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If you crashed your car last year on a Douglas County road, chances are you were a teen-age guy driving too fast early one Friday evening in daylight, in good weather, on a blacktop road that was dry, straight and level.

And you hit an animal, most likely a deer.

A hilly and shoulderless stretch of County Road 442 between Lawrence and Stull is marked with no-passing signs for motorists. To make the blacktop more safe, plans are in the works to create shoulders and level out the steep hills.

Such are the conclusions of a new report compiled for Douglas County’s Traffic Safety Advisory Committee, which is looking for ways to increase safety on county roads.

At least for now, officials said, it looks like the best way to reduce accidents would be drivers swallowing a large dose of common sense.

“People need to be more aware,” said Keith Browning, who heads the committee and is the county’s director of public works.

The report crunched numbers for the 378 accidents that Douglas County Sheriff’s officers worked last year on rural roads, excluding highways such as Kansas Highway 10 and U.S. Highways 24, 40, 56 and 59.

The committee will review the numbers during a meeting next week. Examination of the data could lead to recommendations for making physical changes to the county’s blacktop routes and townships’ gravel roads, Browning said.

	By the numbersOf the 378 accidents that occurred last year on rural roads in Douglas County, 242 were on designated county roads. Another 120 were on township roads, and 16 were on other roads.Here are the five county routes with the highest number of accidents worked by Douglas County Sheriff’s officers in 2001:1. (tie) County Road 458, 40.1. (tie) County Road 1055, 40.3. (tie) County Road 442, 32.3. (tie) County Road 1061, 32.5. County Road 438, 22.Accident outcomesOf 378 total accidents:2 were fatal62 had injuries314 were property damage only461 vehicles were involvedSource: 2001 Douglas County Accident Data

“We don’t have unlimited funds,” he said. “We can’t do improvements everywhere, but maybe there are some things we can do that aren’t too expensive.”

Posting warning signs might help, Browning said, but extending shoulders on busy roads certainly would put the brakes on many accidents. Nearly one in four injury accidents last year put a car in a ditch, compared with only one in six involving collisions with another vehicle.

“Most of our accidents are one-vehicle accidents that leave the roadway,” Browning said. “(Adding shoulders) would provide some recovery areas.”

The report’s data didn’t surprise Commissioner Bob Johnson, but the numbers certainly frustrated him. Nearly one-third of accidents involved drivers who “exceeded posted speed limit,” traveled “too fast for conditions” or “failed to give full time or attention” to the road.

None involved a vehicle moving too slow.

“We have to build better roads because people won’t drive the speed limit,” said Johnson, retired chairman and CEO of Charlton-Manley Insurance in Lawrence. “We have to protect ourselves from ourselves.”

The county already is working on plans for overhauling Stull Road later this year. A 2.3-mile section of the busy two-lane road between Lawrence and Topeka will get an estimated $1.9 million makeover, including adding shoulders, shaving hills and filling valleys so drivers can see one another more easily west of Douglas County Road 1029.

Commissioners embrace such projects, which are financed largely by state and federal grants, but they continue to urge drivers to polish their own habits rather than rely on an engineer’s designs.

“There’s no substitute for driving carefully,” Commissioner Charles Jones said.

	2001 Douglas County Accident Data(These files are in pdf format. You must have the free Acrobat Reader to view them.)CoverContentsGlossaryGeneral SummaryTime of AccidentsLocation of AccidentsClassification of AccidentsDrivers Involved in AccidentsVehicles Involved in Accidents