The recent tragedy on a dangerous stretch of Highway 129 underscores that state and local officials must examine what lengths can be taken to make the inter-county road safer. That might include looking at signs, speed limits and whether some sort of expansion project should be high on the priority list.
Government officials have placed a significant amount of attention, and rightfully so, on fixing Highway 25 in light of many lives lost earlier this decade in accidents. They should take the same approach with Highway 129, in what likely would require a partnership involving San Benito and Santa Cruz counties, along with the state.
Hollister’s Matthew Plesek, 33, died in an accident Wednesday on the highway just west of the county line near a curvy stretch where visibility, and reaction time in the case of an emergency, can be severely limited. A Santa Cruz woman two days earlier was airlifted from an accident only a couple of hundred feet from Plesek’s wreck.
In Plesek’s case, he lost control of his pickup truck on a shallow curve and spun out into the opposite lane, where a semi-tractor trailer struck him, according to the California Highway Patrol. The CHP attributed the accident to wet conditions and Plesek driving at a high rate of speed.
The series of curves at the county border, however, leaves little opportunity for drivers to respond – especially such large vehicles as the semi – and adjust when conditions might call for it. That is nothing new, though, because the road itself has not changed, but perhaps state and county leaders should take a closer look at where traffic counts have gone on that highway and whether any increases might potentially, coincidingly hike the danger level of the road.
These two accidents and one man’s life are enough reason to at lease examine whether a larger problem needs fixing.
There clearly were extraordinary factors involved with Plesek’s accident, as the CHP noted. In one way, it served as a reminder that residents in general all too often speed on rural roads in San Benito County, and that some sort of more aggressive traffic enforcement and additional signage may help improve the highway’s safety as well.
