The July 4 death of Sharon Miller, a retired Sherman, Ill. teacher here for an education conference, cast a pall over a relatively safe holiday weekend in the city. The Illinois Education Association activist, 60, was riding with a friend in a pedi-cab on the Martin Luther King Promenade — an area near the Convention Center in which pedi-cabs are prohibited — when she fell out of the vehicle and hit her head on the pavement following what police call an “unsafe movement” by the driver. She was declared brain-dead on Sunday, July 5 and was kept on life support pending organ donation. Prosecutors have so far declined to file charges against the driver, 23-year-old Turkish national Sukru Safa Cinar, who arrived in the U.S. June 18 on a four-month work visa. He had leased the vehicle from Shakespeare Pedicab of San Diego. Meanwhile, the case has prompted a wave of concern by members of City Council, who on July 28 passed regulations banning the three-wheeled taxis from sidewalks and from streets with speed limits greater than 25 miles per hour. They would also cap the number of pedi-cabs at 250, require drivers to carry proof of insurance and limit the number of the vehicles in high-traffic areas. Council has also said this isn’t the end of the matter. Better too late than never. The thing is, those proposals were drafted more than a year ago amid a proliferation of pedi-cabs and the lack of controls that followed. In 2008, the city issued 643 pedi-cab operator permits, nearly 400 more than the pending regulation would allow. And as Petco Park opened in 2004, the city OK’d an ordinance allowing pedi-cabbies to operate before and after Padres games on Island Avenue but not on nearby Market Street — yet the city’s Event Traffic Management Plan reportedly suggests that the cabs can use Market but not Island. This lack of control is legendary in a city that began to regulate its pedi-cab industry through its municipal code, the Port of San Diego and the San Diego Harbor Police, apparently without much conviction, all the way back in 2000. Five years later, when it acknowledged in a report that “There are currently too many jurisdictions regulating pedi-cabs, with different operating rules, fees and requirements,” the city was set to transfer oversight to the Metropolitan Transit System — a transfer that never materialized. And currently, operators aren’t even required to have a California driver’s license, the standard ID in everyday city life. Council’s latest action transpired almost a month after Miller’s death and nearly seven months since the last election year ended (presumably, the new regs weren’t terribly vital talking points during the campaigns). Meanwhile, Miller’s widower Gary, a director of the National Education Association’s Illinois chapter, is left to fend for himself amid the free-for-all that ensues in an industry desperately out of kilter with its peaceful urban surrounding. In late 2008, a Connecticut man celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary died in Seattle when the pedi-cab in which he and his wife were riding met up with a van and a scooter (the pedi-cab driver ran a red light). Two months ago, three passengers and a driver were injured when the latter’s pedi-cab, reportedly traveling down an especially steep slope, slammed into an oncoming taxi on Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge (according to one witness, the vehicle’s front wheel was “embedded” in the driver’s face). Both cities have jumped hard on the upshot, with promises of beefed-up regulations on all fronts. Let’s hope they make good on their declarations — and above all, let’s trust that San Diego will lead the way. — Martin Jones Westlin is the editor of San Diego Downtown News, a sister publication of the Village News.