Highway work zone crashes kill hundreds nationwide, including many innocent Texans. Now the Texas Department of Transportation is hosting a 20-foot traveling wall memorializing such work zone deaths. Those tragedies occurred largely because drivers were too distracted or in too big of a hurry to heed the orange cones and barricades alerting them to work zones and urging their caution.

“People just need to learn to slow down and pay more attention to what’s going on on the road,” Central Texas DOT spokesman Ken Roberts told the Waco Tribune Herald. “There’s speeding and people doing things like talking on the phone, texting, eating.”

Tell us about it. As many as 6,000 American motorists yearly are now slaughtered by distracted drivers, often for no more reason than someone acting as if a call or text about lunch was an urgent matter while driving at high speed in heavy traffic.

Now you can add more than 800 persons nationwide who die in highway construction zones or other work zones, and another 40,000 who are injured — many of them seriously. These include transportation workers, law enforcement personnel and highway road crew members who are just trying to do their job. After all, if highways weren’t improved via work zones, you’d have no place to drive.

Also killed are many of the motorists who cause such crashes. But those laboring in work zones are especially vulnerable, as are pedestrians walking near a road or people who pull onto a shoulder to change a tire or make repairs. Just because you’re off the road — or behind work zone barricades — doesn’t mean a negligent driver barreling at 90 miles per hour can’t kill you anyway.

Often the culprit is a large truck, which can’t slow down as quickly as can a car. Out of 1,074 work zone fatalities nationwide in a recent year, 235 — or more than one in five — involved a large truck. Beyond that, the biggest cause of work zone accident deaths is speeding and inattention.

Roberts says Texas may have as many as 1,000 work zones set up across the state at a given time. Work zones will be especially prevalent in coming years due to many road projects planned along Interstate 35.

Texas DOT Executive Director Amadeo Saenz hopes the traveling memorial will help raise public awareness of the dangers around work zones and prompt more drivers to heed signs and speed limits around them. Besides Waco, the memorial is making stops in Beaumont, Amarillo, El Paso and Laredo.

Jim S. Adler & Associates urges all Texas motorists to drive with special caution in and around highway construction or road work zones. Respect the job that workers must do and curb your  impatience when encountering their labors.

You wouldn’t want cars careening around you while sitting at your office, would you? Well, highway work zones are some workers’ “office.” Respect that.

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