Fixing a dangerous highway

It was one of the worst crashes in Ventura County history: In 2003, seven members of the Covarrubias family were killed on Highway 118 near Moorpark when a car rear-ended them, sending their car into oncoming traffic. Four years later, officials are going to Washington, seeking money for long-stalled transportation projects:

Two major undertakings in the East County include the connectors between the 23 and the 101 freeways and an Environmental Impact Report for rural Highway 118, a road plagued with deadly accidents.

Highway 118 has been a subject of growing concerns after several major accidents on the two-lane road. According to the Star, a new task force has been formed to "tackle a problem that has vexed politicians and residents for years: making Highway 118 safe without destroying the area's rural character."

The numbers are sobering:

The two-lane portion of the highway threads from Moorpark past bucolic Somis to the eastern edge of Ventura. It was the site of one of the most horrific accidents in the county's history in 2005, when seven people were killed, five of them children. Since 2003, about 300 collisions have occurred annually along the entire stretch of the highway from Moorpark to where the highway converges with Highway 126. Around one-third involved injuries. But in the portion that runs from the western side of Moorpark to Somis, the number of collisions rose from 57 in 2005 to 76 last year. The number injured increased from 23 to 39. Deaths declined sharply in that stretch from 2005, when the seven fatalities were recorded. There were eight killed in total that year, but only one last year along that portion of the rural roadway.

Comments

[William Isenberg]

Camarillo is a great place to live, but getting to the Val can be a chore. I always avoid the killer section of 118, which is a hill-and-dale 2-lane with swerving RR crossing added for good measure. The 118 freeway in College Park has been built with a stub to the west, but it will be a long time before we can bypass the commercial strip through south Moorpark. Remember, it took about 30 years to get the state 210 built from La Verne to connect with the Devore cutoff.