Apr 28, 2019 3 min read

Imagine for a minute that it’s 3 a.m., and you’re driving down a largely deserted Interstate 79 on the northbound portion between Washington and Pittsburgh.

You’re on the winding highway, and you see a pair of headlights rapidly coming toward you. But they’re not in the southbound lane. They’re in your lane, and they shouldn’t be.

This is the sort of nightmare where most of us would feel lucky to wake up and find that we were just dreaming. But wrong-way driving is unfortunately not just the product of random neurons firing during sleep. Nationally, about 350 people die a year as a result of wrong-way driving, according to the U.S. Transportation Department. Twenty-two percent of all wrong-way crashes cause at least one fatality, compared to 0.5% for all other kinds of crashes.

There have been at least five fatalities resulting from wrong-way driving in the region over the last month. Late on Easter Sunday, four people were killed on Route 65 in Beaver County due to a driver going the wrong way; then, on April 6, a 25-year-old Morgantown, W.Va., resident was killed when she drove on to I-79 at the Canonsburg exit going the wrong way around 4 a.m.

While investigations of those accidents are still unfolding, researchers point out that most wrong-way accidents are caused by drivers who are confused or fatigued, or under the influence of alcohol or drugs. They also tend to happen at night. But given the labyrinthine series of entrances, exits and twisting roads that drivers confront in this region, it’s easy to sometimes feel a twinge of uncertainty that you’re in the correct lane even when you are a longtime resident, fully rested and traveling in broad daylight.

Something needs to be done to prevent wrong-way driving. And Pennsylvania can look to other states for examples of how to proceed.

In Ohio and Michigan, for instance, new signs are being given a test run that unmistakably let drivers know they going the wrong way by flashing bright lights. According to The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, “The lights on the new ‘wrong way’ signs flash when oncoming drivers are detected by radar transmitter-receivers attached to the sign. The signs also are equipped with cameras that allow authorities to see what triggered the sign to flash.” Similar sensors have been put in place in parts of Florida, Arizona, California, Rhode Island, Missouri, Texas and Wisconsin.

Cracking down on impaired drivers is also crucial in stopping wrong-way driving. Entrance and exit ramps could also be reconfigured to make them easier to navigate at any time of day.

Of course, the odds of any of us being in a wrong-way crash are negligible. But we should do everything we can to make those odds even smaller.