KCTV 5KCTV5 Investigation: Divided Highways - Do Cable Barriers Save Lives? 3-01-2011

Drivers in Missouri see highway cables separating one direction of traffic from crossing into another, but not a single road in Kansas has ever seen highway cables.
When it comes to highway cables, KCTV5 found states have dramatically different opinions about using them.
If a driver veers toward oncoming traffic on a divided highway in Missouri, the odds are high that a cable median barrier will catch their car, preventing a head-on collision. If a driver in Kansas makes the same mistake, there is no chance the cables will stop them because they aren't used anywhere in the state. Some said that is costing lives.
One woman has first-hand experience on how a head-on collision can change lives.
"That whole year is pretty fuzzy now," Tara Coffman said. "I had, you know, just had a baby. I just turned 26."
The moments that shape Coffman's life are measured in seconds.
Twenty-four seconds is the length of the only video she has of her husband and their newborn son.
Two seconds is the estimated amount of time Justin likely had to try and avoid the truck barreling toward him head-on.
Five seconds is the time Coffman can't let go of.
"What if I'd let him go five seconds earlier?" Coffman said. "You know, it could have made a difference."
It was the morning of April 14, 2006, when Justin Coffman was heading into work driving eastbound on Kansas Highway 10.
"He tried to avoid it," Tara Coffman said.
A tractor-trailer in the westbound lanes crossed over.
"He tried to swerve," she said.
The tractor-trailer barreled toward Justin's Toyota Camry.
"He ran head-first into my husband's car," Tara Coffman said.
Justin Coffman, 28, died at the scene.
"There is no reason that a westbound should ever meet an eastbound," Tara Coffman said. "I mean, my husband was doing nothing wrong."
Tara Coffman is convinced a cable median barrier, like the ones used all over Missouri highways, would have stopped, or at least slowed the tractor-trailer that struck and killed her husband.
Manufacturer training videos show that a full-sized pickup truck, driving 60 miles per hour is stopped by a cable median barrier. While the cable median barrier are not designed to stop something as large as a tractor-trailer, in Missouri they have.
Tom Evans is the Missouri Department of Transportation's traffic engineer in Kansas City, Mo. He said in 2004, the state installed 150 miles of cable along Interstate 70 and as the cable went in, the number of people dying on the highway plummeted. MODOT came up with a simple formula for barrier instillation -- go where the drivers are dying.
"I had one person that said, they were just, the headlights were coming at them, they thought it was it. And then it just stopped and they went on by ... And they went back and saw the car snagged up in the cable."
Evans said the cables cost $100,000 a mile to install, but that's not the number his department focuses on.
"Although I have to use numbers to correlate everything, I know that every one of those numbers has a name," Evans said.
KCTV5 studied a decades worth of crash report data along the stretch of K-10 between Lawrence and Lenexa and found 19 people had died during that period. Seven of the victims, almost 40 percent, died when a car traveling one direction crossed over, through the grass median and struck a vehicle going the other direction.
"Would you agree that cables could have prevented most if not all of those cross median crashes on K-10?" KCTV5's Dana Wright asked James Brewer, the engineering manager for the Kansas Department of Transportation.
"That's a difficult answer. I would say the probability is that it would've, or could've," Brewer said. "If you just start putting up cable indiscriminately, because you had a fatality, it may never happen there again. And that leads you into, well we're going to have to put it in all over the state. Under the, wherever you have a median. And that's not, that's not good economy."
Brewer said in a recent cost-benefit analysis, a small stretch of highway in Topeka qualified for cable, as did Kansas Highway 96 in Wichita. But K-10, which handles up to 43,000 vehicles a day, did not.
"These are trade offs that we're talking about here," Brewer said. "Most people that I hear from, most complaints are about the road surface. 'You got a pothole,' or 'It's rough,' or 'When you gonna do something about this?'"
"My husband could be here today enjoying his children if there had been a cable," Tara Coffman said.
Later in 2011, for the first time in Kansas history, cable median barrier will go in -- but not on K-10, but in Topeka and Wichita. KDOT officials said K-10 is a good candidate for the cable the next time the re-evaluate their highway statistics in three years.
Missouri has been using the cables for 12 years and just reported the lowest number of highway fatalities statewide since the 1950s.
MoDOT's Cable Median Program
KDOT's Cable Median Guidelines

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