Along busy streets in Long Beach’s Washington neighborhood, longtime resident Jesus Esparza says locals will consider just about anything to keep themselves safe from speeding drivers.
The latest idea: leaving reflective vests on the worst street corners so pedestrians can don them while crossing and leave them for the next passerby.
It’s a grassroots tactic that illustrates their frustration with Long Beach’s increasingly deadly streets. In 2025, the city recorded 53 fatal traffic collisions, a sharp increase from 2024 and the most in more than 10 years.
Long Beach has been striving for years to make its roads safer. In 2016, the City Council said it hoped to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2026. It was their version of a Vision Zero plan that many municipalities have adopted.
But in the ensuing decade, Esparza, who leads the local neighborhood association, says he’s seen little progress. He’s regularly passed along residents’ requests for traffic-calming measures — things like adding more lighting or delaying green lights so pedestrians get a head start in a crosswalk. But, he said, he’s yet to see any effective measures installed.
“We would always ask for speed bumps or speed tables,” Esparza said in Spanish, “but they don’t put them [on our streets.]”
Despite a rise in deadly crashes, a spokesperson for Long Beach’s Public Works Department, which manages streets, said the city is still confident in its strategy.
Its “core principles” include protecting pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists by slowing down drivers, Public Works spokesperson Jocelin Padilla wrote in an email. Those plans “remain unchanged.”
She said speeding is a primary factor in the city’s most serious crashes. Bad driver behavior, such as impairment and distraction, is also to blame.
Their greatest toll has been on people outside of cars. Last year, 32 people were killed while walking, biking or riding an e-scooter. That eclipses the number of people murdered here last year: 29.
Other residents have also pressed for faster action.
On another dangerous section of roadway along Orange Avenue, resident Kelsey Wise said she’s seen countless near misses. In response, she spent hours putting together a PowerPoint presentation to convince the city to install speed humps on Orange Avenue between Seventh Street and Hellman Avenue.
Wise estimated that roughly half of the drivers on her street travel above the posted 25 mph speed limit — a habit she finds increasingly troubling when teenagers from the nearby school zip through her neighborhood on electric scooters and e-bikes.
Last month, Wise presented the information to Councilmember Mary Zendejas’ office, who told her they would refer the presentation to Public Works. She’s yet to hear anything back.
“I think the system right now is designed to respond once something catastrophic happens, not when residents are signaling that something catastrophic is likely to happen,” Wise said.
Public Works told the Long Beach Post that seemingly simple fixes like the speed bumps Esparza and Wise asked for aren’t feasible. Its engineers prefer other “traffic calming treatments.” Speed humps slow down emergency response vehicles and the department has received “objections to noise” caused by drivers hitting them, Padilla wrote in an email.
Padilla said they instead favor “bulb outs” that extend curbs into the street at a crosswalk and “diverters” — islands that separate bicyclists from regular traffic and prevent cars from turning into neighborhoods or where it’s unsafe.
Over the past few years, the city has “made meaningful investments” to redesign major corridors with those principles in mind, Padilla wrote. Last May, Long Beach celebrated the completion of a $44.2 million project that installed protected bike lanes, new crosswalks and other traffic safety features on Artesia Boulevard.
On Tuesday, the City Council voted to approve reducing speed limits on dozens of streets.
Kurt Canfield, an organizer with local street safety group Car-Lite LB, said he was skeptical that speed limit reductions would slow down drivers unless it ramps up enforcement. Cops have been writing fewer speeding tickets since the pandemic.
The city has pivoted to relying on automated enforcement. Officials plan to install speed cameras at 18 locations throughout the city, but they’re not scheduled to be installed until the summer. They’ll then start issuing warnings to drivers until fines begin in the fall.
Canfield said he hopes last year’s high death toll will be an outlier.
“I think people are wanting to get back out and bike and walk, but as more people start doing that, now we have what essentially amounts to more targets to be victimized,” Canfield said.
The high death toll, he said, doesn’t mean the city’s approach is wrong, Canfield said.
“It just means that we need to try more, we need to continue building safer streets and changing behaviors because it does work,” he said.