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Published on Wednesday, November 24, 2004
in the Orlando Sentinel
The Florida Highway Patrol and the Orange County Sheriff's Office are beefing up patrols on Colonial Drive, Central Florida's deadliest road.
The FHP is permanently reassigning nine troopers who normally patrol freeways to spend a couple of days a week going after speeders and aggressive drivers on Colonial, said Kim Miller, spokeswoman for the patrol.
Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary is reassigning a 26-unit motorcycle patrol to deal with East Colonial, school-crossing zones and other targeted dangerous roads at least through the holiday season. Beary might also pull deputies from other sectors to help.
The crackdown comes after an Orlando Sentinel report this week revealed Colonial through Orange County is the 12th-deadliest road in the nation. It is most dangerous for pedestrians and for motorists trying to turn left or cross Colonial, the Sentinel found.
Beary said the critical need for stronger enforcement against speeders, aggressive driving and red-light running was made apparent by the Sentinel stories -- and by recent crashes that killed two young children on Goldenrod Road and injured two area school-crossing guards.
"We are really cracking down on school zones. As soon as school zones are over, we'll be wailing on East Colonial," Beary said. "That's a prime target right now."
Beary also is talking to other local police agencies to crack down countywide through New Year's Day. After that, he called for long-term help for improving safety on Colonial and other deadly roads.
"We've got to change something long-term," he said. "Right now there's too many people getting hurt."
The FHP changes will continue beyond the holidays.
"We welcome the sheriff's department's help. It's got to be a group effort," Miller said. "Hopefully, we'll prevent some crashes, so some of the officers will be able to spend more time on traffic enforcement."
The Sentinel also reported that Colonial and several other roads in Central Florida are two or three times more dangerous than freeways.
Long-term fixes
Experts say some of the best long-term ways to save lives on multilane urban highways such as Colonial Drive in Orange County are to get rid of the center turn lanes, dubbed "suicide lanes," and add median islands, and install street lighting.
The Florida Department of Transportation will make the median and street-lighting fixes when it rebuilds about 121/2 miles of Colonial Drive later this decade. It is already fixing dangerous portions of other roads, such as State Road 5A through Volusia County, U.S. Highway 441 through Lake County and U.S. 192 in Osceola County.
Typically, it can take a decade or more for road-improvement projects to get from conception to completion.
"It's a simple matter of money," FDOT spokesman Steve Homan said. "You set priorities. You'll have a list of 20 priorities, and you'll have the money to fund maybe two of them. That's just the way it is. You'll get there eventually."
But some of Central Florida's roads are so dangerous that FDOT officials dipped into an emergency pot of money to get them fixed more quickly.
When Osceola officials complained loudly a few years ago about all the deadly crashes on U.S. 192, local DOT officials decided to use $2.3 million of the emergency safety money for a three-mile median project there. Work began earlier this year and should be finished next year.
Then, recognizing the same problems on S.R. 5A, they put $800,000 in safety money to add medians there. That project also should be finished next year.
Improvements also are coming for another of Central Florida's deadliest roads, S.R. 60 in Osceola County. With 23 fatal accidents in six years, that road has the highest rate of deaths per mile for traffic in Central Florida. That road will be widened to four lanes from Yeehaw Junction and through Indian River County.
Improvements for Colonial, the deadliest road in Central Florida, with 144 deaths since 1998, have been discussed since the 1970s, with only a few stretches improved since then. More work should begin within three or four years.
For those who know the dangers well, such as police and the FHP, the safety problems scream for attention.
"What would you think if 140 people were murdered there with a gun? People would be outraged," said Miller of the FHP. "But because you're in a car, people say, 'Oh, crashes happen every day.' "
On Colonial, state plans will widen a few segments to six lanes, replace the suicide lanes with median islands, limit left-turn openings to one every eighth of a mile and limit full intersections to one every quarter-mile. Some side streets will be closed off at Colonial, and some business driveways will be combined.
The parts of Colonial to be improved include the road's deadliest stretch, roughly 3.6 miles from Semoran Boulevard (S.R. 436) to the Central Florida GreeneWay (S.R. 417.)
At the same time, similar work will be done on West Colonial between Hancock Road in Lake County and Florida's Turnpike near Oakland, and between Good Homes and Pine Hills roads. The price tag: $157 million.
But Florida has no money yet to improve an additional 13 miles of Colonial targeted for similar improvements, including other stretches with suicide lanes, such as through Ocoee and Winter Garden.
Medians are No. 1 goal
The primary goal for many of the road improvements is to install median barriers that will eliminate suicide lanes by police and safety advocates.
"We've been doing everything we can to get median barriers in everywhere we can," said Gary Sokolow, transportation-systems planning engineer for the Florida Department of Transportation.
Without the median barriers, people turn left anywhere to get to and from side streets and driveways. That makes their vehicles targets for oncoming traffic that they either didn't see or misjudged.
Traffic-safety studies a decade ago were so convincing that medians save lives that Florida became the first state in the country in 1993 to require them and ban suicide lanes in all new construction.
"Where they went to a raised median with a four-to-six lane road, the accidents dropped dramatically, 40 to 60 percent. And the severity of the crashes wasn't so bad," said Bill Eisele, associate research engineer at the Texas Transportation Institute.
Raised medians could have made a difference in crashes that killed Arthur "Manny" Zamorano , Yull A. Toro and Jayson L. Echevarria. The state plans to install raised medians along the stretch where they died, at Old Cheney Highway east of Semoran Boulevard.
Zamorano, 31, was driving his motorcycle west on Colonial Drive in October 2002. He was on his way to get a haircut when a truck pulled out from Old Cheney to cross Colonial. Zamorano's motorcycle slammed into the truck.
He left behind a wife and two small children.Twenty months later, Toro, 28, and Echevarria, 23, riding their motorcycles side by side, died in an almost identical accident at the same spot, just a few feet from a "Drive Safely" sign that Erica Zamorano had installed in her husband's memory.
"It's good to know they're going to take action and actually do something about it," Erica Zamorano said. "But it's a touchy subject. I try not to think about the accident itself. It's too painful."
Experts say street lighting also is essential to saving lives, especially on roads -- such as Colonial -- with a lot pedestrian deaths. The Colonial project will include new street lighting.
Throughout Central Florida's seven counties, 678 pedestrians and bicyclists were killed from 1998 to 2003, according to federal records. Nearly three-quarters of them were struck at night. And most of them were hit where there was no street lighting. On Colonial, 61 pedestrians have died since the start of 1998, 50 at night, dusk or dawn.
Roadwork could add danger
But widening Colonial and other roads from four lanes to six lanes might add more danger.
Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Ron Behnke, who oversees the traffic-fatality squad for Central Florida, worries that a wider, freer-flowing Colonial will mean an even faster road. And more lanes mean more weaving and a wider roadway for drivers and pedestrians to cross, which could add to the accident total.
FDOT officials suspect that might be true. To find out, the department is beginning a study to see whether adding lanes increases a highway's danger.
Road officials generally dismiss speed as something they can't do much about.
Transportation engineers say motorists will drive the safest "natural" speed a highway permits, regardless of what the speed-limit signs say. And there are no easy ways to slow down a road's natural speed, they say.
"We can post the road [speed limit] whatever we want. But people are going to drive at speeds they feel appropriate," said Patrick Brady, FDOT's transportation-safety engineer.
For roads such as Colonial, the goal is to move as many commuters and as much commerce as quickly as possible.
"Traffic calming is not an option," said Anthony Nosse, transportation-safety engineer for FDOT's District 5. "We've got to move goods and services. You've got to move traffic."
Many studies have shown that lowering speed limits has little impact on reducing the number of crashes. Speed-caused accidents happen because of the speed difference between regular traffic flow and the speeder. So someone driving 50 mph in a 35 zone is about as likely to cause an accident as someone driving 70 mph in a 55 zone.
But some critics say that misses a key point. Crashes involving people driving 70 mph or faster are more likely to kill someone.
Jackie Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, said 45 mph is too fast for busy urban highways, where vehicles or pedestrians frequently pop out unexpectedly. And people driving even faster assure a high death rate, she said.
"One of the premises of highway safety is just because you make a mistake doesn't mean you have to die from that mistake," Gillan said.