Motorcyclist Killed on Santiago Canyon : Accidents: The third recent fatality on the winding road comes after a Rancho Santa Margarita rider crosses a double line, sideswipes a car and hits a pickup truck.

A motorcyclist was killed Friday on Santiago Canyon Road after colliding head-on with a pickup truck, marking the third fatal accident along this curving commuter road in less than two weeks, officials said.

Charles Whitney, 43, of Rancho Santa Margarita was crossing over the double yellow lines into the road’s single southbound lane to pass traffic. He sideswiped a Monte Carlo sedan while crossing the Santiago Creek Bridge near Irvine Lake about 6:25 a.m. and slammed into a pickup truck, said Officer Keith Thornhill of the California Highway Patrol.

His 1979 Yamaha motorcycle burst into flames when it hit the ground and officers found Whitney’s helmet in the creek bed some distance away.

CHP officials met Friday morning to plan stepped-up enforcement on the canyon road, and will likely add patrols to the road as early as next week in hopes of deterring reckless drivers.

“If you know there’s going to be an officer out there, I think people are less likely to drive around a car, or speed,” Thornhill said.

He also called on drivers to obey traffic laws, saying two of the three fatal accidents on the road in the past two weeks were clearly the fault of the motorists.

On Tuesday, a 41-year-old man died after his pickup rammed a semi-trailer truck on a new stretch of the road in Orange. One week earlier, a 29-year-old Trabuco Hills man died after he repeatedly cut off another driver with his Thunderbird, then nicked her car and crashed into an Orange County Fire Authority pickup before rolling down an embankment.

“The circumstance surrounding the Thunderbird accident was a specific act of driving aggression,” he said. “[Friday’s] crash was also caused by the motorist. The last thing any reasonable person would do is be passing traffic on the opposite side of the road where there are double yellow solid lines.”

Thornhill said it was the “behaviors and the attitudes of the drivers that got them killed. The road in these cases really has nothing to do with the accidents.”

The driver and two passengers in the sedan, and the driver of the pickup, were all wearing seat belts and were uninjured in Friday’s accidents, Thornhill said. But the glancing blow of the motorcycle to the left front of the sedan was strong enough to flatten the car’s front tire and the front of the pickup was crushed, Thornhill said.

The early morning accident closed the road in both directions for three hours.