I didn’t intend for my short piece about speeding on Friday to be prophetic, but sadly, it appears that was the case because on Saturday yet another person in Santa Clarita died a truly pointless death on our local roads.
Killed was Jeff Laird, 41, of Saugus as he turned left at the intersection above and was hit by 19 year old Garrett Brixon of Valencia. Brixon suffered major injuries in the collision.
Look at the shot of Plum Canyon above. It’s a perfect example of what I talked about last week; a wide open, six laned highway with few stoplights or reasons to slow down. Can anyone deny that the many roads in SCV like this are designed for one thing: high speed driving?
In most of the places I’ve lived, such roads would be technically classified as highways. In Colorado Springs, the main north-south road is Highway 124, and it’s only two lanes each direction and has overpasses and on/off ramps to minimize intersections. In Santa Rosa, a city of similar size to Santa Clarita, high capacity roads like the one above have many stoplights and a low speed limit of 35-40 mph, like Lyons Ave.
Someone in the comments argued that the main problem with drivers in Santa Clarita is inattention. I agree that might be a problem. But here’s the thing: at a high rate of speed the cause isn’t so important. It’s the consequences that matter! High speed collisions are more likely to injure the driver at best or kill him at worst.
There’s only so much kinetic energy today’s cars can deal with, and only so much blunt force trauma the human body can withstand. The margin for error goes down as the speed goes up.
In our desire to get where we’re going quickly, we’ve created a road system in the SCV that makes injury or death more likely than equivalent high-capacity streets in other cities. And we sequester other users of roads off onto other infrastructure (paseo, bike paths) just so we don’t slow cars down at all.
And despite all this, despite all the roads in Santa Clarita designed like the one above, 86.3% of respondents in the recent City public opinion survey said Traffic congestion is a “Very Important” issue in town. We as a community actually want to go faster on our roads.
Which makes me think, maybe a little more traffic and a little more congestion is ok if it means people have to slow down.
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