More lanes may be end of the road for Death Alley

I was heading back from a few days of skiing at Mammoth Mountain last week when I came upon a pleasant surprise on U.S. 395: A portion of the road was being widened from two to four lanes.

It’s about time.

The main route to the splendiferous Eastern Sierra for many Southern Californians is to take California 14 to 395. The problem is that north of Red Rock Canyon State Park, both roads alternate between two- and four-lane divided stretches -- too often a recipe for disaster.

Overall traffic is very light, at least by So Cal standards, with an average of about 7,000 cars a day traveling most of the route. That’s compared with 400,000 vehicles a day on some freeways in the Southland.

But many trucks use the route to travel to Reno, and there are motor homes headed to Mammoth and Yosemite, among other destinations. When traffic backs up behind high-profile or slower vehicles in the two-lane stretches, some motorists try to pass, regardless of oncoming traffic.

“I’ll be driving down the road and a vehicle will come up behind me at a high rate of speed, and they don’t want to be interrupted, and they continue around, no matter where they’re at,” said Dana Jeffries, who sells geology equipment in Lone Pine.

Take, for example, the crash near Olancha last August. A 23-year-old woman from Cerritos was driving a Toyota SUV on the 395.

Stuck behind an SUV pulling a trailer, she tried going around and rammed into a Mazda traveling in the other direction. A 14-year-old girl in her SUV died, as did a female passenger in the Mazda.

It was hardly the first horrible accident on the two highways. Between 1997 and 2007, 185 people were killed and 3,137 injured along the 313-mile section of road between Kern County and the Nevada state line, according to the California Highway Patrol.

Those numbers do not distinguish which deaths occurred on two-lane sections of road.

And the CHP was not willing to say that the 14 and 395 are more deadly than other roads. An agency spokesman said reckless drivers are the bigger problem.

Still, federal officials have long argued that two-lane, rural roads are the most dangerous and, in fact, about 69% of all fatal crashes in the United States in 2006 were on two-lane roads, according to a national database.

There is some conflicting data. In 2007, for example, 12 people were killed in crashes on the 395 in Inyo and Mono counties. Five deaths were in the two-lane stretches, two of which were the result of crossover accidents, according to Caltrans.

Get this: Caltrans District 9 spokeswoman Susan Lent said efforts to widen the 395 in the Eastern Sierra began in 1955. That’s not a misprint. Why is it taking so long?

Sacramento has other priorities, said Inyo County Supervisor Richard Cervantes. Inyo and Mono counties have a combined population of roughly 31,000, not enough to raise the kind of fuss needed to get the job done sooner.

“The Eastern Sierra is the wild side of California,” Cervantes said. “It’s still essentially the way it was 100 years ago.”

The current project involves widening 14 miles of road between Independence and Big Pine, an area that Owens Valley locals have dubbed Death Alley. It should be completed sometime next year.

That still leaves three two-lane stretches totaling 39 miles to widen south of the Yosemite turnoff, with construction on the last of them -- 11 miles of 395 through the towns of Olancha and Cartago -- scheduled to begin in 2015.

The total cost of widening all four segments is about $385 million, according to Caltrans. That’s still about $565 million less than the cost of adding about 10 miles of a carpool lane on the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass.

In the meantime, trout season opened this past weekend. Snow is melting and the high country soon will be accessible to hikers.

So consider this a plea: Ask your public officials about transportation funding, then ask again. We don’t need any more tragedies like this:

At midnight on Aug. 30, 2003, on a two-lane stretch of 395 near a well-known jerky stand in Olancha, a vehicle carrying two drunk men veered across the road and rammed into Margaret Hart’s vehicle. Hart, 43, was killed instantly.

Her daughter and daughter’s friend -- both sitting in the back seat -- were seriously injured and airlifted to Bakersfield.

The daughter has recovered. The friend is in a wheelchair.

Hart’s younger sister Loretta Berry lives in Quartz Hill in the Antelope Valley. She knows the Eastern Sierra well, and like many others can’t figure out the delay in widening a road that slices through empty desert mostly owned by the government.

“I was standing at my sister’s cross on the side of the road, and there were people passing each other like idiots,” Berry said, recalling a visit to the site of the accident.

“I turned around and yelled at them -- ‘You stupid people, don’t you realize?’ If I could get a tractor myself and widen the road, I would.”

The anecdote has a sad coda that reflects the often inexplicable nature of wrecks on the highway.

One of the CHP officers who responded to Hart’s crash was Paul Pino. Four months later, on Dec. 30, 2003, Pino was sitting in his patrol car writing a citation to a trucker he had just pulled over on a nearby stretch of 395.

An SUV driven by a 20-year-old woman, who later said she was tired, veered off the road and plowed into Pino’s car, pushing it under the truck.

Pino died a short time later. A 23-year veteran of the CHP, he was 49.

Odds-N-Ends . . .

* To Inland Empire readers, I’m well aware that the stretch of 395 between Victor Valley and Ridgecrest used to reach the Eastern Sierra is mostly two-lane and has its own dangers. That’s for a future Monday.

* The city of Chicago is going to mount cameras on about 100 street sweeping machines to record the license plates of illegally parked vehicles.

Meanwhile, back in California, the city of San Mateo is supporting Beverly Hills’ push to legalize speed enforcement cameras. Say cheese!

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steve.hymon@latimes.com

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