Treacherous crossings: Top 10 intersections for crashes in Santa Fe

Feb. 18—Drivers on their morning commute were slowed at a congested intersection Friday after a silver sedan rear-ended an SUV, which in turn hit another car.

Newspaper vendor Mickey Morales, 65, saw the series of collisions unfold while standing in a tree-laden median at St. Francis Drive and Cerrillos Road. He's been selling copies of The New Mexican at the busy spot daily for about three years and has witnessed some 15 crashes there, he said.

"Most of them, it's the cellphone," Morales said of drivers who cause the collisions. "Sometimes I see this — coffee, cellphone, cigarettes and hauling [expletive]."

He chose the median with trees for protection against inattentive drivers, he added.

Data provided by the New Mexico Department of Transportation shows Morales' intersection, just outside the downtown area, is one of the crossings in the city that sees the most crashes. There were 93 collisions at St. Francis and Cerrillos in the three-year period of 2019-21, the most recent data available.

During the three-year span, law enforcement responded to 5,532 crashes at intersections in Santa Fe, or within 150 feet of a street crossing — most of which city and state officials attributed to distracted drivers and errors in heavy traffic.

Six of the top 10 most dangerous crossings in Santa Fe were along Cerrillos Road, and three were along St. Francis Drive. Cerrillos Road's south-side intersection with Airport and Rodeo roads topped the list with 110 total crashes in three years.

The state data shows 14,472 people were involved in the 5,532 crashes, with 2,740 people suspected to have been injured and 25 killed.

Santa Fe police Capt. Anthony Tapia, who heads the department's Support Operations section, said the 10 intersections that saw the most crashes from 2019-21 are major traffic arteries. Traffic enforcement is emphasized on such roadways by "all uniformed staff and traffic safety operations," he added.

"The majority of traffic flow that travels in or through Santa Fe uses Cerrillos, St. Francis — those main, main arteries," Tapia said. "When you consider that, you have an influx of traffic. If the majority of traffic is there, that's where we expect to have more incidents of improper driving because of the larger amount of traffic."

Like Morales, Tapia said the majority of crashes officers and public safety aides encounter are caused by driver error.

"It is very, very rare that we see a contributing factor of a motor vehicle collision caused by a roadway design or the timing of a lighting cycle at an intersection," Tapia said.

"It is, the vast majority, driver error. You have inattentive driving, people talking on the cellphone, texting while driving, not paying attention to the traffic signals, following too closely — and those collisions do occur in a greater number" when a greater rate traffic is involved, he said.

Jim Murray, a state Department of Transportation spokesman, echoed Tapia's comments — even if intersections are optimally designed, driver error will make them less safe, he said.

"Most intersections — they're going to fall into a couple of distinct types [of crashes]. Rear-end collisions, or somebody going through a red light and, you know, getting T-boned," Murray said. "Again, this is all driver error. There's usually nothing wrong with the actual intersection. The lights are working properly; people just aren't paying attention."

It's difficult to find ways to mitigate collisions "when it's all user error," he said.

Rocky Moretti — director of policy and research for TRIP, a national transportation research nonprofit — said there is a set of broader "holistic" solutions to help increase safety at intersections. These include better education of the driving public, along with pedestrians and bicyclists; effective traffic enforcement; better access to high level trauma care nearby; and engineering.

"That's when you get more into the need to tailor solutions to specific intersections," Moretti said.

When it comes to design choices that could help improve intersection safety, Moretti said cities can add high-friction pavement and install roundabouts where possible.

Santa Fe Public Works Director Regina Wheeler said any time her department works on a traffic corridor in the city — like the over $100,000 project to improve signal timing on St. Francis Drive — it evaluates crash data.

If the Public Works Department is evaluating a corridor, traffic engineers hired by the department will evaluate all of its intersections "for their level of service, as well as their safety performance," she added.

Wheeler said traffic corridors are selected for evaluation based on a number of factors: time since the last evaluation, available funds and significant changes in the area. She cited a corridor study on Agua Fría Street, due to new housing developments that will be popping up in the area, as well as roundabouts that will be placed on South Meadows Road because of a new development.

"When there's a development in the area, we take a look at the new projected traffic volumes and the performance of the intersections, and then make recommendations," Wheeler said. "If anything needs to be changed, then we'd pursue a capital project for that."

The Public Works Department evaluates intersection safety by looking at the number of accidents compared to the total amount of traffic that goes through a specific crossing, Wheeler said.

"If you have very little traffic in an intersection but two accidents a year, that might be kind of a high percentage. Whereas if you have tens of thousands of cars a day going through an intersection, and you have two accidents a year, that's [a] super small percentage," she said.

People ask her department to try to solve "speeding problems" and "accident problems," she said, and while the agency can make some changes to slow traffic, driver error can only be curbed by drivers themselves.

"There's a saying that no amount of concrete and asphalt is going to prevent an accident from a driver that's not paying attention or speeding," Wheeler said. "I just feel like we're neighbors in Santa Fe, and we should be driving as such."