Staff Editorial
Pacific Coast Highway is a very dangerous road. It’s curvy, the pretty scenery is distracting, the lanes are thin and with more and more fat Hummers and Escalades on it, navigating Highway 1 is pretty treacherous.
Well no kidding, buddy, you say. We all drive PCH, so telling students to drive safely on it is about as useful as their parents telling them “be safe” before they go out at night. “Oh, thanks for the advice, Mom. Had you not said that I surely would have tried copious amounts of illegal narcotics then cliff dived off Malibu Canyon.”
Having now established that PCH is dangerous and that we’re not your mother, what else is there to discuss about this subject? Well plenty, because driving to, from and around Pepperdine involves several factors that deserve to be discussed.
Simply shouting out the lowest-common-denominator answer frequently given by law/speed enforcement officials, “slow down,” is not helpful and is not an adequate answer. Besides, considering there are very few people in this country who consider speed limits to be maximums rather than minimums, there have to be other factors at hand.
In terms of Pepperdine students, there are several factors that make PCH a treacherous drive. To begin, PCH (and almost every other road in and around Malibu) is twisty, meaning cars tend to drift out of their lanes. Secondly, this twistiness creates blind corners that allow countless opportunities for cars, pedestrians or other objects that to dart out at oncoming vehicles.
Then, add that to arguably the greatest danger faced by all drivers anywhere: in-vehicle distractions. The radio, the navigation system, the new XM satellite radio with 28 buttons, rowdy friends, the venti mocha latte in the cupholder and that infernal cell phone are all dangerous distractors. It takes only a split second to cause an accident, and all of these activities can command a driver’s attention for much longer than one second. Again, we won’t tell you to stop using these distractions, because no one is going to listen (but seriously, let’s limit the cell phone usage just a smidge).
Now, all of these factors add up to a typical Pepperdine driver’s level of risk of getting into an accident. However, risk itself isn’t the only thing that increases our chances of being in an accident. That other thing is exposure to risk. Simply put, double the amount of miles you drive, and double your exposure to risk. Because of Malibu’s remote location from commercial hubs like Santa Monica, Woodland Hills or Thousand Oaks, Pepperdine drivers typically drive many more miles than most college students. This increases our exposure to the already long list of risk, therefore making our chances of getting in accidents that much higher.
So, we’ve broken down the reasons for Pepperdine students’ vehicular danger, plus we never mentioned speed. The police will generally say the leading cause of accidents is speed, and maybe it is, but it can be argued that speed only exacerbates the risks described above. It’s hard to imagine that simply boosting your speed from 45 to 55 will suddenly make you spin out of control because you’re unable to handle the speed. Of course, insane speeds on roads such as PCH are incredibly dangerous, but it seems like a safe bet that many of the 326 reported accidents in 2004 have not been caused by insanely high speeds – otherwise, how could it be that there were no fatalities
“The good news is that injuries are down,” a Lost Hills Sheriff Department deputy said in the Graphic news report about PCH accidents. “It could be from traffic being too heavy, causing more low-speed collisions. They don’t have enough time to get up to higher speeds.”
If he is right, it’s hard to imagine that simply slowing down by five or 10 mph will significantly lower your risk of getting in an accident here in Malibu.
Although students should be careful out there on the roads and be mindful of the risk and exposure to risk factors we’ve brought up, there is some good news. Because of the great strides made in automotive safety, traffic injury and fatality rates are at an all-time low (the government began keeping track in 1966). In 2003, the fatality rate was only one death for each 66.6 million miles traveled (that’s more than 2,650 trips around Earth at the Equator).
This year’s accident rate in Malibu is 22 percent higher than last year’s rate. No one can say for sure why that is, so there’s no point in guessing. All that’s important is to stay aware, and although you probably won’t listen, as your mother would say, “be careful.”
09-30-2004