THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512200450
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Short : 42 lines
The deadliest section of road in Virginia may soon get a little safer.
The City Council decided Tuesday to spend $1 million making improvements to the wooded stretch of road that has claimed 59 lives since 1977.
Drunken and inattentive driving, trees and soft shoulders are the main culprits along the 3.2 miles of Shore Drive, an engineering consultant told the council Tuesday.
There's no way to design a road safe for drunken drivers, but adding a shoulder will give careless drivers a chance to regain control before it's too late, Lawrence Gassman, vice president of Larsen Engineers Inc., told the council.
Gassman also said the city can reduce the risk of accidents by cutting down 345 trees close enough to the road to endanger motorists who lose control.
His recommendations also include: asking the police to aggressively enforce the 55 mph speed limit; adding guard rails where the shoulders are steep or slope into a ditch; adding a rumble strip to alert drivers in danger of running off the road; and repaving sections to eliminate uneven patches of pavement.
Those recommendations would cost just over $1 million. Work could start soon but could take several years if the recommendations are phased in, as the engineer suggested.
Council member Robert K. Dean, an environmentalist, said Tuesday he wasn't sure he could support cutting down trees to save drunken drivers from themselves. But he did not object to the direction the other council members gave to the city manager to draw up a specific proposal for the road work.
``If we are aware of an engineering change we can make. . . we shouldn't hesitate for any length of time,'' council member Barbara M. Henley concluded.
KEYWORDS: SHORE DRIVE by CNB