State patrol seeking to curb crashes on I-270
It was just after 7 a.m. during the Thursday morning rush hour when four vehicles collided in the southbound lanes of I-270, in the construction zone underneath the Trabue Road bridge on the West Side.
Soon after, at 7:20 a.m., another six wrecked into one another, just south of the Roberts Road exit.
It was just another day of the paint-swapping, NASCARlike pileups that block traffic for hours on Columbus’ Outerbelt. In these two crashes, there were only minor injuries, with one person from each crash taken to a hospital. But lanes remained closed until 9:30 a.m., forcing scores of motorists to drive to work on alternate routes that then also clogged up.
Law-enforcement officials say there’s no doubt that the 7-mile-long construction zone on the west Outerbelt is contributing to the number and severity of crashes there. Crews began widening I-270 in that area, from three to four lanes, in April 2017. In the meantime, there are concrete barriers along the lanes. So if there’s a crash, there’s nowhere for traffic behind to go, often leading to multicar crashes.
That’s not the only problem area on I-270. The State Highway Patrol developed a map showing 11 high-crash zones along I-270 from 2017 wrecks, with 40 to 88 crashes per mile, including three zones in the I-270 construction area on the West Side.
So the State Highway Patrol plans to coordinate with Columbus and suburban police to reduce crashes on the Outerbelt.
“There are some things we can do from the enforcement side,” said Lt. Robert Sellers, a Highway Patrol spokesman.
Columbus police Lt. Paul Weiner of traffic operations said police plan to target drivers in high-crash zones for wreck-causing violations such as speeding, following too closely and distracted driving.
That includes the I-270 construction zone through Columbus’ West Side and Hilliard. There, between mile markers 8 and 15, there were 204 crashes that damaged vehicles from April 1, 2017, when construction started, until Jan. 10 of this year. That’s an average of roughly 23 wrecks per month, up from an average of 17 crashes per month between April 1, 2016 and March 31, 2017, before the work began. There was one fatality in each of those two time periods.