Worn crosswalks lead to danger

Every day, Stephan Smith steps to the corner outside his South End apartment for a walk to the park or to Walgreens for milk or any of the other errands that force him to cross four lanes of Washington Street traffic. Every day he wonders if he will survive the trip.

He's not kidding. The painted white stripes of the crosswalks that he views as his main protection amid the speeding cars are so faded they are all but gone.

"I don't think drivers can see them," said Smith , who worries for his children as well as for himself . "How can you stop for something you can't see?"

All across Boston, crosswalks have been neglected for so long that in some cases they are little more than a few flecks of white. City officials say the painting schedule has fallen months and, in some cases, years behind for redoing Boston's 1,953 crosswalks.

Drivers and pedestrians, who daily do a kind of battle in Boston streets under the best circumstances, have flooded the Police Department and City Hall with complaints. Nearly every city councilor can produce a list of intersections where faded stripes have triggered repeated calls from angry constituents.

"It's lethal out there," said Council President Maureen E. Feeney, whose list includes several blocks of Adams Street in Dorchester.

In Boston, a city teeming with car traffic and people on foot, many think of the painted lines as the main order-keepers in the uneasy relationship between the two; cars are required by state law to yield to pedestrians in those zones, and crosswalks are the only places pedestrians are legally allowed to traverse the street.

Without them, drivers say, pedestrians seem to dart into the streets from nowhere. Pedestrians get irked because many cars don't slow down.

Some walkers say they have resorted to their own methods. "You can stare down the driver; you can hit the back of the car if you're really mad," said Chris Balerna, a resident of the Back Bay who crosses busy streets with faded crosswalks every day as he walks to his job downtown. "Yelling works, too, but only if the windows are open."

Drivers have their own frustrations.

"It's very hard to stop; you don't know where is the place to stop," said Abdirahman Abdi, a cab driver who nearly ran someone down in a faded crosswalk near South Station last week.

"It's very dangerous," said Claudia Williams, after trying to cross a street in the South End.

In Roxbury, a scattering of white marks is all that remains at the intersections of Dudley and Warren streets and of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Hampden Street. Crosswalks at the corner of Harrison Avenue and Eustis Street have been cut up during construction work and paved over.

"Watch yourself!" Kent Williams called to a companion dodging car traffic on Warren Street.

When the companion, Tracey Williams, reached safety at the curb, she said that she has written letters to City Hall about an intersection near her parents' Roxbury home, Rockland Street and Walnut Avenue, with no satisfaction.

In Chinatown, a family vacationing from Seattle said they were taken aback by the dearth of crosswalks. They said crossings in their city are meticulously maintained.

"Look at that! You can't even see them," said Leanne Brown, pointing at an Essex Street crossing, where only small sections of white are visible near the curb.

Many cities stay on top of crosswalk maintenance with simple systems. Chicago inspects and repaints crosswalks on north-south streets one year and those on east-west streets the next. Syracuse , N.Y., annually repaints all crosswalks near schools and conducts regular inspections of all the rest, repainting as needed. Somerville also conducts annual inspections.

But in Boston, officials simply wait for residents to complain. Even then, there is no guarantee the work will get done quickly; reported intersections are placed on a list that is now pages long.

"We're trying to get caught up," said Dennis Royer, the city's public works and transportation chief.

Royer said he plans to speed repainting by increasing the crosswalk budget. After inquiries last week, crews refreshed several crosswalks on Washington Street in the South End and several other neighborhoods.

Royer wants to rethink the paint patterns in the city's crosswalks so that they hold up better under heavy traffic; he also wants to create a computerized system to track when crosswalks are due for restoration. Still, he acknowledged, those solutions are months, and in some cases years, away.

Meanwhile, Boston's disappearing crosswalks present some unusual challenges. Fears for pedestrian safety in the South End prompted residents like Smith to ask the Police Department to conduct a sting operation to catch drivers who don't yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. But police first had to search for an intersection that still had visible lines.

Deputy Superintendent Thomas Lee said $200 failure-to-yield violations are dismissed if drivers can show the crosswalk wasn't clearly marked. "It's a viable defense," he said.

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.