By James V. Horrigan
Staff Writer
The intersection of Gorham Road and Payne Road is no longer the most accident-prone in town, according to Scarborough Police Officer Tim O’Brien, who tracks accident statistics and compiles an annual list of the worst traffic spots in town.
Although the number of total accidents dropped from 24 last year to 10 so far this year – the same number of accidents in 2003 and 2005 – the nearby intersection of Haigis Parkway and Payne Road went from being tied for sixth most accident-prone to first, as the eight accidents reported there last year ballooned to 16 so far this year, O’Brien said.
Another dramatic difference between accidents reported last year versus this year is the intersection of Black Point Road and Winnocks Neck Road. Although 10 accidents were reported there in 2006, so far this year there has been none, as was the case in 2002, 2003 and 2005.
O’Brien said he recalls discussing the intersection with several of his colleagues but that nobody knew why there were so many accidents in 2006.
“Sometimes these things are easy to explain, sometimes they’re not,” he said.
Route One at Black Point Road is one of three intersections tied for the third most accidents this year, with nine accidents reported to date. Those numbers compare to seven accidents in 2006, nine in 2004 and 14 in 2002.
Although it hasn’t ranked among the top three most dangerous intersections over the past seven years, things are looking better on the opposite side of Route One, at the intersection with Gorham Road, where no accidents have been reported this year, compared with six in 2006, eight in 2005, six in 2004, nine in 2003 and 10 in 2002.
O’Brien said the department changed methods for compiling accident statistics last May, and cannot state that the numbers for 2007 are precise.
“We won’t really know that until the end of the year,” he said.
O’Brien said until April 30 of this year the numbers posted on the Scarborough Police Department Web site were taken from a dispatch log.
“You see an accident, you call it in, the dispatcher enters it into the log,” he said.
The new system involves the officer entering the data directly into a database, thereby removing the dispatcher from the equation. In the past, O’Brien said, as soon as the dispatcher sent an officer out to investigate an accident, it was entered into the log, even if it turned out there wasn’t one to investigate. Today, if an officer is dispatched to a reported accident site and finds upon arrival that the parties have left the scene, it isn’t counted.
Even so, aside from the increase at Haigis Parkway and Payne Road, O’Brien sees encouraging news with this year’s statistics.
“It looks like pretty much everything else has gone down. But it’s still good to have a heads-up of where to be careful of when you’re driving around town,” O’Brien said.
However, traffic consultant Tom Gorrill, of Gorrill-Palmer Consulting Engineers, Inc., questioned whether O’Brien was duplicating an existing effort by the Maine Department of Transportation (MDOT), which compiles the same information on a statewide basis and issues an annual list of the state’s “high crash locations.”
Unlike O’Brien’s list however, MDOT statistics aren’t based on the number of accidents alone. Although the state defines high crash locations as intersections that experience eight or more collisions in a three-year period, they are weighted according to a formula known as the “critical rate factor.”
“The critical rate factor takes into account the volume of traffic in the intersection and the severity of the accident,” Gorrill said. Accidents that cause property damage, but in which no one is injured, receive the lowest weight, he said. Accidents where someone is killed receive the highest weight.
Intersections with a critical rate factor greater than 1.0 are placed on the list, which, according to the MDOT Web site, includes at present more than 1,400 locations. The list, though a public document, is not available on-line.
“This type of information is very easily misinterpreted,” said MDOT spokesman Herb Thompson. “It’s really a planning tool that we invoke in order to determine departmental actions, when we might want to do safety-related improvements.
Dan Robbins, assistant state traffic engineer said just because an intersection is on the high crash location list, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is unsafe.
“It may be for a variety of reasons that it came up as a high crash location. We don’t put it on-line because it can generate a certain hysteria about an area that may not be unsafe at all,” Robbins said.
During 2004-2006, the most recent three-year period for which figures are available, 11 Scarborough intersections made the list.
Although some intersections made both O’Brien’s dangerous intersection list and MDOT’s high crash location list, there are some very clear differences between the two, when the critical rate factor is used, as opposed to just the number of total accidents.
For instance, with nine accidents in that period and a critical rate factor of 3.13, the intersection of Broadturn Road and Burnham Road tops the MDOT Scarborough high crash location list (MDOT ranks it 89th overall state-wide), but only appeared once on O’Brien’s list between 2004-2006.
With six accidents between 2004-2006, generating a critical rate factor of 2.44, the intersection of Payne Road, Scottow Hill Road and Beech Ridge Road placed second of the Scarborough locations on the MDOT list (158th overall), but hasn’t appeared on O’Brien’s list since at least 2001.
Some intersections place about the same on both lists, such as Gorham Road and Running Hill Road, which is fourth on the MDOT list for Scarborough locations with 17 accidents between 2004-2006 and a critical rate factor of 2.36. Between 2002-2007, the same intersection made O’Brien’s list every year, placing between second and fifth each time.
The difference in the two methods of determining dangerous intersections or high crash locations however is most evident with Haigis Parkway and Payne Road, which leads O’Brien’s list so far this year with 16 accidents. Although it was tied for sixth place in the 2006 rankings, in the preceding four years the intersection was ranked first or second on O’Brien’s list.
On the MDOT list it received a critical rate factor of 1.47, even though 29 accidents were recorded at the location between 2004-2006, making it the seventh highest crash location in Scarborough.
Gorham Road and Payne Road is another example of an intersection that consistently ranks high on O’Brien’s list of dangerous intersections but fairly low in comparison on the MDOT list of high crash locations.
Although the intersection is number two so far this year on O’Brien’s list – and over the previous five years never ranked lower than fourth – as far as MDOT is concerned, with 46 accidents occurring there between 2004-2006, its critical rate factor of 1.57 makes it number six among Scarborough’s top 11 high crash locations.
Gorrill said that no matter how heavily or lightly traveled an intersection may be it is very difficult to make it accident-proof.
“There could be something physically wrong with the intersection, producing a pattern that may be reduced by some sort of highway improvement, but you still have to expect that accidents are going to happen,” he said.