Road Work-Zone Crashes Swell as Buffers Vanish

"The standard strategy used to be you put a policeman in a car with a flashing light and that would be enough to get people to slow down," said Neil J. Pedersen, Maryland's highway commissioner. "Now all they see is he's sitting there and not writing tickets." Even with a lower posted speed limit in a work area, "they don't slow down," he said. With more work being done at night to avoid high-travel periods, more drivers at that time are impaired and speeding, Pedersen said.

To keep traffic moving and still give workers access to a construction site, lanes are narrowed by several feet. Shoulders often disappear. The margin of error for risky driving shrinks.

These are the conditions on Kenilworth Avenue in Cheverly, a six-lane highway where workers are replacing two 1950s-era bridges over Amtrak tracks. It is one of the most heavily traveled spots in Prince George's County, with cars feeding in from routes 50 and 295. Three lanes have been narrowed to two on each side for the past 15 months, and the shoulders are gone.

A 32-inch concrete barrier protects the road crew. Speed limits have been lowered to 35 mph. But there was no barrier one night in October when the road was reduced to one lane in each direction and a police chase brought several workers within inches of the fleeing suspect, recalled Don Koebke, the project engineer. A front-loader saved them.

"The suspect was out of control at 1 in the morning," Koebke said.

In the Montgomery accident in August, Manuel de Jesus Gonzalez-Geronimo, 31, a construction worker, lost control when he hit the workers assembled on the guardrail of Route 29. He fled the scene and later turned himself in. His attorney, Chuck Lipscomb, said that his client's attention was diverted somehow. "He's devastated," Lipscomb said. "He feels very badly for these men and their families."

Maryland highway officials said they were prompted to seek stiffer penalties after the Route 29 incident and several other work-zone tragedies: A man clearing debris from the shoulder of Route 340 in Frederick was struck and killed by a pickup truck in June; two inmates were killed in June while picking up litter on the Beltway; and another worker was injured while trimming trees in Baltimore County.

Only Illinois uses hidden cameras to catch speeders in work areas, an experiment that started this year to stem an increase in fatal accidents. In Montgomery, cameras in school zones and some neighborhoods snap photos of drivers going 10 miles an hour or more over the speed limit. The General Assembly overrode a veto by then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) to approve them. But their use statewide could be controversial.

"What's next?" asked Del. Christopher B. Shank (R-Washington), the minority whip. "Are we going to put cameras all over the interstate system? It's another descent along the slippery slope of our privacy rights."