THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601200138
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Kevin Armstrong
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
I remember vividly a map that adorned a local traffic engineer's office several years ago. It was dotted with colored push pins.
Each one represented the site of a vehicular accident, and the various colors indicated whether the crash involved injury or death.
The map was, you might say, a work in progress.
It offered stark evidence of the growing problems that motorists were encountering on this particular city's roadways.
You couldn't help but notice where several pins were bunched tightly together. These were the ``trouble spots'' that engineers had quite literally pin-pointed through their data collection technique.
It was quite effective.
Virginia Beach planners use a different approach: a computer program.
Either way, it doesn't take Richard Petty's road knowledge to figure out what needs fixing.
In Virginia Beach, Shore Drive has become the city's ``suicide strip.''
At first glance, it's hard to imagine why a strip of asphalt cut through a state forest could pose such a hazard for motorists.
Shore Drive affords a brief but tranquil respite from the usual pit row that marks so many commercial thoroughfares in this town.
But the numbers tell a sobering story.
Using push pins on a map, the 3.2-mile stretch from 83rd Street to the Fort Story entrance wouldn't have room to contain all the dots. Between 1991 and 1994, 83 accidents were recorded there. Ten involved fatalities totaling 19 lives.
It was a statistic traffic engineers couldn't ignore.
Further study uncovered a lot of misconceptions. It found that of the 83 recorded accidents:
19 percent involved speeding.
38 percent involved alcohol.
64 percent involved tree collisions.
Engineers reported that beyond alcohol and speeding, certain characteristics of the road contributed to accidents.
``Two of the major features of reported accidents appear to be the relative inability of vehicles to recover control once they run off the paved roadway and the large number of accidents involving collision with trees,'' the study states.
It's no wonder then that engineers recommend paving the shoulders along both edges of each roadway, carving rumble strips in this added width and installing guardrails where deep ditches exist.
This requires eliminating some trees.
It also means standing up to hard-core environmentalists.
The protests already have begun, as letters on this page attest.
What these opponents don't seem to recognize is that if this road were built today, all trees would have to be cut back 24 feet from the road.
Currently, those trees stand 10 to 12 feet from the pavement's edge in many spots. Engineers recommend trimming them back to be consistently 15 feet from the road. That would amount to axing 342 trees on the westbound side, and three on the eastbound.
That hardly seems unreasonable when experts say that the extra margin available for correcting a driver's error could be the difference between life and death.
But what about the $1 million cost of constructing this?
Engineers have an answer for that, too.
Construction on the first phase, which involves improving the westbound shoulder, would be covered by a $550,000 federal grant designed to eliminate traffic hazards. That money already has been dedicated to the city.
The second phase, improving the eastbound hazards, also could be financed using federal money. Engineers expect to apply this summer for another grant to cover that.
The City Council must sign off on the engineers' recommendations before anything can be done.
Let's hope our city leaders have the sense to put the lives of humans before trees. After all, people vote, pines don't. by CNB