Delay on Radar Is Risky

One day soon we hope common sense and safety will prevail over politics and the Legislature will authorize the California Highway Patrol to use radar on state highways.

Until then, other enlightened public officials, like Thomas F. Riley, chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, will have to keep pushing the state to allow the CHP to use the proven value of radar to help reduce high accident and death rates on the most dangerous state roads.

Ortega Highway (California 74), which runs 25 miles from Interstate 5 near San Juan Capistrano in Orange County to Grand Avenue near Lake Elsinore in Riverside County, is one such deadly route. Since 1984, there have been 16 deaths and 277 injuries on that road, a shocking toll for so short a stretch.

Excessive speed, according to CHP officers, is one of the main reasons for Ortega Highway’s high accident rate. Riley reports receiving “numerous letters and phone calls” complaining about speeders. He wants state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) to help find a way to get state permission to use radar on Ortega Highway.

It shouldn’t take much to get such approval. Radar, as state experience shows, helps reduce speed, accidents and deaths. That’s why county officials, and patrol officers who handle the accident calls, would like to see it in use on Ortega Highway.

We don’t know how long the Legislature can, in good conscience, continue to ignore such life-saving logic and remain the nation’s lone holdout in denying its highway patrol the benefits of radar enforcement statewide.

Radar is already being used in two unincorporated Orange County communities, Mission Viejo and North Tustin, under a special contract between the county and the CHP, which enforces traffic laws in unincorporated areas. One factor in North Tustin’s recent decision to use radar was the success of the radar enforcement effort in Mission Viejo, where speed-related traffic accidents were reduced by 14% and injury accidents by 12% last year.

Radar also is being used by the CHP in other counties under similar contracts. But it is only in use on one state highway, California 126 in Ventura County. That operation is a pilot program scheduled to run until December, 1986.

The experience in Ventura thus far is consistent with what CHP officials have found in nearly every case in which they have employed radar--fewer accidents and fatalities. In the first 10 months of this year, radar has helped reduce the accident rate on California 126 by about 20%.

Motorists using Ortega Highway and other dangerous state roads deserve the same opportunity for safer passage.