“Drive defensively” and “Watch out for the other guy” are just as relevant today as they were on television public service ads that began airing as a sort of novel approach to highway survival decades ago. Those catchy phrases might be even more foreboding now, in the 21st century. As serious traffic accidents and residual backups have become commonplace, the defensive driver must be increasingly on the lookout for “offensive” ones—those who seem brazenly in hot pursuit of saving a few minutes’ drive time by taking risky chances, or the rising occurrence of substance abusers who insist on driving while impaired.
In June of last year, a website called bestlifeonline identified the 30 most dangerous roads in America, and the one in Maryland came in at number 30: Interstate 97—with 0.79 fatalities per mile on a stretch 17.62 miles long. According to 24/7 Wall Street, which listed the 2016 motor vehicle death rates in each state, Maryland ranked 43rd. Even though that statistic may be misleading because of this state’s relatively small size, what’s so bad about being 43rd out of 50?
Going the Wrong Way—Still
“What’s so bad” are wrong-way crashes on major highways, which rarely, if ever, end well. And it’s just recently happened again in Central Maryland. The difference this time was that it wasn’t on the roads that already were the scenes of a previous spate of horrendous wrong-way accidents.
According to various news reports from Baltimore and Annapolis, at around 2 a.m. on February 16, the driver of a Ford pickup truck traveling westbound in the eastbound lanes of Route 32 near Route 198 slammed head-on into an oncoming Toyota Camry and killed its driver, Raymond McCarter Jr., of Bowie, who was pronounced dead at the scene. McCarter was married and the father of two young children.
The driver of the pickup, Glen Burnie resident Christopher Thomas, was not injured in the crash and has been charged with two counts of vehicular manslaughter, two counts of driving under the influence, and one count of driving while impaired. It has become an all-too-familiar and tragic story, and one with no real solution, to date.
Over a span of 18 months through September of last year, six people lost their lives in head-on crashes involving motorists driving the wrong way on Route 50 and I-97, a statistic that has state highway officials trying to figure out why and how people get on limited-access roads going the wrong way into highways and how to prevent it.
The SHA “Solution”
During a presentation on November 14 last year held at Magothy Middle School in Arnold—not far from the scenes of the Route 50 crashes—Kim Trang, deputy engineer for the State Highway Administration (SHA) Fifth District, which includes Annapolis, identified three major factors in the six wrong-way fatalities: alcohol at least playing a partial role in 67 percent (four of the six) “of these kinds of crashes;” the age of the drivers (four of the six from 19–25); and the time of day the accidents occurred (five of the six between 12:30 and 4:30 a.m.). The presentation also noted that four of the six were female, but did not elaborate on how gender might have had any effect on the crashes’ outcomes.
The SHA brief, which is accessible online, presents these statistics and features photographs of what the administration has done to enhance warnings to motorists entering these busy highways. Especially highlighted are additional “Wrong Way” and “Do Not Enter” signs, specifically in daylight and nighttime photos at the intersections of Jennifer Road in Annapolis and Busch’s Frontage and Whitehall roads in Arnold. What the SHA PowerPoint presentation fails to address, however, is the possibility that the real culprit could be the roads themselves and that other warning options could be available.
Shore-Bound Crashes
Another byway that’s seen its share of fatal crashes is Maryland Route 404. The road gets less attention than the highways that merge around Annapolis, in all probability because of its mainly rural character. The two-way 404 was once considered to be a secondary route east to the ocean beaches of Maryland and Delaware, but it’s not called “Shore Road” by locals for nothing. The volume, especially at the beginning and the end of summer weeks, rivals—if not equals—the traffic on Route 50, the more modern of the two highway routes. In fact, as of July 2017 estimates, 23,000 vehicles travel 404 every day.
Shore Road, however, has just recently undergone the last phase of a multimillion-dollar facelift, expanding an 11.3-mile stretch of the highway from Denton to the Route 50 interchange from two opposing lanes to two each way, divided by grass medians. According to the highway administration, this
move was designed to help accommodate any hurricane-evacuation plan, but also to alleviate beach-traffic congestion that’s been blamed for 402 crashes with a total of 12 fatalities between 2005 and 2014.
Not often does one see a memorial erected to commemorate the combined lives of victims who died in traffic accidents on a particular highway. But that’s what happened in 2011 on a patch of land on Orly Road that borders Route 404. Today, motorists so inclined can stop at a circular stone walkway with three benches and specially planted trees overlooked by a flag rustling in the breeze. Afoot are four-by-eight-inch bricks, each with the name of a person who died in an accident on the highway, that were sold for two years at $100 per brick.
The Route 404 Memorial Garden’s Facebook page highlights a quotation from clergyman/philosopher Douglas Horton, who died in 1968, long before large volumes of traffic filled the nation’s byways, and prior to the realization that impaired driving would be a major factor in automobile crashes. Nonetheless, the caretakers of the Memorial Garden thought Rev. Horton’s cautionary quote to be especially appropriate: “Drive slow and enjoy the scenery—drive fast and join the scenery.”
How Problem Roadways Get State Attention
In a statement to What’s Up? Media, Charlie Gischlar, spokesman for the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration (MDOT SHA), emphasizes that the state works “in consultation with its county partners [which] identify capital project needs in their comprehensive planning documents,” he told us. From those, “counties rank their transportation project priorities” in letters submitted to the department. Subsequently, before the end of each year, department leaders visit every county in the state and talk with “local officials and stakeholders about each county’s needs.” All this information combined helps the department “match those priorities with available state resources.”
The recent addition of one lane over the Severn River Bridge on Route 50 and the expansion of the Route 404 stretch from the split at Route 50 to Denton, Gischlar points out, are “two projects made possible thanks to Governor [Larry] Hogan’s unprecedented $1.97 billion in transportation funding announced in June 2015.”
Adding a fourth lane on the eastbound Severn River Bridge, Gischlar says, was meant “to address daily recurring congestion and remove a bottleneck at the east end of the bridge.” He calls this “a great example of practical design solutions at work.” Noting that the stretch is “along one of the busiest corridors in the state of Maryland,” he adds that previous efforts to ease eastbound traffic congestion “ranged in cost up to hundreds of millions of dollars for replacement and would take multiple years to complete.”
Instead, the MDOT SHA “developed a solution within the footprint of the bridge by reconstructing the median area of the deck surface and the barrier between westbound and eastbound traffic, as well as shifting it north. After adding additional bracing to the support’s underneath, crews restriped the surface, creating four eastbound lanes and three westbound lanes.”
The 404 project, Gischler notes, “was a safety project that also relieved congestion. Each project was a model for success in planning, design, and construction and are fully operational for hundreds of thousands of daily highway users.” He added that the separated stretch of the roadway “opened to traffic a year and a half early in November 2017…The widened roadway improves safety and operations and reduces traffic congestion caused by high seasonal peaks in the summer. Construction began in summer 2016 with an expedited design-build contract and innovative partnership with industry partners.”
Move Anne Arundel!
To gain perspective on how Anne Arundel County approaches highway safety, we spoke to Ramond A. Robinson, director of its Transportation Commission. Mr. Robinson was especially eager to share, exclusively to us, the preliminary components of the county’s new as-yet-not-formalized transportation master plan, Move Anne Arundel!
According to the report, the county ranks fifth in the state in the number of motor-vehicle crashes, as well as those involving bicyclists and pedestrians; more than 30 traffic accidents in the county are reported, on average, every day. “More concerning,” the plan emphasizes, “is the high incidence of serious injuries and fatalities in Anne Arundel. Between 2013 and 2017, an average of eight motorists, bicycles, and pedestrians have died on roads in Anne Arundel County.” The report identifies 10 “highly concentrated areas” for such crashes, detailed in the map accompanying this story.
The commission’s infrastructure relationship with the state is partly the product of its input into the development of the county’s annual Priority Letter to MDOT. Commission spokesman Brian Ulrich explained, “The county and the state share information and participate in each other’s planning documents and construction projects as well…The state provides a considerable amount of funding for county infrastructure improvements through grants for biped, transit, etc. Likewise, the county spends money on improving state roadway infrastructure, and the county and the state both operate signals on each other’s rights-of-way and coordinate our individually provided transit services.”
The partnership sounds a bit complicated and not particularly clear-cut, in that “while we usually each maintain our own infrastructure, we often share information and coordinate repair efforts,” Ulrich stated. But he assured us that “neither of our systems would work as well without the other’s partnership.”
At a ribbon-cutting on November 20, 2017 for the redesigned section of Route 404, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan embraces Marie Freeman, whose 10-month old daughter, Brianna, was killed in a car crash on the road in 2000.
County road enhancements are done by the Department of Public Works “during routine maintenance efforts,” major projects are addressed “by the county’s Capital Improvement Program and the budget process,” and operational safety improvements on county roadways “are handled by the Department of Public Works, primarily through the Traffic Engineering Division,” Ulrich delineated. What are deemed “major improvements” are addressed primarily by way of the aforementioned Priority Letter to the state.
According to Ulrich, “priorities are made by each contributing department, and then a subcommittee reviews the proposal and makes recommendations, which are then reviewed by the administration.” Those priorities are then addressed by a “draft Capital Improvement Program,” which passes through a Planning Board and the general public “for comment and review” before going to a County Council vote. “The development of the operating budget,” Ulrich asserts, “follows a similar, but slightly different, process.”
A “Smart” Approach?
An article by phys.org posted in October last year details “innovative traffic research” conducted by Florida State University, “incorporating a fascinating mix of engineering and psychology” that is already “being deployed to save lives by targeting a deadly problem: wrong-way driving crashes.” According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, such accidents kill approximately 350 people a year and injure thousands.
What Dr. Walter R. “Wally” Boot, an associate professor of psychology at Florida State University and director of the university’s “Attention and Training Lab,” has identified in his research is “smarter signs and pavement markers equipped with advanced technology that can improve safety.” The “smartness” comes in the form of “radar-triggered road alerts to determine which worked best,” Boot says. “The evidence we collected suggested these detection-triggered countermeasures will be more effective than traditional wrong-way countermeasures.”
Boot has been working on this project since 2014, when the Florida State Department of Transportation contracted him to collect evidence after a series of wrong-way accidents in the Tampa Bay area. An expert on cognition and perception and author of the book, Video Games as Tools to Achieve Insight into Cognitive Processes, Dr. Boot had had an epiphany of sorts. We caught up with him recently to talk about his potentially game-changing efforts to reverse, or at least deter, the increasing incidence of wrong-way crashes on busy divided highways.
“Human Factors”
“My expertise is in human factors, or evaluating how humans and complex systems interact,” Boot says. He employed that discipline in evaluating “how systems, including roadways, might be better designed to match the abilities of system users.” This led to his interest in wrong-way crashes. “Our research has found that additional cues, [including] extra markings at and around exit ramps and dynamic radar-triggered signs up the exit ramp, can help drivers make better decisions.”
The two ultimate goals of Boot’s team were “to first prevent a driver from mistaking an exit ramp for an entrance ramp, causing them to be placed onto the highway going the wrong way, and second, if this mistake is made, to help drivers know to retreat so they never get past the exit ramp onto the highway.”
Boot’s team has conducted driving-simulator studies and found that “these cues make a difference.” Foremost, wrong-way entrances are reduced. But also, Boot emphasizes, “in our data, we see that even when a wrong-way entrance is avoided, participants in our studies are less confused about where to go.” For example, he points out, “they drive past the exit ramp faster, indicating more certainty that it is not an appropriate location to get onto the highway.” The bottom line in this and other driving-simulator studies, Boot and his team has found, “dynamic radar-triggered signs on the exit ramp can effectively capture attention and stop drivers.”
How do these “dynamic signs” work? Boot explains that “they are often radar-triggered. When they sense a vehicle approaching in a manner indicating wrong-way driving, they activate and flash. These can be, for example, ‘Wrong Way’ signs that have red LED [lights] that flash around the sign border when triggered. For cars going in the correct direction, they don’t activate,” thus not distracting “drivers doing the correct thing.”
After a number of wrong-way crashes in Florida, that state’s Department of Transportation invested a great deal into how to address the problem. “In many ways,” Booth acknowledges, “Florida has become a leader on this issue, and the hope is that whatever effective countermeasures are discovered here can be adopted throughout the United States.”
