Villanueva went to some effort to place blame on the road at the spot where Woods crashed. "This stretch of road is challenging and if you're not paying attention, you can see what happens," he told ABC News.
Of course, paying attention is a basic requirement of safe and responsible driving.
Hawthorne Blvd is not the narrow mountain road that jumps to mind when someone describes it as "curvy and steep." Engineers have already done what they can there - it's wide, free of obstacles, and in fact looks sort of like a freeway. In other words, it's built to encourage speeding.
Maybe Woods' crash will bring attention to much-needed safety interventions on that stretch. But what shape those interventions take is also key. The civil engineer's habit is to make it safer to go fast, and those chickens are coming home to roost.
But what is needed is more careful driving, and you don't engineer that by straightening, flattening, and widening.
Tiger Woods had a bad crash, and his recovery will be difficult. We wish him well.
Streetsblog California editor Melanie Curry has been thinking about transportation, and how to improve conditions for bicyclists, ever since commuting to school by bike long before bike lanes were a thing. She was Managing Editor at the East Bay Express, editor of Access Magazine for the University of California Transportation Center, and earned her Masters in City Planning from UC Berkeley.
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What happened in West Portal was entirely predictable and preventable. The city must now close Ulloa to through traffic and make sure it can never happen again
