The highway safety disconnect

Earlier this year as the last Legislative session ended, Maine hit a near-all-time low in its commitment to highway safety. Leaders in Maine’s transportation industry – the people who every day work to design, build and maintain safe roads and bridges for our state – were left wondering whether we really had a highway problem and whether the public really cared.

Well, we do have a problem, a problem that is growing bigger by the day, and it turns out that the public is seriously concerned. This fall, the Maine Better Transportation Association conducted a survey of 500 Maine voters across the state and discovered that 97 percent fear that their children or grandchildren are at risk because of the poor quality of our roads and bridges. It turns out this fear is not based on some vague protective instinct. It is based on experience.

Think about those unsafe road conditions you experience every day. A common one is rutted roads that collect water, snow and ice. In these conditions, your tires may no longer be on the pavement and, needless to say, that is an important part of staying on the highway. From our survey, it appears that 62 percent of us experience these kinds of rutted roads every day. The survey further revealed that large numbers of us experience other obvious unsafe conditions every day like blind spots (31 percent), dangerous intersections (37 percent), no paved shoulders (43 percent) and sharp curves (21 percent). The exclamation point on this survey is that one or more of these unsafe road conditions has caused nearly half of us, a family member or friend to have an accident. To most of us, these are not theoretical safety risks; they are very, very real.

If you are skeptical of surveys, the state has hard data that makes a clear connection between bad roads and accidents. Traveling a mile on one of the state’s worst roads is three times more likely to result in a crash than traveling a mile down the Interstate. This might not be a big issue if we did not have many bad roads, but nearly half of the roads under Maine DOT control are in poor condition. That is because nearly half of all Maine DOT roads have not received any significant upgrade in more than 50 years. These facts illustrate the huge disconnect between governmental spending priorities and the government’s most important function: protecting public safety.

You would like to think that common sense and compassion would solve this problem, but after neglecting this many roads for so long, you have to wonder. Maybe it really is just about money. That does not make sense either when you learn that vehicle crashes cost the Maine economy roughly $1 billion a year. That is at least four times more than we spend to fix our roads and bridges each year. And if it is all about money, consider this: you and I spend less every year on state gas taxes than we do on car repairs due to bad roads.

According to The Road Information Program, Maine drivers spend an average of $282 per year on auto repairs caused by poor roads, a total of $263 million statewide. Insurance companies also pay more on auto claims in Maine each year than we raise through the state gas tax. In other words, we are seriously compromising our own safety – and doing so for the sake of no offsetting economic benefits. So we are less safe, and we are spending more money. It just does not make sense.

Each Election Day, we push the reset button on the machinery of government with the hope that the next set of elected officials will do better responding to our concerns. Still, we can’t stop there. As Maine citizens, we need to let our legislators know what matters to us – that safe roads and a strong economy are at the top of the list.

We also have to let them know Maine voters understand that there is more than one way to pay for Maine’s deteriorating roads: We can continue to pay the mounting costs of lost economic opportunity, increasing auto repairs, personal injury and lost lives, or we can invest in real solutions that will get our roads fixed. Maine residents shouldn’t have to worry as much as they do about the safety of the roads and bridges their children and grandchildren are traveling on. In the next two years, I hope highway safety will receive the priority consideration it deserves. In the long run, we can save lives and save money.

Scott Leach is president of the Maine Better Transportation Association.