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JENS-Citizens for Safer Highways
(Just End Needless Suffering)
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Why JENS?
JENS-Citizens for Safer Highways, a non-governmental citizens advocacy group, was founded in 1996 following the tragic death of high school senior Jennifer Krukowski on U.S. Route 20 in Central Massachusetts. Jen was one of dozens of individuals who lost their lives on this old truck highway during the 80's and 90's. Our group is dedicated to improving the safety of this road.
When we started, Route 20 was a four-lane, 50 mph road with less than regulation lane widths, no emergency lanes, drainage problems, and limited sight distances for drivers including blind driveways. Most importantly, on-coming traffic in those narrow lanes was only separated by a modest line of yellow paint. The route was heavily travelled being the primary east-west route in booming Southwest Worcester County and also a toll-free commercial cut-off between I-84 and I-395/290.
In that corridor, Route 20 had a very bad reputation. Head-on collisions were particularly commonplace. Most people in Central Massachusetts, it could be argued, knew someone who had lost a friend or relative there. The major trauma centers in the area were well acquainted with 20 as were the emergency services personnel in the towns along the route. If you applied criteria developed by Reader's Digest for its "America's Most Dangerous Highways" series (which we did in our campaign), Route 20 easily qualified for membership.
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How JENS Started, What JENS Did
Following Jennifer's death, her friends and family initiated a petition drive to separate the traffic flows by dividing Route 20 in our town, Charlton. Another community member wrote a town government resolution calling on the Massachusetts Highway Department (MassHighway) to provide temporary means of increasing driver awareness of the centerline and to divide the road. In April 1996, these groups came together along with friends and family members to found JENS. This is what we did:
1. Campaigned the Governor's Office and MassHighway through our petition drive which eventually numbered well over 10,000 signatures from all over the region.
2. Got our selectmen to pass the resolution calling for action from MassHighway.
3. Pressed MassHighway officials for action using newspaper and radio interviews.
4. Worked with our excellent state legislators, then House Minority Leader David Peters and Senator Richard Moore, for the solutions we sought.
As a group advocating safety, even though we had strong feelings about protesting, we committed ourselves to using only safe means of protest (avoiding things like demonstrations on the road or traffic slowdowns, etc.). To build our base of support, we also committed ourselves to be advocates for the community and worked with local police, state police, other government officials and concerned citizens.
Within a few months, our efforts led, providentially, to a multi-million dollar commitment for a redesign of Route 20! Once we received that commitment, we made sure we didn't disappear (since these projects have a tendency to stall in the design phase) and kept working by:
1. Doing research on accident and other related data in support of our cause. At first this data came from local and state police, but once we got MassHighway on board, we were able to use their data which were much more thorough.
2. Designing a "Please Drive Safely" billboard [see the top of our page] with time donated by Southbridge Savings Bank. The billboard ran in the summer of 1996.
3. Appearing at key meetings, including all design hearings, armed with our research which we shared freely with everyone. Other meetings included regional transportation planning meetings and meetings with town officials and the local chamber of commerce.
4. Meeting with MassHighway to advocate improved solutions and to build a good working relationship (part partner and part watchdog). For example, they were initially only planning to use plastic stanchions along the centerline in the initial phase of the project. These could only be used in the warm months due to snowplowing. We argued for and won a year-round, centerline rumble strip which MassHighway then chose to extend beyond the town borders and into other adjacent high hazard sections of 20.
5. Writing all area realtors with a fact sheet promoting the benefits of the project and giving them ideas on how to use these as selling points. These points included the safety and traffic benefits as well as the more focused commercial development that a better designed 20 would provide.
6. Canvassing project abutters to understand their concerns and offering to bring those to MassHighway.
7. We even took the MassHighway design team pizza one late work night.
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What Happened
Beyond the summer of 1996, the Route 20 project pressed onward. The rumble strip and stanchions went in place within a few months. Our local and state police initiated special enforcement campaigns to better control speeding, and they initiated a "lights on" campaign encouraging all-weather and daytime use of headlights on the road. Our local police also ran their own "drive safely" billboard and bumper sticker campaign a year or so later.
The design and preliminary work was completed in just about 2 years- a record time for a project this big. The MassHighway design team won an award for their design. The new design included upgraded and new traffic signals, regulation width travel and emergency/breakdown lanes, improved drainage, reduced overall environmental impact, and the jersey barrier for which we had fought. In addition through a series of cuts and fills, the sight distances were dramatically improved. This improved design was also largely accomplished with very little land-taking.
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In July of 1998, the General Assembly and the Governor's office recognized our work
by naming the new section of U.S. 20 the "JENS Memorial Highway" in
honor of the group's work. The project officially broke ground in October of 1998.
Today, you can drive through the first phase of the project which is still under
construction. Within a few years the rest should be completed.
Photo copyright and credit: Southbridge Evening News, 1998
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We hope that our success story encourages you. We were often told early in our
work that we would never see the day when the road would actually get fixed. We
freely offer our strategies and tactics in the hope that they may benefit others who
want to improve highway safety in their community. Copyright 2001 JENS-Citizens for Safer Highways
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Other Links of Interest
Child passenger safety info from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia or from NHTSA.
Interested in national accident research? Try NHTSA fatal accident or automotive sampling system sites.
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