A 66-year-old man named Gerardo Reboseno-Pacheco died after a hit-and-run driver hit him on Grand Avenue.
The crash took place near the intersection of Maltby Place Saturday, according to police spokesperson Officer Scott Shumway.
The 911 call about the collision came in at 9:51 p.m. Officers found Reboseno-Pacheco, 66, “in the street suffering from injuries to his head and legs,” Shumway wrote in a release issued Monday afternoon. The driver had fled the scene.
Reboseno-Pacheco was taken by ambulance to Yale New Haven Hospital, where “he succumbed to his injuries.”
Shumway asked “witness who have not yet spoken with the police” to call (203) 946‑6316.
Tragic. Once again, busy pedestrian main streets such as Grand and Chapel should be designed so that drivers rarely exceed 15 miles per hour. Many other cities around the world do this on their main streets by using simple traffic calming approaches. Doing so would be guaranteed to reduce injuries and deaths like these by 90%.
Currently, these streets are designed to facilitate easy travel at 30 miles per hour or above. That is a huge mistake on the part of our engineers, and is by far the top reason why hundreds of pedestrians are dying and suffering serious injuries each year.
Until the street geometry can be modified, drivers can avoid killing people by limiting their speeds in these areas to 15 miles per hour. However, that is not a solution, of course, since the vast majority of drivers will drive at whatever speed the road is designed for them to do so.