After a fatal collision 10 months ago at a Richfield Township intersection, the teenage driver of a speeding car who admitted responsibility for the wreck told investigators he never saw the stop sign at which he should have stopped.
Arthur Nevers, a Richfield trustee, said he expects never to hear that particular explanation again for a crash at Sylvania Avenue and State Rt. 295 - not since mid-October, when the Ohio Department of Transportation put up the new stop signs on Sylvania with blinking light-emitting diodes around their edges.
"You can see it from my house, and I live two miles away," Mr. Nevers said of the westbound sign, which replaced the traditional stop sign that Michael Callan, then 17, passed before his car broad-sided an auto driven by Juanita Adams, 55, of Swanton, who died in the March 13 collision.
Rodney Conger, the village administrator in Republic, Ohio, gave an almost identical review of the blinking stop sign he saw a few years ago near Mansfield, Ohio, that inspired him to install such signs at a triangle of state-route intersections in his Seneca County community.
"You could see the thing blinking two miles away, even on a sunny day," Mr. Conger said. "They get your eye. They're not blinding, but you definitely see 'em."
The Ohio Department of Transportation, which has installed similar LED-enhanced signs at a half-dozen other intersections in its Bowling Green-based district along with the Sylvania-Route 295 corner, says it's too soon to know how much safety benefit the signs have brought. But both Mr. Nevers and Mr. Conger are confident they will prevent crashes, if they haven't already.
"We've had one wreck since putting those signs up," Mr. Conger said, and that involved a driver who pulled out after stopping and wasn't paying attention to cross traffic.
LED-enhanced signs triggered by passing traffic could be a measure against wrong-way motorists on freeways, according to promotional materials from the manufacturer of the patented signs, Traffic and Parking Control Co., of Elk Grove, Wis. Twice in the last two weeks, drivers have used exit ramps to enter Toledo freeways going the wrong way and crashed into oncoming traffic.
TAPCO offers Blinker Signs with a variety of messages, including wrong-way or do-not-enter signs that it says can be connected with motion sensors, though so far no such packages have been sold, said Jason Kugel, the company's product manager,.
On Dec. 30, a northbound pickup that authorities say was driven by Michael Gagnon, 24, of Adrian collided with a minivan on I-280 at Manhattan Boulevard after entering the freeway's southbound lanes at Navarre Avenue in Oregon, killing five of eight people in the minivan.
Police aren't saying yet where they believe the 20-year-old driver of a car that went the wrong way on eastbound I-475 in West Toledo early Friday morning entered the freeway before colliding with an oncoming vehicle near Rushland Avenue, injuring the other driver. But the closest eastbound exit, marked for Central Avenue but which uses Westland Avenue to get to Central, is the only such ramp before eastbound I-475 reaches the central Toledo junction with I-75.
Several states are testing wrong-way ramp signs with flashing lights activated by passing vehicles, and ODOT officials said after the Dec. 30 crash in Toledo that they previously installed extra signs on several exit ramps in Columbus that had been identified as problem spots for wrong-way drivers.
But no Toledo locations were identified during that study, and Jason Yeray, the district traffic safety engineer at ODOT's Bowling Green office, said the state is reluctant to put up special signs at every freeway exit - or every intersection, in the case of blinking stop signs - because officials believe that would compromise the signs' effectiveness.
"We try to use these as a tool, but the more you have them, they lose their target value," Mr. Yeray said.
In determining high-risk ramps, "we look for reoccurring or continuous patterns," agreed Theresa Pollick, the district spokesman in Bowling Green. "If there's not a pattern, well, these are such isolated incidents, and we're really not sure what it would take to stop a severely intoxicated driver."
Authorities say post-accident blood tests revealed Mr. Gagnon to have a 0.254 percent blood-alcohol level, three times the legal driving limit in Ohio. Police say the wrong-way driver and passenger involved in the crash Friday morning also were drunk.
Blinker Signs, for which Mr. Kugel's company holds patents, cost quite a bit more than standard traffic signs. Mr. Kugel said a typical Blinker Sign costs about $1,600, which includes solar panels and batteries for the lighting system, while ODOT spends about $80 for a regular sign. Including a motion-activation device would boost a sign's cost by about $2,500, Mr. Kugel added.
But Blinker Signs are ready to install and don't require any local electric power supply, so they can go anywhere they're needed, Mr. Kugel said. And because the lights outline signs' shapes, he said, they give motorists a better idea of what they're approaching from a distance.
Blinker Signs have been on the market for about six years, Mr. Kugel said. Three years ago, TAPCO sold about 100 of them per year, but last year sales were up to about 1,500, he said.
TAPCO's blinking stop signs were designed primarily to reduce "blow-through" incidents in which drivers either couldn't stop in time for a stop sign they weren't expecting, or didn't see it at all, Mr. Kugel said. A study in Texas showed that failure-to-stop crashes were reduced by 53 percent at intersections where the blinking signs were installed, he said.
But Mr. Yeray said that at four of the seven northwest Ohio locations where ODOT installed TAPCO's stop signs, it used them to replace overhead flashing red lights. At those corners, Mr. Yeray said, officials noticed unusually high numbers of crashes in which motorists stopped, but then pulled out into the path of oncoming traffic.
"Maybe those people assumed that, because there was a blinking light, it was a four-way stop," Mr. Yeray said, adding that the new stop signs are supplemented with yellow signs warning, "Cross traffic does not stop."
In Republic, the blinking stop signs are complemented with stop-ahead signs with yellow blinking LEDs. ODOT has used a couple of those as well, though only in selected locations where the stop signs aren't visible from a great distance, Ms. Pollick said.
The signs have not been universally accepted. Alonso Uzcategui, a Michigan Department of Transportation spokesman, said the solar panel kept falling off the Blinker Sign MDOT installed, on an experimental basis, in southwestern Michigan, so for now, his agency has no plans to buy more.
Mr. Conger's only problem with the Blinker Signs is his expectation that, like every other innovation, eventually its novelty will wear off.
"You constantly need to be putting up something different," he said, "because people get used to the same old thing."
Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.
First Published January 13, 2008, 12:09 p.m.
