Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009

NCDOT misses the point

Let me see if I have this right: Narrow, undetectable gaps in bridges people fall to their deaths from after car wrecks are not the problem. Good Samaritans are.

So says your state Department of Transportation. Instead of closing the gaps on bridges it studied, the agency plans to teach motorists to rescue others more safely.

It can't hurt to urge good Samaritans to be safer if they decide to get out of their cars after a wreck.

Since 2000, 21 of them have been killed and 73 injured on North Carolina's highways.

And three other bridges have had accidents like the one last month that took the life of Lee Eames Jr., who stopped on a Beltline span over Crabtree Creek to help wreck victims, a recent DOT review found.

But the DOT's self-exonerating logic sure seems faulty.

For one thing, people aren't likely to abandon their valiant good-Samaritan instinct.

For another, the DOT took several weeks of detailed study to conclude what everyone could have stipulated at the outset: It's unusual for people to fall fatally from bridges.

Well, yes. It's also quite rare for airplanes to crash. And?

The correct question is whether some bridges have a correctable design flaw that causes unnecessary deaths.

The answer, at least on the Beltline, seems to be yes.

They are those parallel bridges with gaps so narrow that, especially at night, they're impossible for wreck victims or good Samaritans to see.

If they have to jump out of the way of an oncoming car, they go sailing over the side barrier, presumably expecting to land on concrete, not air. They perceive median barriers you could hop over, not plunge to your death from.

The DOT saw no problem on the Crabtree bridge until good Samaritan Todd Fletcher fell fatally there in 2005. Two years later, it put up a fence, but only on that side.

Now that Eames has died on the other side, the DOT plans to install a fence there, too.

Nevertheless, the DOT's review concluded that the bridge and similar ones "do not pose a significant risk to persons."

For the DOT, apparently a significant risk doesn't exist until someone dies, if then.

What, then, is the purpose of putting up a second fence at the "safe" Beltline bridge?

And why not install fences on the two other Beltline bridges with narrow center gaps? On the hopeful theory that anyone who mistakenly fell from them would survive with broken legs or quadriplegia?

If the state won't fix those bridges, Raleigh should.

Meanwhile, here's what the DOT recommends people do if they have to get out of their car after a wreck: "Make sure you are on the opposite side of any barriers so that any car coming will not reach you."

Just like Eames and Fletcher did. That's killer advice.