“This is basically an expressway,” said Rosalyn Perez, 65, who lives nearby in a senior housing complex at 888 Iwilei Road and walks daily. “Nobody should cross anywhere around here.”
Although there’s a crosswalk a few hundred feet Ewa of the accident site, it has no signal and is in a spot Perez considers more dangerous than where the man was struck.
At the crosswalk, four Ewa-bound lanes of Nimitz from downtown Honolulu split. Three left lanes continue Ewa, rounding a curve just before Kmart. The extreme right lane veers off onto Iwilei Road. And another lane feeds in from the left, splitting off from the town-bound lanes and coming into the Ewa-bound direction.
“It’s too much going on here,” Perez said.
The Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office on Monday identified the victim as Masakazu Toguchi of Kalihi.
Police said the male pedestrian was not in a crosswalk when he traversed Nimitz over the Nuuanu Bridge. He was struck in the left lane at about 6:15 p.m. by a silver 2004 Ford pickup truck driven by a 47-year-old Honolulu man.
The pedestrian received internal injuries and was taken to the hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
It was the 44th Oahu traffic fatality of 2015, compared with 52 last year.
Marguerite Turner, 72, said she saw the scene from her ninth-floor lanai Sunday shortly after the accident occurred, and pointed out the location on Nimitz: “His head was on the curb.”
She also saw a pickup truck stopped on the far left lane shortly after the accident.
Perez said the community has a lot of older people, a lot of homeless and a lot of handicapped. One woman Monday was crossing nearby Iwilei Road in a wheelchair, and the driver of a pickup stopped just in time to avoid hitting her.
“Drivers don’t have time to deal with us because there’s no light, no signals,” Perez said.
She added, “It’s like nobody cares. I have spent hours of my life calling the city, the Governor’s Office, TV stations.
“They’re killing seniors,” she said of drivers. “They’re crossing at the crosswalk and people still never see you.”
Perez recommends at the very least “blacking out” the un-signaled crosswalk on Nimitz.
Han Song, who was walking on River Street on Monday, said, “They need a crosswalk and they need signals. People’s patience runs out, and they make rash decisions, whether driver, pedestrian or cyclist.”
Song, a bicyclist, added, “There’s a “strong disregard for cyclists. … The way to address the situation is to re-examine the timing of the lights.”
He also recommends a crosswalk with a pedestrian sign.