Construction Zones: No margin for error, but why?

It’s a cycle that never ends — beat up the roads in winter, fix them in the summer. My drive to the office feels like a slalom course these days as I swerve around potholes at cruising speed and then squeeze past crews making emergency road repairs. The lane through the construction zone was barely wide enough for my minivan, let alone the rig two cars ahead of me.

It reminds me of a tragedy that happened a few years ago. It could have been avoided, I believe, if only more care had been taken in designing the temporary lanes of a highway construction zone.

Seems to me that nothing has changed in the intervening years.

The truck driver in question died at 2:30 in the morning. There was little traffic and no weather to contend with. She was an experienced driver, and a good one by all accounts. She was on her first run of the shift, a 70-mile shuttle of recyclable material that she did a few times each day across the top of Toronto on Highway 401. Running empty at the time, she knew the route well.

It all sounds pretty routine, but she ran headlong at speed into the four-foot-high, V-shaped, concrete temporary divider separating the express lanes of the highway from a single-lane exit ramp to the collector lanes. There were no braking marks, no skid marks, no clue that she made any attempt to avoid the crash. The concrete divider met her truck just about in the centre of her steering axle, so she was clearly four or five feet off the mark either way, whether she was heading into the collectors or intending to stay in the express lanes.

Another trucker following her was close enough that he saw her truck leap into the air in a fireball and fall on its side. He slammed into her overturned, burning wreck and very nearly lost his life too. With no shoulders, he had nowhere to go.

According to the accident investigator I talked with at the time, who was on the scene in minutes, the second driver’s “black box” showed a speed of about 90 km/h in the moments before impact, and that driver said he’d been gaining on the woman’s truck slowly. So it looked like excessive speed wasn’t a factor.

Or was it? Other drivers I spoke with said you couldn’t negotiate that particular section of highway safely in a truck at anything over 70 or 75 km/h. I’d driven it myself, and I had no doubt that 70 clicks would be a lot safer than 90 through there, especially in traffic — with unskilled four-wheelers wiggling around beside you. The posted limit was the usual 80 km/h.

The thing is, it was a section of road construction — like many others across the country then and now — that demanded a warning specific to truckers. There was none in this case, of course, and I’ve yet to see one anywhere else unless it refers to a low bridge clearance. The lanes there were extremely narrow (though they met provincial “standards,” for what that’s worth), there were no shoulders at all (just a four-foot concrete wall on either side), there was a mix of asphalt and concrete pavement (that didn’t match the lane direction), and the “new” lanes weren’t clearly marked with painted white lines. In other words, there was just no margin left for the slightest error. No margin whatsoever, no matter what the error.

We never did find out what really happened with that wreck, and never will. There was no clue to be had in mechanical terms because the truck was burned completely. The second driver didn’t recall there being other vehicles near her, so it’s unlikely she was cut off by anyone. She may have lost her focus for a second while she fumbled for a cigarette. Maybe she had a bit of grit in her eye.

Maybe a lot of things, but none of the obvious ones should have killed her. And I maintain that none of them would have killed her if the possibility of a moment’s inattention had been designed into that construction zone. There just has to be a better way to keep traffic moving and to keep construction work on schedule than to create such skinny lanes with no shoulders.

If not, then you haul speed way down with signs aplenty and you specifically warn truckers for miles ahead that things are going to get difficult for them.

Obviously, we can’t guard against every tragic possibility. But highway construction zones are among the most dangerous places on earth, and they demand much more careful design — with truckers’ special needs in mind — than they usually seem to get. In fact, more often than not, it looks to me like they’re designed for the convenience of the construction crews themselves. And that’s really not good enough.