The state Department of Transportation says it plans to fix the most dangerous intersection on Santa Fe’s bypass route. But not until next year.
That’s not soon enough to suit Santa Fe County Sheriff Robert Garcia, who wants something — anything, maybe even a stoplight — done now at intersection of N.M. 599 and County Road 62. Two people have been killed at the intersection so far this year, and a third was severely injured; there have been nearly three dozen crashes at the crossing over the past five years. Garcia notes that the Department of Transportation hasn’t yet gotten around to planning a fix for the next intersection to the east, at N.M. 599 and County Road 70, but it might as well — over the same five-year period, that intersection has been the scene of 24 crashes. Unfortunately, the problem is as simple as it is — and was — predictable. The bypass was originally planned as a controlled-access through-route for radioactive waste bound from Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project down in Carlsbad. But in the course of multi-year budget negotiations — who would pay for the road, how much it would cost, and what could be done to make it cost less — Santa Fe ended up with a four-lane fast-track but no freeway-style on- and off-ramps. Instead, the bypass was built with several “at grade” intersections, of the kind you might expect to find in a rural area. The result: slow-moving local traffic inches into — or even more dangerously tries to cross — much-faster traffic intent on getting to the other side of Santa Fe as quickly as possible and without interruption. Latest example: the July 7 crash, where a 24-year-old Santa Fe woman turning south onto the bypass from C.R 62 was T-boned — and killed — by a faster-moving car. Flash back to 1999, when the bypass opened as a two-lane road pending upgrades to four lanes. At a DOT hearing on those improvements, residents were already complaining about this very problem. “Everyone is speeding like crazy,” one woman is quoted in the Journal’s report on the meeting as saying. “There are no cops to stop them.” Sheriff’s deputies and State Police patrol the road, but they can’t be there all the time. We sympathize with Garcia’s plea for stop lights, stop signs — anything to slow down the murderous flow of traffic. But will stop lights or stop signs work? We doubt it. For one thing, santafesinos are notorious for ignoring these kinds of controls everywhere else in town. N.M. 599 was built to be exactly what its name implies: a bypass. As such, it needed cloverleaf-style intersections, to merge slow and fast traffic in a controlled and safe manner. It wasn’t built that way, mainly because under- and overpass intersections are expensive and, in the political squabbling over all the required highway improvements between Los Alamos and Carlsbad, much of the available money went elsewhere. The result is a danger to all who use Santa Fe’s section of the route. It should be fixed. And yes, it will no doubt cost more to fix it than it would have to build it right in the first place. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.
