Jill Sack sees a lot of close calls. Sack, 25, works as a barista at the Marysville Starbucks, where storefront windows look out on to a pedestrian's nightmare: Ninth and C streets — otherwise known as Highways 20/70.

"There are a lot of people who cross here," says Sack. "We're so worried about them. This is a really, really busy street."

According to a recently completed Pedestrian Safety, Mobility & Context Improvement Study, the city of Marysville would do well to install a two-stage crossing system at the treacherous "T" intersection.

The study's authors call the currently existing situation there, "a legal, though unmarked crosswalk."

A dozen other pedestrian hot spots were targeted along Highways 20/70 in Marysville for improvements.

The $98,000 study, headed by the Sacramento nonprofit Local Government Commission, was funded through an $89,000 Caltrans grant and roughly $9,000 in city money.

Recommendations incorporate feedback from focus groups and community workshops conducted in May and June 2007. They include the addition of street markings, pedestrian countdown clocks, adjustments to signal timing and pedestrian access that adheres to Americans with Disabilities Act standards.

The authors also recommend the construction of two roundabouts.

A single-lane traffic circle, according to authors of the study, would help ease traffic flow at B and 14th streets, and improve pedestrian safety.

The intersection at E and Ninth streets, among the city's biggest traffic problems, might be best served by a roundabout with two lanes north and south of E Street, according to the study.

Such dramatic changes, says Anthony Leonard, the study's project manager, will be a long way off, if they are considered seriously at all.

"You can't do anything without Caltrans," he says.

In the meantime, smaller, less expensive improvements can be made.

"What you did along D Street," says Leonard, "creates an environment that people want to be in."

Better pedestrian markings and clear parking lanes along E Street, Leonard says, will help draw foot traffic into the city, and hopefully, encourage more businesses to move in along the corridor that heads north into Marysville.

Currently, E Street, "seems like it's dividing Marysville," he says. "It's just pushing traffic through, and there's not a lot of incentive to develop the properties there."

As for the situation in front of Starbucks, the report's authors point out that changes were never made to accommodate pedestrian traffic when the strip mall — and another one, directly across Ninth Street at Ellis Lake — were developed in recent years.

"Right now, people are having to just run across the street there," Leonard says.

Cars and gravel trucks thunder past in either direction all day long, Sack says.

On Tuesday morning, she says, a patron had been shaken up by a crossing she witnessed a moment earlier by two kids on bicycles.

"She said, 'Oh my God, those kids just almost got creamed,'" Sack recalls.

Sack herself once tried to cross the street. It scared her enough so she won't do it again.

"If I go over there," she says, "I most likely will drive."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Nancy Pasternack at 749-4712 or at npasternack@appealdemocrat.com