IOWA – A new training facility could help lessen traffic times from crashes.
Iowa DOT has its eyes on Jasper County as the site of a new traffic training system. With crash totals in Iowa reaching around 3,000 a month, a new facility could help lessen those delay times.
The new facility would cost at least $2 million and could train people from all across Iowa and even those from other areas of the Midwest. The average crash takes about 50 minutes for crews to clear the lanes in Iowa. With another facility, clearing those crashes off the roads could be more efficient.
According to the DOT, Iowa had 405 deadly crashes in 2016, and there have already been 126 this year.
Jasper County’s Chief Deputy Duane Rozendaal worked for the highway patrol for 25 years, covering hundreds of crashes.
“You can immediately tell the nose drop on these cars, and when it’s like, ‘oh no’, and they go by you, and I hope for the best,” he said. “They go over the hill and sometimes they succeed in stopping, sometimes they don’t.”
“Literally every minute counts, and it’s not just safety, it’s also the efficiency of the system,” said Scott Marler, the DOT’s traffic coordinator.
“A couple of minutes could easily mean several hundred cars,” said Rozendaal.
It’s why the department wants to build a new traffic training center in rural Newton.
“The side of the interstate is not the place that you want to practice traffic incident management,” said Marler. “You really need a controlled environment to really practice those collaborations and those techniques really effectively.”
“Is there good visibility at the tail end of this thing? (You’ll have a time) where people are coming 70 miles an hour at highway speeds, and all of a sudden, there’s gridlock,” said Rozendaal.
It wouldn’t just be Iowa either. Marler says thousands of people from all over the Midwest could use the space as well.
The proposal hasn’t gotten a lot of push back locally, because of the potential impact on the economy during the training process, and the safer roads.
“If we do this well, we’ll have safer conditions, we’ll be moving our goods and services more efficiently across the transportation system, and ultimately there’s fewer angry motorists on the roads,” said Marler.
The proposal hasn’t gotten a lot of push back locally, because of the potential impact on the economy during the training process, and with the safer roads. Since the topic is still in the exploratory stage, there’s no definite date when it would open up.
