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TXDOT data reveals San Antonio's worst spots for wrecks
The Riverwalk District, the Six Flags amusement park and a major suburban shopping mall are among San Antonio's worst hot spots for wrecks, a Texas Watchdog analysis finds.
Sun Sep 5 06:56:00 2010 CST
By Jennifer Peebles
Remember the Alamo – and don’t forget to use your turn signal as you drive past it.
The area around San Antonio’s popular Riverwalk District – an attraction for locals and tourists alike -- is one of the three most wreck-prone spots in downtown San Antonio and one of the six most wreck-prone spots in all of Bexar County.
That’s according to a Texas Watchdog analysis of nearly three years’ worth of wreck data from the Texas Department of Transportation – data that our partners at WOAI-TV Channel 4 in San Antonio fought for two years to access under state public records laws.
Even though the Riverwalk and its restaurants, shops and scenery are on an all-pedestrian level below that of the city’s automobile traffic, much of the touristy surrounding area – and the several blocks stretching north to Travis Park -- have one of the highest concentrations of wrecks in the county for 2007, 2008 and most of 2009. And the most wreck-prone spot in San Antonio is in that neighborhood, near the corner of St. Mary's and College streets.
DowntownMost of the Bexar County wrecks in TxDOT’s database for the given time period included latitude and longitude coordinates of the crash, recorded by the police officers who investigated the wrecks. At the request of WOAI, Texas Watchdog used special mapping software to plot the wrecks on a map and analyze the results to find the areas with the highest densities of wrecks.
Aside from the Riverwalk area, another major wreck hotspot was a section of the South Pan Am Expressway – a conjoined section of interstates 10 and 35 between West Martin and West Commerce streets, not too far from Christus Santa Rosa Hospital -- as well a third area around Methodist Hospital and Interstate 35.
The most wreck-prone spots in Bexar County’s suburban areas were the Loop 410 exit for Ingram Park Mall, at Wurzbach Road; the intersection of I-10 with Loop 1604, near Six Flags Fiesta Texas theme park; and the U.S. 281 junction with Loop 1604.
WOAI investigative reporter Brian Collister, with whom I serve on the board of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, first asked TxDOT for access to its wreck database two years ago.
Mall wrecks
I’ll let Brian tell how it played out from there. Here’s an excerpt from a blog post he wrote earlier this year:
My fight to get these records started back in 2008 when I filed an open records request for the entire database. The Attorney General ruled it was public, but TXDOT challenged the ruling in court. It feared the ruling would mean that ambulance chasing attorneys and chiropractors would have access to the names and address of crash victims. (Ironically, they already get that information from our local police departments.)
To calm those concerns, our attorney reached a deal with TXDOT. The state would provide the data without any personal information and we would withdraw our request. But for some reason, the agency at the time was slow to finalize the deal... the reason now is clear.
This is when TXDOT decided to get sneaky.
Late one Friday afternoon last March, while the lawsuit was still going on, I stumbled across a bill filed in the legislature that would make the entire crash database secret!
It turns out that TXDOT officials had quietly gone to Senator John Carona of Dallas, the head of the Senate's Committee on Transportation and Homeland Security, and begged him to file a bill to ban release of the data - forever. The TXDOT officials decried the AG ruling and claimed it would spell disaster for accident victims who will be further besieged by rogue lawyers and doctors.
But TXDOT conveniently forgot to tell the senator about our lawsuit and the compromise it had agreed to. It also conveniently forgot to tell our lawyer that they had gone behind our back in a shameful attempt to shut off the data with a new law.
Once we learned what was going on, we sprung into action. I testified to the senate committee along with representatives of several open government and media groups. Luckily, the lawmakers listened and the governor eventually signed a bill making the data public - minus the personal information.
So why would TXDOT fight so hard to try and keep this information from you? I don't know and could never get an honest answer from anyone at TXDOT.
I’ll add that FOIFT was among the open government groups that pushed for the release of the information. You can also read another summary of Collister's fight for the TxDOT wreck database, and all its twists and turns, written by the San Antonio Express-News' John Tedesco.