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CHP wants motorists to slow down on Highway 101
CHP officer Julie Powell talks to a motorist suspected of speeding in the Highway 101 construction area between Santa Rosa and Windsor.
JEFF KAN LEE/The Press DemocratPublished: Friday, May 1, 2009 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 2:08 p.m.
Standing alongside Highway 101 north of Santa Rosa Thursday, a CHP officer aimed a laser device at oncoming vehicles to register how fast they were going through a construction zone.
“Lane one. Blue sedan. 73 mph. Passing you now,” the officer said at one point into his radio.
Putting the pedal down on her cruiser, Officer Julie Powell entered the highway from the River Road on-ramp and within seconds was pulling over the driver of the Volkswagen Jetta.
The ticket Powell gave to 19-year-old Kori Farrel of Windsor was among dozens officers handed out Thursday during a special enforcement action to try and get motorists to slow down.
Many apparently don’t realize, or don’t care, that the speed limit along this 7-mile stretch has been temporarily reduced to 55 mph while Caltrans installs carpool lanes from West Steele Lane to Windsor.
The $77.8 million project is slated to wrap up by late summer or early fall of 2010.
The construction has led to narrower lanes, the installation of temporary barriers and visual distractions that the CHP said raise the risk for crashes.
“There’s very little room for error,” Officer Jon Sloat said.
He said many motorists still aren’t getting the message, however, putting not only their safety but that of construction workers at risk.
The CHP has been conducting regular enforcement actions in the area for weeks, and on Thursday, invited the media to witness how they work. More are planned for the future.
“We get calls every day from citizens saying, ‘I was on my way to work or going home to Windsor and people were blowing by me at 70 mph,’” Sloat said. “It seems we need to swarm the place every once in awhile to let people know we’re taking care of it.”
The River Road team consisted of five officers in cars and another officer standing alongside the road armed with a Light Detection and Ranging system, or LIDAR.
Instead of using radio waves as radar guns do, LIDAR generates pulses of light — reaching out to 1,000 feet — to measure a vehicle’s speed. The technology allows officers to pinpoint individual vehicles, even those traveling in packs.
Once a speeding vehicle was detected Thursday, the information was relayed to officers waiting in formation on the River Road on-ramp. They stopped the drivers and then circled back to the on-ramp to wait for the next speeder.
From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., officers working in tandem cited 47 motorists for speeding, with the worst offender clocked at 80 mph. Another team working outside the construction zone near Todd Road in Santa Rosa led to more citations.
One woman told Powell that she was speeding because she had to go to the bathroom. Another man insisted he wasn’t going much faster than 60 mph, despite the LIDAR pegging him at well above that.
The officer issued tickets to both drivers, who are subject to additional penalties for speeding in a construction zone.
Farrel, who was on her way home to Windsor after attending classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, said from behind-the-wheel of her Jetta that she’s never gotten a ticket before.
“I guess I didn’t realize how fast I was going,” she said.
California has made an effort to cut down on the number of crashes in construction areas using increased law enforcement and the “Slow for the Cone Zone” public awareness campaign.
Every year, more highway workers are killed in the United States than police and firefighters combined. Motorists also are at risk, as four out of the five fatalities that occur in construction zones are drivers or their passengers.
The good news, according to Caltrans spokesman David Anderson, is that since the introduction of the slow for the cone campaign in 1999, the total number of collisions in the state has dropped by 34 percent.
Nationally, collisions have increased by 6 percent over that same period of time, he said.
Anderson said the leading causes of crashes in construction zones are driver inattention and waiting until it’s too late to merge into traffic.
“A lot of progress has been made in California but lives are still lost each year,” he said.
The Santa Rosa area CHP received a grant from the state’s Office of Traffic Safety to pay for the construction zone speed teams, including paying officers overtime, Sloat said.
He said the money generated by fines for the tickets goes to the county or a city, depending on where the ticket was issued, not to the CHP.
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