Driver beware: Danger is Arizona's other name

Where are the meanest of the East Valley's mean streets for motorists? What about in other cities?

Sure, you may know the intersection of Country Club Drive and U.S. 60 is a fur ball worth avoiding during the rush hours. But if you find yourself driving in a strange place, it may be worthwhile to learn beforehand where the danger lies. Forewarned is forearmed, and all that.

Proposal would delay Valley highway projects

Car pool lane to open on Loop 101

Rural transportation safety experts at the University of Minnesota have launched a new national service - SafeRoadMaps.org - to help drivers identify the most dangerous portions of upcoming trips through an online, searchable map. Compiling the data was the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The service was launched last summer by the school's Center for Excellence in Rural Safety, but it now flags the nation's Top 100 "Hot Zones" - areas that have experienced the most fatalities over the past five years. The hot zones, 100 each for rural and urban areas, are presented in a Google Map-based format, where viewers can zoom from a national map showing all of the zones, down to a photo of each individual section of the road.

Thankfully, the East Valley doesn't have any of these zones. For rural areas, the closest is near the intersection of Interstate 10 and state Route 587, south of Chandler. Meanwhile, Phoenix is loaded with urban hot zones, the nearest to us being the I-10/state Route 51 interchange.

According to the school, Arizona ranks among the worst states for most hot zones, both rural and urban.

Looking at a "heat map," which color-codes areas by their number of fatal crashes, nothing in the East Valley glows as bright as central Phoenix. But there are some trouble spots: For example, Country Club and the 60, and much of Loop 101 between the 60 and Loop 202.

Curiously, lit up is the intersection of Apache Trail and Ellsworth Road. Perhaps you east Mesans can fill me in on what's going on out there.

The newest version of SafeRoadMaps.org offers several other enhancements over the original version released in 2008. SafeRoadMaps now allows anyone visiting the site to enter a ZIP code, municipality name or street address, and immediately see a map or satellite image of all road fatalities that have occurred in the chosen area over the past five years.

Details about each crash, such as whether the driver was wearing a seat belt, drinking or speeding, are also available. (I checked out a few fatal crashes I've covered. It was like a trip down Memory Lane, if that lane was featured in a "Red Asphalt"-ish driver's education film.)

SafeRoadMaps.org is an interesting site and, even better, an informative one.

Light rail schedules change

Just a reminder for riders of light rail: This is the weekend that schedules change.

First, the trains now run deep into the night on Fridays and Saturdays. And Sundays, service now is every 20 minutes instead of every 15.

An updated schedule can be found here: http://www.valleymetro.org/images/uploads/lightrail_publications/METRO_Rail_Schedule_07_09.pdf.