Tollway Must Have Median Barrier

* The grisly crash and three resulting fatalities on the San Joaquin Hills tollway Feb. 3 highlighted its lack of a center barrier.

Although its design was approved by the state, it’s the only high-speed, limited-access highway without a center barrier in Southern California, except for other tollways.

Just as it is becoming more and more evident that managed health care for profit is not working, could it be that building highways for profit doesn’t work either?

TOM BARNUM

Laguna Beach

* Caltrans is apparently slow to learn, stating that the San Joaquin Hills toll road median is “so wide” that a concrete barrier is not necessary. They used to say that about a freeway near San Jose until the cross-median carnage became unacceptable.

As a South County resident, I am beginning to shy away from the use of this toll road. It is like an uphill-downhill roller-coaster ride, hampered by fog problems, poor lighting, lack of a median barrier and unpredictable conditions during rain.

Some of these problems are intrinsic to the beast, but the lack of a center median is an obvious safety deficiency that needs to be corrected now. The undulating nature of this road demands a concrete median barrier, Caltrans’ highway standards notwithstanding.

Don’t count on traffic enforcement to abate the dangers. To further delay installation of a concrete median barrier places Caltrans into the “tombstone agency” mentality.

WALLY ROBERTS

San Clemente