Ventura Traffic Accidents Fall 32% in 6 Years

Traffic accidents in Ventura have dropped by nearly a third in six years due to an intensive city traffic safety program.

The program, initiated in January, 1988, involved both police and traffic engineers in a joint effort to make the city safer for drivers. Car wrecks on city streets have declined 32%.

But budget cuts this year have forced police to disband their traffic unit, and the department fears the reduced vigilance will reverse the accident trend, pushing insurance rates up. Traffic engineers, however, believe their work will keep accidents at the current level.

But police officers say law enforcement is an integral part of any accident reduction effort and worry that the number of car accidents will rise.

“We noticed the reduction in accidents,” said Cpl. John Turner, who sits behind a desk this summer doing the traffic-related paperwork half a dozen officers participated in last year. “We’ve also noticed an increase too, now. It’s generally allowed, that when the cops are writing less tickets, people are less cautious.”

Some city officials call the officers alarmist and their warnings exaggerated. They point out that the police lobbied heavily against the budget cuts and suggest they may still be trying to turn public opinion their way.

Both the city and the police said they did not have the time to pull together accident statistics for the first half of 1994. Officers say, however, that if there is an increase as they believe, the consequences will hit motorists in their pocketbooks.

A low accident rate “means the community as a whole enjoys a lower (insurance) premium,” Turner said. “We will all end up paying higher premiums because no one’s issuing tickets for the right things.”

The city’s traffic safety program began in January, 1988, soon after Ventura hired Nazir Lalani as its top traffic engineer.

“When I came to the city in ‘87, the accident rate was going nuts,” Lalani recalled. “Then we started the safety program and boom!”

Immediately, the number of accidents citywide started to decline, he said.

First, city employees identified all intersections and city blocks that had three or more accidents a year. Engineers attended to the most hazardous areas first, working their way around the city until, by this year, the program is nearly completed.

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Workers slathered corner curbs with red paint, to prevent parked cars from blocking the views of drivers making turns. The city erected new traffic signals at problem cross streets, synchronized many of the city’s existing signals, and planted stop signs and curve warning signs where none had stood before.

The results for even one improvement measure could be dramatic. When Ventura coordinated all the traffic signals along a busy stretch of Victoria Avenue, car crashes on that street dropped by 25%, Lalani remembers.

Vigilant police traffic enforcement helped, but it was not the reason for the decline, Lalani said.

Police officers “geared up in 1985, but it had no impact,” he said. Studies done by Ventura’s engineering department show a nearly 99% correlation between engineering improvements and reduced accident rates, he said.

“But the Police Department,” Lalani said, “feels very strongly that their department caused it.”

Cpl. Turner explains it like this: “When you are trying to reduce the accident rate, you have the ‘Three Es,’ ” he said. “Educate, Engineer, and Enforce.

“Enforce--that’s the one being dropped currently.”

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When the Police Department still had a traffic unit, Lalani said, his office would tell the police what areas the public was complaining most about and the traffic unit would then send officers out to issue tickets.

For their part, Turner said, the traffic officers held monthly meetings to discuss congestion on the city roads, reckless driving at key intersections and what they planned to do about it.

City traffic engineers would attend those meetings and “diligently take notes,” Turner said.

But communication between Ventura traffic engineers and police officers has declined precipitously since the traffic unit disbanded in January, both sides agreed. Even traffic monitoring within the department has disintegrated since former traffic officers were farmed out for general patrol, Turner said.

“Now, these officers are smeared with a ton of other things to do,” he said.

Traffic safety specialists--many of whom are former police officers themselves--say that when a police department takes its focus off traffic enforcement, accidents do indeed become more frequent.

“There definitely is a connection” between the number of traffic cops patrolling the streets and the number of accidents occurring, said Lloyd Turner, a traffic safety consultant with UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation, and a former highway patrol officer.

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Ventura’s Cpl. Turner insists that the hobbled enforcement rate will eventually translate into more car crashes. The increased accident rate, in turn, will cause insurance rates to soar, he concludes.

John Millan, media relations director for Farmer’s Insurance, said the relationship between accidents and insurance premiums is not quite so immediate and simple.

If an area’s collision rate continues to rise steadily over a period of eight to 10 years, he said, then rates will climb. But six months or even a year of increase, especially when compared to a steady decline in accidents for the last six years, is a “blip” on the statistical horizon, he said.

Lalani, however, is not yet convinced accidents are increasing.

“I’m certainly supportive of the police disgruntlement,” he said. “They’re definitely overloaded.”

But traffic collisions are not necessarily rising as a result, he added.

On the other hand, the decline in the accident rate is also over, he said.

“Our program is pretty much finished,” he said. “There’s not much left we can work on. What’s happening now is a very strong curve is flattening out.”

And since the economy is picking up again, resulting in people driving more than they have been, it may contribute to a slight increase in the accident rate, he said.

But since the accident rate can fluctuate month to month, even season to season, Lalani said he’d want to see statistics for the whole year before making a judgment about the direction the accident curve is headed.

“The jury’s still out, in my opinion, on where we are in 1994,” he said.