ARLINGTON — When her son died in a car crash last month, Gail Chute hoped to prevent a repeat of the tragedy.
She wanted to put up a roadside sign that carried her son’s name and warned people to obey speed laws. She’d seen similar signs memorializing victims of drunken driving and she wanted the same for her son, Adrian Kuchin.
Police said Kuchin, 17, was speeding when he crossed the center line and smashed head-on into a semi.
“This is very important to me and I know it’s important to his friends,” she said. “We want to save as many kids and people as we can.”
Still, after Chute placed phone calls to officials, she learned that roadside memorial signs currently are only allowed for victims of drunken driving crashes.
That may soon change.
“Rather than looking at this as something we should not do, we tried to find reasons that we should do it,” said Pat O’Leary, who runs the roadside sign program for the state Department of Transportation.
Officials agreed Monday to review the federal rules that permitted the drunken driving memorial signs, to see whether relatives of crash victims involving high-speed or reckless driving could put up similar signs, O’Leary said.
Speed ranks a close second statewide to drunken driving in causing fatal car crashes. Speed-related crashes are on the rise and could soon exceed impaired driving as the state’s leading cause of traffic deaths, according to the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.
Chute’s phone call, among other similar recent calls, spurred the conversation about change, O’Leary said.
Since 1994, more than 120 roadside memorial signs have gone up in Washington warning drivers not to drink and drive, O’Leary said. The signs are paid for and maintained by relatives and carry the victim’s name.
“Those signs do make a difference,” said Lowell Porter, the traffic safety commission’s director. “Every time I drive by one, that’s a stark reminder that someone isn’t here anymore.”
Last year, the commission decided to prioritize speed-reduction alongside drunken-driving awareness and campaigns to promote seat-belt use, he said. Getting people to slow down isn’t easy.
“It’s a very tough behavioral thing to change,” he said.
When people drive over the speed limit, they exponentially increase the chance of a crash and the risks the crash will be deadly, Washington State Patrol trooper Kirk Rudeen said.
“As the speed goes up, the energy involved in the collision gets greater,” he said. “You need more time to react and you need more distance to stop. But you have less time to stop and you have less distance to stop.”
That means driving even a few miles per hour over the speed limit, especially in bad weather, can have fatal consequences, the trooper said.
“There’s a reason it’s called the speed limit,” Rudeen said. “When you start exceeding those speeds, that’s when you put yourself and others in danger.”
O’Leary said he doesn’t know how long it will take to approve the new roadside signs for victims of speed-related crashes.
Still, news that a “no” had turned into a “maybe” was welcomed by the family of the Marysville teenager who died.
“That is awesome. I am just so happy,” Chute, the boy’s mother, said.
Every day her son’s teenage friends drive the stretch of Highway 530 east of Arlington where her son died, she said.
“I want to make sure they’re driving carefully as everybody should,” Chute said.
Speeding is a big, big problem, she said.
“People don’t realize that you step on the pedal and it could kill you. We need to stop this, especially for teenagers,” she said.
Reporter Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3437 or jholtz@heraldnet.com.
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