It’s too easy to say human error caused the pair of fatal crashes that have occurred in the past two years at the intersection near the west end of Vero’s Barber Bridge.
Nor should it matter that perception is not reality – that officials say there aren’t nearly as many crashes at the intersection of State Road 60 and Indian River Boulevard as we might think – because, when wrecks do happen there, they’re often serious and sometimes devastating.
The time has come to take a hard look at an often-busy crossroads where drivers from the island and mainland converge, and see if there’s anything that can be done to improve the engineering of the intersection, the functioning of the traffic signals, or the contour and condition of the roadway.
After the Jan. 15 crash that killed Holy Cross rower Grace Rett and injured a dozen other people, Vero Beach Police Chief David Currey said, “I don’t believe there’s a problem with the intersection.” City Manager Monte Falls said, “Everything was working the way it’s supposed to,” at the time of the accident.
But the death of a young athlete the day after her 20th birthday has hit the community hard, and the Florida Department of Transportation is now conducting a “safety and operational audit” of the intersection.
According to FDOT, the audit is a “bottom-up review of existing active and passive traffic safety measures, such as signage, road striping and signaling, traffic volumes and patterns, and historical crash data.”
FDOT officials will analyze the information they gather to determine if additional safety measures are needed and present their findings to the county’s Metropolitan Planning Organization on Feb. 12.
In the meantime, there is a public outcry for somebody to do something to make the intersection safer.
Some want FDOT to reduce the speed limit on the boulevard in the area approaching the intersection. Others want a red arrow added to the traffic signal, thus allowing left turns only under a green arrow and eliminating the risk of mistakes when gauging oncoming traffic. Adding a second southbound left turn lane is another possibility.
One or more of those changes might well make the intersection safer.
But don’t be surprised if FDOT reviews the crash data and determines no improvements are needed.
Statistics provided by Currey last week indicated there had been only 50 crashes at that intersection over the past 32 months, including 13 in the last eight months. That’s slightly more than 1.5 crashes per month and just 18.5 per year.
Those numbers seem startlingly low – even difficult to believe – for people who travel through the intersection regularly and remember seeing police vehicles, ambulances and crashed cars on many occasions, but they were verified by Phil Matson, the county’s MPO staff director, using the Florida Signal 4 Analytics crash-mapping database endorsed by FDOT and the state’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.
“The numbers on the database corroborate the numbers you received from Chief Currey,” Matson said. “We’re averaging about 18 or so accidents annually at that intersection, maybe 20 in a bad year.”
(Currey said the crash statistics do not include minor fender-benders after which drivers agree to not call the police.)
If it turns out after the FDOT review that the intersection itself is, in fact, properly designed and engineered, what other factors can be blamed for the recent tragedy?
Vero’s busy winter season could be a culprit.
Motoring around town and traversing busy intersections is a challenge at this time of year, when our roads become crowded with drivers who are seniors, teenagers, working folks, seasonal residents and out-of-town vacationers, all of whom have different driving habits and many of whom are not familiar with Vero Beach.
Busy construction workers and commuters, tourists glancing at their GPS devices in search of their hotel instead of watching the road, families with back seats full of noisy kids, teenagers with brand-new licenses and older snowbirds whose reaction times have slowed – too often, they’re all on the road at the same time.
It’s probably not mere coincidence that the two most recent fatal crashes at west end of the Barber Bridge occurred at this time of year, and involved two people who were from out of town.
Col. Christopher Hannon, a 58-year-old former Air Force pilot from Melbourne Beach, was riding his bicycle and attempting to make a left turn from Indian River Boulevard, across the intersection and onto the Barber Bridge, when he was struck and killed by a northbound car on the afternoon of Feb. 2, 2018.
After investigating the crash, which created the worst traffic jam in memory on the barrier island, for two months, police and prosecutors determined that both the cyclist (failure to yield; illegal left turn) and driver (speeding) were at fault.
“Had those traffic violations not occurred,” Currey said at the time, “this crash would not have happened.”
Similarly, a preliminary Vero Beach police report released last week blamed the tragic crash earlier this month at that same intersection on the Holy Cross women’s crew coach, who was driving the rented passenger van in which Rett was killed.
The report, in fact, indicates the longtime coach, Patrick Diggins, 55, failed to yield the right-of-way to an oncoming northbound pickup truck when he attempted to turn left from the boulevard onto the bridge shortly before 7:30 a.m.
It also states that the pickup driver, Ronald Wolfe of Fort Pierce, told police that Diggins appeared to be “looking down and not looking at the roadway” as he turned toward the bridge.
But the report doesn’t provide any certain answers as to why Diggins, driving a van filled with 11 of his Holy Cross rowers, pulled directly into the path of the pickup that, according to multiple witnesses, had the right-of-way.
“That’s the big question: Why?” Currey said last week. “What did he see? What was going through his mind? We haven’t spoken to him yet.”
Diggins, who brought the team to Vero Beach to train, was among those injured in the crash and has been recovering at Fort Pierce’s Lawnwood Regional Medical Center.
He, along with Wolfe and six rowers, was hospitalized after the crash. Rett, who was riding in the right-front passenger seat in the section of the van that took the brunt of collision, died at the scene.
The police report stated that Diggins uttered several remarks before being taken to the hospital, including: “Please let me have had a green light. Did I have a green arrow? God, please let me have had a green arrow.”
Witnesses say he didn’t, and police have concluded he was at fault in the fatal crash.
But was the fault entirely his, or does the intersection need to be changed in some significant way to make it safer?
Hopefully, FDOT will provide some answers in February.
