Peeks We Can Fix This The writer knows from unfortunate personal experience the toll in human suffering that a poorly designed road can extract. He also knows that designs can be fixed. It’s time to do something for our Vasco problem. March 2007

by Jim Frazier

On December 16, 2000 our beautiful daughter, Stephanie, died from injuries received in an accident on Highway 50 just east of Placerville, California. We learned that an oncoming car had hit a patch of black ice and, with no barriers between the lanes, slid across the centerline, and collided head-on with our daughter’s car.

It was a horrific accident! Her 17-year-old sister, Lindsey, was in critical condition with massive internal injuries, broken ribs, and a fractured back. Stephanie’s boyfriend spent the next several weeks in a coma, and a fourth passenger was seriously injured. The wife of the driver of the other car died, and his two children were seriously injured, as well.

Fixing the Problem

Part of our healing came from working with Senator Tom Torlakson and his staff to get Caltrans to install a median barrier in the area of the accident. We hired our own highway safety specialist to do an analysis and discovered that over the past 14 years 142 accidents had occurred at that scene and a majority were caused by crossover collisions during winter conditions. The state maintains a grim standard called Death By Mile and that portion of Highway 50 had met and exceeded the threshold required to get Caltrans’ attention. But they did nothing until we forced them into action.

We enlisted the aid of Senator Torlakson. It was the first time in our lives that we ever asked assistance of any kind from a politician, and we were impressed by the quality of the help we received from the senator and his staff members, Gloria Omania and Robert Oakes. I was as pleased with the support we received from the senator as I was annoyed by the initial lack of action on the part of Caltrans.

We discovered that working with a large bureaucracy like this is like walking in mud with a load on your back. We engaged in a two-year battle with Caltrans to fix that stretch of highway so that others wouldn’t have to endure the agony of my wife and I, not to mention the families of the seven other people who had died during the 14 years before our daughter’s death. We ultimately filed our highway safety report with Will Kempton, the director of Caltrans. After his review many of our recommended changes were implemented to that two-mile stretch of highway.

A new traffic collision report will be issued in May to document how effectively the modifications worked in saving people’s lives during the year that has elapsed since the changes were made.

History of Failure

In the course of doing the research and working with the highway specialist that I hired, I learned a lot about highway safety in general, and about median barriers, in particular. After our success with Highway 50, I was approached by Senator Torlakson to help with the process of making changes on Vasco Road. I conducted research on the Internet and in the archives of oneten Magazine.

Oneten Magazine has done a number of these articles. In the January 2005 issue, then Brentwood Vice Mayor, Annette Beckstrand, recounted the failures of the county to address the issue of the roadway. She told how in 2004 the City of Brentwood offered to loan the county money that, based upon the city’s engineering studies, would be sufficient for installing temporary barriers in the most dangerous sections of the road.

Rather than actually taking action, the county began to carry out its own research and to moderate a series of discussions. Plus they put a Vasco Road Taskforce together including citizen activists, Jeff Altman and Joann Flynn. The county then took the additional step of hiring Nolte Associates to make yet another study. Annette said that the Nolte report missed the point completely, which was figuring out a way to save lives right now. Instead they put together a plan for the ultimate improvement of the roadway, bringing it up to Caltrans standards.

The report estimated the improvements would cost $600 million. No $600 million is available to bring the roadway up to the Caltrans standards. The county ignored the point that the goal was to minimize fatal accidents by preventing aggressive or careless drivers from threatening the lives of innocent people.

Annette and other council members were frustrated by the county’s inertia in this matter because if the county had simply spent the money on implementing the plan, the result would have been a barrier that would have eliminated the deadly crossover accidents that subsequently continued to plague the road.

Annette wrote:

“I was incensed that the county should have warped the goal to such an extent. By commissioning this expensive and detailed report, they excused themselves from the need to implement the realistic improvements that would have saved lives in the short-term.”

Annette pointed out that bureaucrats and politicians all face the temptation to regard the holding of endless meetings and conducting numerous studies to be the content of the job they were elected or appointed to do. They should be solving problems that their constituents are facing rather than give the impression of working on those problems through endless discussions about them.

Someone once said that the county government will often institute a task force or conduct a research study in order to avoid actually doing anything — in this case actually erecting the traffic barriers that we need so much.

We’re trying to talk to death issues that become life-and-death matters in the blink of an eye. Annette pointed out that people don’t die by themselves. Each death touches the lives of any widows or widowers left behind, children left orphaned, and grandchildren left bereft. Who knows how many lives might be affected by one single, terrible moment? The county’s only response to the report from Nolte and Associates was to implement a quick “band aid” fix by adding rumble strips and delineator poles to the three passing lane sections. However, these don’t prevent people from crossing into the oncoming lane of traffic when they lose control of their vehicles, which is the main reason for the awful head-on crashes. As a result, during the years since the delineators and rumble strips were installed there have been several more deaths due to crossover accidents. The cars “cross over” the rumble strips and delineators as though they aren’t there.

Under Senator Torlakson’s prompting, the state has taken the recent step of making Vasco a double-fine roadway.

The long-term fix is to widen Vasco to four lanes with a median barrier. Vasco Road was built ten years ago for $36 million. To increase it to four lanes would require a new environmental impact report leading to a total cost of $600 million, which is hopeless at this time!

Senator Torlakson invited me to address one of his Subcommittee Meetings and to speak about the importance of making changes to the roadway. He was horrified by what he could see was the lack of initiative on the part of County staff. All I had ever heard from them was, “We don’t have the money.” There was no attempt to behave in a proactive fashion in identifying resources and needs in creating an effective life-saving solution.

Fixing the Problem

I have a suggestion that would efficiently and effectively provide a short-term solution to our problem by modifying the areas where accidents are at the highest concentration. These include the three stretches of roadway in Contra Costa County that have lengthy uphill grades. The grades are dangerous because trucks are forced to use lower gears. As their speed falls, overtaking motorists become frustrated and anxious, which leads to the dangerous passing situations.

My suggested solution has two parts: One is to replace the third lane in each of these stretches with a median barrier. That would satisfy all the distances required by Caltrans specifications, such as mandatory sight-lines, emergency vehicle passing, etcetera.

The second part of my suggested solution would restrict big rigs from the roadway on weekdays between the hours of 5 and 8 a.m. in the southbound lanes and between 3 and 7 p.m. in the northbound lanes. This would effectively eliminate the need to get around the slow-moving trucks during high-density traffic situations.

This recommendation would not require another environmental impact report since alterations would be within current road boundaries. Bypassing environmental impact requirements would be a huge saving in time and money.

The most suitable median barriers for our needs would cost about a million dollars a mile, reducing the entire cost to less than ten million dollars. My idea could save lives. But this will never happen unless citizens join together behind this effort.

I think there is a will on the part of the stakeholders to help stop the Vasco Road carnage. Brentwood Mayor, Bob Taylor, expressed the attitude of a lot of us, I think, when he told me, “I would do anything; talk to anybody, go anywhere to fix the problem on that road.”

Assemblyman Guy Houston wrote,

“I’m currently working with state and county officials to expedite funding and to eliminate red tape to put concrete median barriers in place. I agree that the rumble strips and vertical delineators are a ‘band-aid’ fix. In the meantime, I encourage everyone who travels Vasco Road to drive the speed limit and not to make unsafe lane changes.”

Even the county has a will to do the right thing. County Supervisor Mary Piepho wrote,

“Vasco has always been a top priority for me, and believe it or not, it is with the county too. My view is more direct and passionate than county staff, but that can be expected. I assure you, while activity may not be visible from the public’s perspective, we are very actively working on the issue inside and out.”

I’m a little frustrated by the way the county carries out these kinds of deliberations in the dark with no periodic reporting of progress to people who would like to be informed about what is happening. We come to believe that they are inactive because they don’t advertise their actions. We also suspect that they don’t want to talk about their plans because of how seldom they actually turn plans into action.

Mary added,

“We have a huge buy-in with Assemblyman Guy Houston and Senator Torlakson. They are both working on relieving the environmental review study applications so any proposal we bring forth can move quickly and not be bogged down by tiresome and endless studies and comment periods.”

Let’s applaud Mary’s last comment — and keep prodding our representatives to actually address the issues. We need to work together.

We can fix this. So let’s do it!