As traffic dips, some treating highways as superspeedways.
Hundreds of speeding tickets issued, but crashes are down
Bay Area freeways aren’t the clogged roads of just a few weeks ago. Yet the trek on concrete remains irritating, as some drivers are using the wide-open lanes as the Indy 500 speedway.
The California Highway Patrol and motorists are seeing cars flying at 110 mph on Highway 101 in Sonoma County, drag racing over 100 mph on Interstate 280 down the Peninsula, 90 mph on Interstate 680 in the Tri-Valley, and 80 mph on Highway 237 west of Milpitas.
In the two weeks after the shelter-in-place edict was imposed March 16, the CHP issued 543 tickets to Bay Area drivers going 100 mph or faster compared with 418 for the same period last year.
CHP Officer John Franzen said the speeding problem has been documented across the nine Bay Area counties, and he told the Marin Independent Journal that “just on a first-hand basis, our officers are definitely seeing an increase in the number of citations. That’s why you’re seeing a number of officers warning against speeding,”
The problem extends across the country, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Many states have reported alarming speed increases, with some noting a significant surge in vehicles clocked at 100 mph or more.
“While COVID-19 is clearly our national priority, our traffic safety laws cannot be ignored,” said GHSA Executive Director Jonathan Adkins, adding that “emergency rooms in many areas of the country are at capacity, and the last thing they need is additional strain from traffic crash victims.”
In New York City, despite far fewer vehicles on
the road, automated speed cameras issued 24,765 speeding tickets on March 27, or nearly double the 12,672 tickets issued daily a month earlier.
Not every driver is playing this dangerous game, but enough motorists are zooming at excessive speeds and zig-zagging around others to scare the bejabbers out of those adhering to a slower pace.
The good news is that because of the low number of vehicles on the roads, injury and fatality crashes in California have been reduced by half, from 1,000 collisions and 400 injury/ fatal crashes per day to 500 and 200 per day, respectively, according to data analyzed by the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis, providing the first estimate of the effects on traffic since the shelter orders went into effect.
“If we extrapolate this reduction, it works out to about 15,000 fewer crashes and 6,000 fewer injury accidents per month” in the state, said Fraser Shilling, co-director of the Road Ecology Center.
While the study showed a slight increase in speeds in urban areas than rural, Bay Area drivers have noticed a vast increase in speeds by a few who are taking advantage of the open roads.
“It seems the aggressive drivers are using this opportunity to do what they want,” said Alan Williams of San Jose. “It’s not a big issue for me since I’m rarely in the car now, but my wife has to commute on the freeway to her hospital job and has to deal with these whackos.”
Cracking down on speeders isn’t easy. It may mean officers have to get out of their cars and closer to drivers than the recommended 6 feet, the distance to be maintained between people during the pandemic.
Sometimes CHP officers will instead use their public speaker to yell at drivers to ease off the gas pedal.
On his drive home from Auburn to Campbell on a recent Sunday night, Greg Salerno came across two “horrific” crashes that he speculated were caused by speeders he had seen on I-80 and I-680.
“Traffic is so light some drivers are using the open highways as an opportunity to speed like madmen,” he said. “Please slow down.”
Ditto, said Minh Phan, a veteran of the Highway 237 commute between his home in Fremont and his job in Mountain View.
“Please tell drivers to slow down, to stay with the posted speed,” he begged. “Due to COVID-19, traffic is much lower than regular, but it doesn’t give them the right to speed up to 80 miles an hour.”
Speeding is what rankles many about our new traffic conditions, so much so that the CHP posted this tweet recently:
“What is a safe speed in the rain? It’s definitely not 95 mph. Slow down!”