CHP’s Radar Makes Ortega Highway Less of a Fatal Attraction

The California Highway Patrol has a simple lesson for drivers navigating Orange County’s two-lane Ortega Highway: hairpin curves plus high speed is a deadly combination.

And after a yearlong experiment with the use of radar along the twisting, 25-mile stretch of roadway, the CHP has brought that message home. The number of speeding tickets issued last year was way up, and accidents were way down.

That’s good news for a highway that the California Transportation Department says has four times as many traffic deaths as similar roads throughout the state. Radar is used on only one other state highway, Ventura County’s California 126.

The CHP in San Juan Capistrano, which patrols the 13 miles of the highway in Orange County, began using radar along the road on Jan. 1, 1987, after the state Legislature agreed that its use might be an effective way to put speeders on notice and, in the process, slash the accident rate.

In the CHP’s report to the Legislature recommending extension of the program, officers cited a 342% increase over 1986 in the number of speeding tickets issued, and an almost 40% drop in the number of speed-related accidents compared to the previous year.

During the 12 months that ended Dec. 31, 1986, two of the CHP’s 50 officers patrolled the highway in opposite directions at the wheel of Ford Mustangs outfitted with dashboard radar equipment.

CHP spokesman Ken Daily said that although the radar devices have helped to catch speeders along Ortega Highway--1,389 tickets were issued last year as opposed to 418 in 1986--the higher visibility of the CHP along the roadway also appears to have helped.

“There’s some psychological value, because in a lot of cases, we don’t necessarily issue many tickets, but word gets around real fast,” Daily said. “Also, it’s valuable because it’s very difficult to pursue people on Ortega. It’s difficult to make a safe U-turn. . . . We have an officer on each side of the highway when we use the radar.”

Daily said most accidents on Ortega Highway occur during commuter hours and on the weekends.

“Most of the speeders out there are those who are driving that highway every day, just pushing it to the limit,” he said. “They pass at the wrong time, at a blind curve and it leads to accidents. It’s driver error, not a killer highway.”

The experimental one-year radar project on the Ortega Highway was the result of a bill introduced in 1985 by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) at the request of county Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, who received numerous phone calls and letters from people concerned about speeding motorists on the highway in his south Orange County district.

Daily said he has even seen pairs of motorcyclists racing side by side around blind curves on the two-lane road. “It’s like they have a death wish or something,” he said.

But Daily added that reputation of the Ortega as a death trap is exaggerated.

“People are under the impression that there’s total carnage going on out there, but there isn’t. Because of the publicity it gets, there is a lot of distortion. The number of accidents is low,” he said.

“We only had four accidents out there in December, and the total number only makes up 1% or 2% of the yearly number of accidents in the area,” he said.

“It just isn’t a very forgiving type of highway. If you go off the roadway, it’s a long way down.”