Bridge Barrier Question Remains

Received this from an avid reader -- does this change anyone's mind? Could tragedy have been avoided? -- Sara

The latest Cold Spring Bridge suicide--on April 4 of lifelong Santa Barbara resident Lynne Martyniuk has reverberated throughout the Santa Barbara community.  So many people throughout the community knew Lynne, who was also a nurse at Cottage Hospital, and had three young children.  Where is the bridge barrier? See below links for a glimpse of the grief and outrage this latest preventable tragedy has caused.

http://www.santabarbara.com/lynne/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/51/support-the-cold-spring-bridge-safety-barrier

How do you lose $1 million? CalTrans Can....

Here's a press release from the Friends of the Bridge....Sara

Caltrans has lost the $1,000,000 that had been conditionally approved two years ago to fund its highly controversial proposal to construct unsightly barriers on the Cold Spring Bridge along Scenic Highway 154 near San Marcos Pass.

During the past year the barriers proposal has drawn widespread public opposition from residents and civic organizations in Santa Barbara County based on evidence that Caltrans has utilized false information and flawed analysis it its efforts to justify the proposal as a high-priority suicide prevention measure.

According to Marc McGinnes, a spokesperson for Friends of the Bridge, one of ten citizens groups opposing the Caltrans proposal, “It has long been clear that the barriers proposal is a gross boondoggle, but Caltrans has been able to wave all that money in the faces of local elected officials who should have taken action months ago to stop the project. Unless such officials are now prepared to act decisively to stop the projection which over $500,000 has been spent in staff support costs-- they are likely to seen as undeserving stewards of the kind of funds that they are asking citizens to give them in November when voting on Measure A.”

Caltrans was notified by the California Transportation Commission in late June that the $1 million that had been conditionally approved for the barriers proposal in September 2006 would no longer be available due to "transportation safety priorities statewide and the limited amount of state transportation funding".

According to documents posted on the website of Friends of the Bridge (www.cscbfriends.com), the conditionally approved funds had been diverted from taxpayer funds earmarked for “collision reduction safety improvements.” Project opponents, which include the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association, have challenged the diversion of funds earmarked for that purpose, citing the fact that traffic safety problems along Highway 154 are far more serious (an average of 4 deaths a year in recent years in traffic collisions)than the problem of occasional suicidal behavior on the Cold Spring Bridge (an average of slightly less than one jumper a year over the 44 year history of the bridge and just one in the last three years).

Project opponents will appear before the County Board of Supervisors on August 19 and the directors of the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments on August 21 at their meetings in Santa Barbara to request that public hearings be set to consider testimony and evidence concerning a formal request to Caltrans that it promptly withdraw and abandon its deeply flawed and fiscally irresponsible barriers proposal.

Other community organizations that have called upon Caltrans to abandon its barriers proposal include Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, Citizens Planning Association, Santa Barbara County Action Network, Pearl Chase Society, Los Padres Chapter of the Sierra Club, Los Padres ForestWatch, Womens Environmental Watch, and Santa Ynez Valley Alliance.

More on The Bridge -- SBCTA Opposes

Here's a letter I received a copy of about Cold Spring Bridge that was sent to CalTrans:

===========Letter from SBCTA to Cal Trans===============

This is to inform you of the opposition of the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association (SBCTA) to the CalTrans proposal to install fencing barriers on the Cold Spring Bridge. We have arrived at our position after receiving input from experts in law enforcement.

SBCTA understands that our public safety officers place themselves in life threatening situations on a daily basis due to the unpredictable conduct and behavior of certain members of our society. Nevertheless, when troubled individuals threaten to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, or engage in protesting while climbing the Golden Gate Bridge, we do not believe officers should put themselves in harm's way because of these individuals' erratic behavior and unfortunate conduct.

SBCTA would rather see our taxpayer dollars used to pay for putting more officers on the street and/or by providing our existing officers the wages and benefits they deserve as opposed to using these finite resources to build fencing and other barriers that are not only aesthetically unappealing, but are ultimately ineffective at stopping suicides from occurring.

We thank you for the opportunity to share our position with you on this important matter. In addition, CalTrans staff is always welcome to attend our monthly board of directors’ luncheons, held on the second Thursday of the month at Andersons Pea Soup in Buellton.



Sincerely,



Mike Stoker
President,
Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association

Press Release from Friends of the Bridge

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Compelled by public records requests from project opponents, CalTrans has
revealed that the actual cost of its controversial proposal to install
fencing barriers on the famously scenic Cold Spring Bridge is nearly $3
million, almost 5 times the amount it had previously disclosed. $1 million
of that sum appears to have been diverted from funds budgeted for "collision reduction--traffic safety" purposes.

Shortly after the true cost of the proposal became known, the directors of the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG), unanimously voted to hold a public hearing on May 15 to review the proposal in light of what one board member called "a whole body of new information that has come forward" which challenges the validity of the purported justification for the fencing barriers proposal.

Such information includes the fact that CalTrans doubled the actual number of suicides from the bridge in its calculation of the benefit:cost ratio for the project and that it misread studies it cited as to the central question of whether bridge barrier actually save lives or merely divert persons to commit suicide elsewhere. According to research reported by UCSB Professor Garrett Glasgow, the studies cited by CalTrans and other studies on the topic demonstrate that barriers appear to divert suicidal behavior to other places rather than to save lives.

Widespread community opposition to the fencing barriers proposal has developed over the past several months following disclosures about the questionable bases upon which it was given initial support. Recently the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association voted to inform CalTrans of its opposition to the barriers proposal, joining the following organizations that have previously done so:

Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation
Citizens Planning Association South County Land Use Committee
Pearl Chase Society
Santa Barbara County Action Network
Los Padres Chapter of the Sierra Club
Los Padres ForestWatch
Womens Environmental Watch
San Marcos Trout Club
Santa Ynez Valley Alliance
Friends of the Bridge

CalTrans has announced that it will release and circulate for public comment a draft environmental impact report on the proposal on May 9 and that it will conduct public hearings thereon in Santa Barbara on June 9 and in Solvang on June 10. Locations and times of these hearings has yet to be announced.

Community Post: Suicide Barriers Alternative on Cold Springs Bridge

Unfortunately, I don't have a way of linking to the actual, alternative proposal, if anyone has one -- please pass it along.

--------Friends of the Bridge Community Post/Press Release-----------

Opponents of a CalTrans proposal to install barriers on the Cold Spring
Bridge today formally submitted to that agency a detailed alternative
project proposal that they claim provides superior suicide prevention and
life-saving measures at a small fraction of the $1,000,000 allocated for
barriers and which would not require potentially-defacing physical
alterations of the bridge. By law CalTrans will be required to incorporate
the alternative into its project review and evaluation processes and to
make a carefully considered determination about which approach to pursue.

The new proposal is based in part on the study recently released by UCSB
Professor Garrett Glasgow revealing the lack of any evidence that bridge
barriers do anything other than diverting the problem elsewhere. The
Glasgow report concludes that "there is no evidence that a suicide
prevention barrier on the Cold Spring Bridge would save lives."
Accordingly, the new proposal asserts that "the barriers proposal amounts
to nothing more than a misguided and costly suicide diversion effort that
bears almost no legitimate relation to any traffic safety problem within
the scope of CalTrans' mission and primary functions."

The new proposal discloses that the $1,000,000 allocated for barriers was
taken from funds budgeted for "Collision Reduction-Safety Improvements."

In formulating the new proposal, its authors from the newly-formed citizens
group "Friends of the Bridge" incorporated a number of the features of a
plan adopted earlier this year by the New York State Bridge Authority to
address the problem of suicidal behavior on the 5 bridges under its
jurisdiction. The New York plan rejected the idea of installing barriers,
choosing "instead [to] construct a 'human barrier' that will outperform any
physical barrier and save more lives" and concluding that "preventing
suicides on [the] bridges will most likely occur if we recognize the
situation for what it is: a mental health problem that won't be solved by a
technical 'quick fix' in the form of a 'curtain of steel'...."

Elements of the "human barrier" approach now proposed for the Cold Spring
Bridge include setting clear policies and training methods to assure the
safety of law enforcement officer and others when encountering persons
demonstrating suicidal behavior on the bridge, installing call boxes
connecting to a specialized Lifeline suicide prevention counseling service,
and installation of surveillance cameras to provide continuous monitoring
of activities on the bridge.

The proposal points out that its features could be fully implemented within
a very short period, whereas CalTrans has estimated that the barriers
proposal faces many months of review and design efforts. According to Marc
McGinnes, one of the authors of the new proposal, "The jig is up, we now
know for sure that barriers are boondoggle, and the time has come to
CalTrans to change its course."

UCSB Study Debunks CalTrans

Ummmm, several day old news but the just-released UCSB study discredits the CalTrans proposal to install so-called suicide prevention barriers on the Cold Spring Bridge -- or is it now the Chumash Highway Bridge, doh!

"there is no evidence that a suicide prevention barrier on the Cold Spring Bridge would save lives,"

It seems more important to me to carry forward carefully-considered, facts-based, and effective suicide prevention measures and also consider any traffic calming techniques that could save lives from driving towards the casino as well. A newly-formed citizens group is calling upon CalTrans to withdraw its proposal to spend up to $1,000,000 to install such barriers. What do you think?