Who to blame - the drivers or the roads?

BY TOM MCGINTY | tom.mcginty@newsday.com

August 5, 2007

Which deserves the blame -- the road or the drivers?

When it comes to crash-prone roads and intersections, it rarely comes down to an either or proposition, and finding answers can be like unraveling a mystery, says Richard Retting, senior traffic engineer of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

"Even on some of the worst roads, the vast majority of drivers traverse them without getting into a crash," Retting said. "If the road itself was completely to blame, then virtually every driver passing by would be in a crash."

Traffic engineers, Retting said, need to work accident scenes like detectives work crime scenes, "putting together a pattern of events that are linked" and thinking of their jobs as at least as important as solving crimes.

In their newest report on high-accident locations on state roads, engineers with the New York State Department of Transportation found 363 spots on Long Island where accident rates exceeded statewide averages.

The lists are starting points, alerting engineers about where they need to concentrate their attention, said Frank Pearson, the DOT's lead traffic engineer for Long Island. From there, they pour over police reports to identify what kind of crashes are occurring, solicit input from police and the community, and go out into the field to observe how drivers interact with the roads and intersections, he said.

State statistics culled from police reports say human factors at least partially contributed to 87 percent of the crashes on Long Island in 2004. But if the bad habits and driver errors that contributed to that figure presumably occur everywhere on the Island, why do the high-accident locations stand out?

Experts say the crash-prone segments and intersections just don't have as much of a safety cushion as other roads. Christopher Monk, a George Mason University professor of human factors psychology compared the sharp curves, steep hills and short ramps of the Southern State Parkway with the wider and straighter Long Island Expressway.

The LIE, Monk said, "is more tolerant of variations in speed or whatever. You can get away with more, so to speak. A less forgiving road is going to have less room for driving error and distraction."

Police and transportation officials try to deal with human mistakes and bad habits through educational initiatives and the enforcement of traffic laws. Engineers try to reconfigure the roadway to accommodate driver error without causing an accident, said Jeff Lindley, associate administrator for safety at the Federal Highway Administration.

"The reason that a vehicle left the roadway might be that the driver was speeding, it might be they were inattentive, they might have been impaired," Lindley said "But if we improve the roadway and the roadside, even if the driver is engaging in driver behavior that they shouldn't, it gives them a better opportunity to either not make or correct an error that might be a momentary lapse in judgment."

Retting said those who blame crashes completely on drivers "don't have a deep enough understanding of roadway design" and how, despite human behavior, crashes can be prevented.

"Human factors include the humans who run the roadway system and designed it," he said. "From that standpoint, you could say it's 100 percent human factors [that cause crashes]. The fact is we have built a roadway system that could be much safer."

Monk said the kind of human factors that crop up in crowded locales like Long Island can be the most difficult to solve.

He described a scenario where a driver at a stop sign on a small side street wants to turn onto a teeming thoroughfare like Hempstead Turnpike. Before long, the driver becomes impatient with the constant stream of vehicles and takes a risk, darting out into a small opening. If it works once, the driver will try it again and again, eventually becoming inured to the risk.

"Just by the numbers, eventually he's going to get nailed," Monk said. "Those are the really challenging ones to fix, and they tend to be in the older sections that are built up. You can't put a light at every cross street, and people are going to make poor decisions about when to go."