Old roads, no money a deadly mix

Three painted crosses mark the spot where three people died on U.S. 276 between Mauldin and Simpsonville. OWEN RILEY JR / Staff e-mail this story print this story

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On the roadside — near the symbols the Greenville County coroner's office regularly uses to mark a point of fatal impact — fellow church parishioners maintain a memorial of flowers for Dana and little Katie Trebing, who died in what the Mauldin city police chief says is the worst automobile accident he's seen in 30 years.

A mere 25 feet of grass separated Trebing's minivan from the Jeep that struck them along the four-lane highway. Claude Sweeney had just left Saturday morning Bible study, Mauldin Police Chief John Davidson says, when he swerved to miss a dog and careened across the median into oncoming traffic.

Loved ones are left to pick up the pieces of lives shattered.

"Dana was a great mother and a good friend," says Jennifer Storch, who spent many a day helping her take care of the children at Holy Cross Episcopal Church. "She touched a lot of people."

It is but one of an all-too-familiar display of mourning along South Carolina roadways that are among the most dangerous in the country. And last month's crash illustrates a deadly triangle of outdated roads, a limited amount of funds used to make them safer and the lack of an established priority list to decide where best to spend money.

The section of U.S. 276 between State 417 and the entrances to Interstate 385 and the Southern Connector where the Trebings and Sweeney perished is a prime example of the state of road safety in South Carolina — and how elected leaders and administrators struggle to fix the problems.

At first glance, Davidson says, it would appear that simply installing the cable barriers that have saved countless lives along South Carolina's interstates would ensure such a tragedy never occurs again on the one-mile stretch of limited-access highway.

However, because the road — like so many others in the state — was built close to half-a-century ago to standards that no longer pass muster, the median is too narrow for cable barriers to work, said Craig Nelson, a traffic engineer for the Upstate arm of the DOT.

Even if they could work, the state doesn't have the money to install any more cable barriers than the ones put up along 425 miles of interstate over the past five years, says Dick Jenkins, the transportation department's safety and systems engineer.

And the cost of installing guard rails or cement barriers along U.S. 276 is too high — reaching up to $2 million — when compared to other roads that are considered more dangerous, Nelson said.

"You've got to justify spending money there, because you don't have an endless pot of money," Jenkins says.

But justifying where to spend money on safety upgrades is, for the most part, reactionary.

Waiting on a computer system

The transportation department has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks as state legislators and Gov. Mark Sanford have called for an audit of how the department spends its money.

Staffers within the department informed highway commissioners recently that money for projects funded by the State Infrastructure Bank would fall short by $96 million. And the agency faced added heat when The Greenville News revealed that the department spent $113,663 to buy four of its top officials new Chevrolet Tahoes with added features like four-wheel drive, running boards and tinted windows.

In light of money problems, state Sen. David Thomas, whose district encompasses the stretch of road where the Trebings and Sweeney perished, says he has been pushing since last year for the transportation department to provide a detailed list that prioritizes which sections of roads are most in need of safety improvements.

"I want to see an actual danger list," Thomas says. "They don't have one."

Indeed, while the transportation department assigns value to roads that are the least safe, it has yet to implement a system that explicitly lists where money should go first, says Rick Werts, the DOT's director of traffic engineering.

That priority list, Werts says, won't be available until later this year. The transportation department, he says, is awaiting a computer system to come online that translates crash and fatality statistics provided by the state Department of Public Safety into quantifiable data that depicts the best possible use of safety money.

For now, the transportation department is doing the best job it can interpreting the data it receives, Werts says.

That data is sobering.

Each year, South Carolina ranks third highest in the U.S. in road fatalities per mile, while at the same time ranks fourth compared to other states in the amount of roadway it's responsible for maintaining. Most fatal accidents are on primary routes like U.S. 276, which account for 48.5 percent of the state's 905 road fatalities in 2003.The transportation department has devoted most of its safety-improvement resources to the state's 25,000 miles of secondary routes, where 37.7 percent of fatalities occur on roads often built originally for farm-to-market use. Secondary roads don't qualify for federal funding.

Jenkins says the department has yet to do a study that prioritizes which primary routes need the most help.

Money

"We can make our highways as safe as the public is willing to pay for," Werts says.

Assigning money in the best places is tricky, he says, because the decision can't be based solely on the percentage of fatalities. The danger of a road must be weighed against how much it would cost to fix the problem, creating a "cost benefit ratio."

The state has about $21 million each year to spend on safety improvements, a figure far below what is needed, Werts says. Much of the federal money that is received must by law be spent on new construction rather than maintenance. That means cable barriers are installed along primary route S.C. 31 in Horry County because it is a new road.

Some relief might be on the way. The Federal Highway Administration just days ago granted the transportation department a lower rate by which it must match federal funds, an effort pushed by U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint.

The state's matching percentage will drop from an 80/20 ratio to 90/10. This will free up more than $94 million in state funds over two years for use on local roads, and the transportation department will use the money to address safety-related needs on high-crash roads statewide, according to Demint's office.

But even that might not be enough.South Carolina, unlike other states, hasn't increased its tax on fuel since 1987, Jenkins says. Today's climate of rising fuel prices makes a hike in the state's 16-cents-per-gallon gas tax even more unlikely, says Sarah Davis, a spokeswoman for AAA Carolinas.

"While no one wants to hear about a gas tax increase, that is one of the solutions for making the DOT budget healthier," Davis says.

Gov. Sanford has pushed for higher gas taxes in the past, but the hike was meant to cover the cost of rolling back the state's income tax.

In recent years, budget cuts have been a major culprit in the lack of state agencies' ability to perform tasks. However, $600 million is added this year, Sanford spokesman Will Folks says.

While the governor supports the transportation department audit, Folks says much of the blame for transportation funding deficiencies should be laid on the state Legislature for spending unwisely.

However, Sen. Thomas says the governor's office shouldn't "point fingers at the Legislature." The real problem, Thomas says, is that the Legislature isn't allowed to allocate money by line item and, without a priority list of the most dangerous roads, has no empirical basis to know what it would be spending tax money on.

If such a list incorporating varying factors can be formulated, Thomas says the results might find that U.S. 276 is a priority to be addressed sooner than later, even though U.S. 276 is not a road considered to have a high fatality rate compared to other roads.

A road to U.S. 276 standards wouldn't be built today, Nelson says, and because of the antiquated design, there isn't enough space to place barriers without extensive overhaul. If cable barriers could work, they would cost about $30,000 to install not counting maintenance costs.

The only other options that would work cost too much, Nelson says. A guardrail would cost about $560,000 because of drainage upgrades needed in the median, and maintenance would be a problem because of the median width.

Concrete barriers would require little maintenance, but because of needed upgrades they would cost as much as $2 million to install because of the costs associated with redoing drainage and paving, Nelson says.