Penza pedestrians and motorists complain about street lighting

More than two hundred accidents and 63 dead. All of them occurred in the poorly lit streets of Penza. These are the traffic police data. Drivers and pedestrians feel the lack of lights in almost all areas of the city - in Zapadnaya Polyana, in Ternovka and Arbekovo. These are intra-quarter driveways, the least busy backup streets, and territories near schools and kindergartens. Probably, here is one of the safest pedestrian crossings in Penza. Near the 53rd gymnasium, there are artificial irregularities, and warning signs, and markings, and additional lighting. But it is worth delving into the yards, how you can get into zones of impenetrable darkness. The walkway between two kindergartens. Parents with children go here, cars drive. All this illuminates the lonely lantern, which is extinguished as soon as the preschool institution finishes its work. In Ternovka, in the area of ​​the private sector, lanterns, at first glance, are enough. But as soon as a person from the illuminated territory enters dark areas, he becomes almost invisible to drivers. "The man is coming. He is not visible at all. He appears only when he leaves before you. The road workers have such reflective jackets that have reflective tapes, they are far visible," said Gennady Voronkov, a resident of the Second Tashkent Drive, a car enthusiast. There are examples when there is no lighting at all on long sections of the road. Like the sidewalks. This road is located in a fairly densely populated neighborhood - Zaseka. This is a feature of the city, but there is not a single lamp, there are no sidewalks, and traffic is quite intense. And in relative safety, you can feel yourself wearing a special reflective vest. But the presence of street lighting does not always help. There it is not enough, fatal accidents often occur. As, for example, on minor roads in the Arbekovo micro-district. "On 127 Bolshaya Arbekovskaya Street, the driver of a Ford Focus car, a man born in 1989, allowed a collision with a pedestrian, a man born in 1967. As a result of the accident, the pedestrian died of injuries on the spot," commented Marina Antipova, senior inspector of the propaganda department of the BDD UGIBDD of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Penza Region. According to the traffic police, in 2019, in the Penza region as a whole, in places where there is no lighting, 224 accidents occurred, in which 63 people died. Many tragedies might not have happened if pedestrian clothing had reflective inserts. The press service of the Penza administration said that the regional center has a municipal program to improve the city, including the development of an outdoor lighting network. Now a list has been formed of more than three hundred objects, which require more than two hundred million rubles. In 2019, about 130 fixtures were installed. And in the future, it is planned to allocate at least 5 million rubles a year from the city budget only for lighting - based on the capabilities of the treasury.