THE STATE Department of Transportation should figure how to protect motorists from the hazardous guardrails in the Big Dig, or else it should replace them altogether. Either way, the rails, whose design has been implicated in several grisly deaths in the tunnels, pose too great a safety hazard to be left as is.
The railings, which run the length of raised walkways alongside the tunnels, were designed to protect maintenance workers who might otherwise be at risk of falling into traffic. But odd quirks of their design - from the size of the gaps between horizontal runners to the squared-off corners on vertical posts - make them likely to ensnare and mangle motorcyclists who brush against the side of the roadway or drivers who are partially ejected from their vehicles. A state trooper whose motorcycle collided with the railing at a moderate speed lost an arm and suffered a broken neck in 2005, and the state is now defending a lawsuit by his widow.
Why the railing was built as it was is anyone’s guess. By one estimate, it cost up to $700,000 more than a safer option considered by Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the joint venture that supervised the Big Dig. State Senate President Therese Murray has rightly called for a safety review of the railing, and that review ought to focus on how to mitigate the danger. It’s not clear how much it would cost to replace the railings entirely, or whether there are cheaper options available. But state transportation officials should find out.
The circumstances of most other fatal accidents between 2005 and 2008 suggested that the victims would have risked serious injury no matter how the guardrails were constructed. Meanwhile, an engineer who submitted an affidavit for the state argues that the rails were built according to relevant standards. But safety features on public roadways need to be designed to minimize the harm even when drivers fail to behave as they should. And design standards have to evolve when lethal accidents expose flaws that the authors of the standards never anticipated.
