Are Beltline safety fences worth the cost?

Fences are more than worth it

BY MATTHEW EISLEY
STAFF WRITER

Raleigh and the state Department of Transportation are smart to add safety fences to several Beltline bridges with gaps too narrow to see, especially at night.

The second fatal fall in November of a good Samaritan who had stopped on a bridge over Crabtree Creek to help wreck victims shows the gaps to be a dangerous design flaw.

Three other people who leaped over a low wall at the bridge's edge to escape oncoming cars that night also fell but survived. But for their good luck, we'd be talking about four fatalities, not one.

Spending $122,000 - $61,000 each for the city and state - to fix the flaw is a reasonable investment in public safety. For Raleigh, it's cheaper, considering inflation, than the city's $51,100 cost for the Light + Time Tower in 1995. Heck, the fences might even look better.

Most people, I suspect, won't mind that the fences aim to prevent only occasional deaths. We spend limited resources to safeguard against many unlikely events, and a cold cost-benefit analysis isn't always the best approach.

Take flying. Your odds of dying in a plane crash are something like 1 in 15 million. Even less are the chances that a Boeing 737 with a defective rudder would crash and kill you.

But out of millions of flights, a few 737s with stuck rudders have crashed and killed people. So I'm glad Boeing spent what it took to correct the hazard, which was unacceptable no matter how small the odds. Aren't you?

Same thing goes for closing the bridge gaps: obvious peril, simple fix, affordable cost.

It would have been safer to fill in the gaps with concrete - and more expensive. The fences aren't perfect, or free. But we need them.

Matthew Eisley edits The N&O's North Raleigh News and Midtown Raleigh News.

It's about saving lives, not money

BY CHRIS HOFELT

Allow me to begin by expressing my sympathies to the families who have lost loved ones in the tragic bridge accidents on the Interstate 440 Beltline.

I do not wish to tarnish their memories but rather to examine how we can best save lives in the future.

In determining best practices for public health and safety, we risk assessors use a benchmark called de minimis risk. This value is set at 1 × 10^-6, or 1 in a million - not because two people dying out of 2million is OK, or that we are somehow assigning dollar values to human life.

De minimis can be viewed as the point below which one can no longer predict outcomes with any kind of accuracy.

It is comforting to think that if only we erect fences on these bridges, we will prevent people from dying. However, there is little to support this view other than the fact that it seems right.

In the most recent death, the man was jumping over the wall to avoid being struck by a car. Had there been a fence preventing this, the outcome might have been just as tragic.

Being on a highway while not surrounded by a car's steel frame is extremely dangerous; about 600 pedestrians per year are killed on America's interstates. A Zebulon man was recently killed on I-440, trying to retrieve a ladder that had fallen from his truck.

The $61,000 Raleigh's City Council allocated would likely save far more lives if it were spent on publicity, alerting people to the dangers of being a pedestrian on the highways.

Hofelt is an assistant professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator of N.C. State University's Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology.