Great reporter killed in crash at Bay Area Toll Authority's traffic signals

David Halberstam was one of the best correspondents in Vietnam during the war I remember. He loved to discuss and argue, and had an enormous capacity to demonstrate a theme with examples. I remember - rather vaguely - several exchanges with him while we were both reporters in Saigon. My memory of him is of a guy who loved learning the details of how the struggle was developing, and was animated in discussion of what it all meant.

He reported for the New York Times and wrote a number of books. He managed to annoy both the left and the right at various times.

Halberstam died at age 73 Monday morning. I remember Halberstam in about 1970 in Saigon as a tallish lean fit man that you'd expect these days to live into his 80s, so he probably lost ten years of his life.

He died in a collision at a dangerous intersection on the southern end of the Bay Area Toll Authority's Dumbarton toll bridge that runs between Palo Alto in Santa Clara County and the Newark-Fremont area on the East Bay. It links US101 and I-880

The toll is $4 westbound only. The 2x3 lane bridge 1.6 miles (2.6km) long over a southern arm of San Francisco Bay takes about $10m/yr in tolls and caters to an average 55k veh/day.

Miserable stretch of road

The intersection where Hamberstam died is on an approach road to the Bridge called the Bayfront Expressway, not at all an expressway but an anomalous section of signalized surface road in a link between two major expressways (US101 and I-880). Halberstam was a passenger in a red Toyota Camby driven by Kevin Jones a journalism student at UC Berkeley.

Jones' Camry had come off the Dumbarton Bridge westbound and was turning left into Willow Road at the signalized T-intersection. A car driving eastbound on the Bayfront Expressway heading toward the Dumbarton Bridge rammed into Jones Camry on the passenger side where Halberstam was sitting as it turned across the eastbound lanes.
One or other of the drivers must have run a red.



COMMENT:

Regardless, the surface intersections of this so-called expressway are a disgrace

The Bay Area Toll Authority deserves some blame for the crash that killed Halberstam. They took responsibility for designing the upgrade of the Bayfront Expressway which was completed as recently as 2003. They produced the present design which added lanes from 2x2 to 2x3 lanes but left the old signalized surface intersections in place.

The addition of lanes to a major bridge approach road without grade separations is to engineer a killing field.

BATA should make amends by going back and doing a proper upgrade with bridging and ramps. They could rename it the David Halberstam Expressway in the memory of a great American reporter who died needlessly early on a lousy bit of BATA road.

Real toll authorities don't do signalized intersections, they bridge, they do interchanges.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-04-25