Victoria Goetz loves living on Wells Avenue South, just a short walk from a slew of downtown Renton restaurants and parks.

She just wishes she and her family could get to those destinations without endangering their lives.

“The thing that’s really frustrating is trying to get across the street with my kid or other kids and kind of having to step out in front of cars and challenge them. Like, ‘Are you going to run us over or not?’” Goetz says.

Mornings are OK, but evenings are bad. That’s when Goetz says people, driving like race-car drivers, are “literally racing home” and it’s “absolutely prohibitive” to cross the street.

She fears for the safety of her young daughter Samantha and the old lady and tiny Chihuaha she sees trying to cross the street.

Although Goetz admits there are breaks in traffic, she says most drivers simply don’t slow down for her family or other walkers.

A crosswalk would help, Goetz says. The four-way intersection of Wells and South Fourth Street doesn’t have any of those white painted lines to guide pedestrians across the street. Just a block west, there’s a crosswalk, on Williams Avenue South, but only across one of the intersection’s legs. And not the leg Goetz could use to get into Renton’s downtown heart.

To solve her pedestrian woes, Goetz asked the City of Renton to put in crosswalks at those two intersections: South Fourth Street and Williams Avenue South and South Fourth Street and Wells Avenue South. She also asked for stop signs on Wells Avenue South and South Fourth Street and lane lines on Wells Avenue South.

But crosswalks were her highest priority.

It took a while, but the city answered Goetz with a letter denying her requests.

The author of the letter, Chris Barnes, transportation operations manager, says the crosswalks, stop signs and lane lines Goetz requested simply aren’t justified, according to the rules and guidelines defined in his bible, the “Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices.” All U.S. cities and traffic engineers must follow that manual’s instructions, Barnes says.

To justify a crosswalk, those instructions require a score of at least 16 out of 28. That total includes a ratio of pedestrians, cars and gaps in traffic. A recent city count on Wells and Fourth during a noontime hour scored only four points. And Barnes says that intersection had at least one traffic gap each minute.

As for Williams and Fourth, that intersection is already controlled by the crosswalk that runs on the north leg of Williams, and a three-way stop. Barnes says stop signs are the best pedestrian protection.

To justify a stop sign, the manual requires 300 cars an hour for eight hours on a major road and 200 cars an hour for eight hours on a minor road. Barnes says South Fourth Street meets the major-road car requirement, but Wells doesn’t, thus that intersection doesn’t get stop signs.

Goetz also wanted lane lines on Wells Avenue South. That one-way street breaks into two lanes just before the intersection at South Fourth, which Goetz says results in “perpetually confused people.” One of those lanes is for left turns and one for straight or right turns.

She wants those two lanes to extend down the entire street. Barnes says the residential street is too narrow for two lanes, and the traffic is so minimal it’s “not any volume to speak of.” Posted signs indicate the lane separation.

Goetz says she understands her requests would take time and money, but says she “was just floored” at the city’s reponse to her call.

Barnes holds firm that Goetz’s suggestions are not justified, either by the numbers of car and pedestrian traffic or collisions at those intersections. He says there have not been any pedestrian accidents at those intersections.

Barnes also says that all intersections are crosswalks, whether or not they are painted with white lines. Drivers are required to stop for pedestrians at these unmarked crosswalks, he says.

In addition to going against the traffic manual’s requirements, Barnes says unjustified crosswalks are dangerous and sometimes have to be painted over. These unwarranted crosswalks create a false sense of security, he says.

“The citizen gets an idea they can just step out in the crosswalk and expect someone to stop and we’ve found they cause more accidents than when a crosswalk is not there,” he says.

Goetz’s rebuttal? “If crosswalks are such a problem, perhaps we should uninstall them in front of schools. I’d hate for children to have a false sense of security, too.”

Goetz’s request is only one of the three to five traffic requests Barnes and his team receive each day. But they receive about one request a year about the downtown area that concerns Goetz.

Barnes and his team investigate each of these citizen requests, often conducting traffic and pedestrian studies and looking into accident histories.

“We do take action when we can,” he says. “When we see the need.”

He and his team didn’t see the need to fulfill Goetz’s requests, so for now she’ll simply have to continue charging into the streets and hoping drivers let her cross.

“To me it’s bigger than just crossing the street,” she says. “This is something that bothers me about our culture. It bothers me that the car is king.”

And, she asks, without her requested crosswalks and stop signs, is Renton a pedestrian friendly downtown?

As long as pedestrians make eye contact and use common sense and logic, Barnes says her answer is yes.