By Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler
At a California State Senate committee hearing this year, the director of CalTrans, Tony Tavares, showed a simple chart that might have caused the assembled lawmakers some alarm.
It was a series of black bars representing the death toll on California’s roads in each of the past 20 years.
Fatalities had been falling until 2010, when the bars started getting longer and longer. A blood-red arrow shot up over the growing lines, charting their rise, as if to make sure nobody could miss the more than 60% increase in deaths.
“We are working to reverse the overall trend,” Tavares said.
No legislators asked about the chart. No one asked the director what, exactly, his agency was doing about it.
Over the next three hours, the Senate Transportation Committee members asked instead about homeless encampments along roads, gas tax revenue, gender identity on ID’s and planning for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The committee chair said it was the legislature’s first informational hearing on the state’s transportation system in more than a decade. Yet only two senators — both Republicans with little legislative power in a state controlled by Democrats — even asked about dangerous driving, one following up with questions about a deadly stretch of road in her district and the other about a small California Highway Patrol program to target egregious behavior behind the wheel.
Over the past decade, nearly 40,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been injured on California roads. As an ongoing CalMatters investigation has shown this year, time and again those crashes were caused by repeat drunk drivers, chronic speeders and motorists with well-documented histories of recklessness behind the wheel. Year after year, officials with the power to do something about it — the governor, legislators, the courts, the Department of Motor Vehicles — have failed to act.
The silence, in the face of a threat that endangers nearly every Californian, is damning.
California has some of the weakest DUI laws in the nation. Here, DUI-related deaths have been rising more than twice as fast as the rest of the country. But this fall, a state bill to strengthen DUI penalties was gutted at the last minute.
When it comes to speeding — one of the biggest causes of fatal crashes — again the legislature has done little. For two years in a row, bills that would have required the use of speed-limiting technology on vehicles have failed.
Lawmakers did pass legislation a couple years ago that allows the use of speed cameras. But it’s just a pilot project in a handful of jurisdictions.
Marc T. Vukcevich, director of state policy for advocacy group Streets For All, considers it a win — but a modest one.
“This shit is not enough to deal with the size and severity and the complexity of the problem we have when it comes to violence on our roadways,” Vukcevich said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declined an interview request. Last year, he vetoed a bill that would have required technology that alerts drivers when they’re speeding.
The state DMV, which is under his authority, has wide latitude to take dangerous drivers off the road. But it routinely allows drivers with extreme histories of dangerous driving to continue to operate on our roadways, where many go on to kill.
Steve Gordon, whom Newsom chose to run the agency in 2019, won’t talk about it. He has declined or ignored CalMatters requests for an interview.
The agency simply released a statement from him in March, after our first interview request, touting modernization efforts that reflect an “ongoing commitment to enhancing accountability and transparency while continually refining our processes to ensure California’s roads are safer for everyone.”
Neither Newsom nor Gordon has announced any major changes since then.
How a bill to fight DUIs fails in Sacramento
For a brief moment earlier this year, Colin Campbell thought the state might finally do something about the scourge that changed his life one night in 2019.
A repeat drunk driver slammed into his Prius on the way to the family’s new home in Joshua Tree, killing his 17-year-old daughter, Ruby, and 14-year-old son, Hart.
Campbell, a writer and director from Los Angeles, began advocating for California to join most other states and create a law requiring in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI.
At first, he was encouraged when the bill coasted through two legislative committees. But then came the roadblocks.
The ACLU opposed the measure, calling it “a form of racialized wealth extraction,” according to a Senate Public Safety Committee report from July. In California, people forced to use the devices have to pay about $100 a month to a private company to rent them, though there’s supposed to be a sliding fee scale based on income.
Then the DMV told lawmakers that it could not “complete the necessary programming” for the law, citing possible technology delays and costs of $15 million or more.
The bill was gutted. California couldn’t do something that nearly three dozen other states could.
Campbell called the sudden reversal a shameful example of forsaking public safety for bureaucracy.
“Our lives were destroyed that night,” he said. “If these people’s children had been killed by a drunk driver, there is no way they would be objecting to this.”
Even if the law had passed, DMV data suggests that California judges would have mostly ignored it.
State law says judges have to require in-car breathalyzers for people convicted of repeat DUIs. Last month, the DMV issued a report reinforcing what a similar report laid out two years earlier. Judges across the state ordered the devices just one-third of the time for repeat offenders. In 14 counties, they ordered the devices less than 10% of the time for second-time DUI offenders. The counties are Alameda, Colusa, Glenn, Lassen, Los Angeles, Madera, Mono, Plumas, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Sierra, Tulare and Yuba.
DMV officials did not answer questions about what, if anything, the agency was doing about it.
We reached out to all 14 counties’ courts. Only eight responded to questions.
Chris Ruhl, executive officer for the Glenn County Superior Court, said the court is looking at local changes.
“Given the light CalMatters is bringing to this issue … the Glenn Court will review its current DUI sentencing practices,” according to a statement.
Glenn was one of a number of counties — including LA, Alameda and San Luis Obispo — that also suggested it wasn’t their judges’ responsibility to issue a court order. They said they only needed to notify the DMV of the convictions.
However, the law is clear: It’s the judge’s job to order the offender to use the device, said Jerry Hill, the retired Bay Area Democrat who wrote the bill.
When he worked in the Capitol, Hill said he also saw little urgency to rein in intoxicated driving.
“If you ask any legislator, they are going to say it’s a terrible, terrible thing,” he said.
But he said committee chairs and staff members who set the tone and write analyses often shied away from increasing criminal penalties.
“That’s where we see a lack of understanding, in my view, of the devastating effect of drunk driving in California,” he said.
Lawmakers say next session could bring change
A number of lawmakers said they are aware of the carnage on our roadways and plan to do something about it this coming legislative session, maybe.
Sen. Bob Archuleta, a Democrat from Norwalk who sits on the Transportation Committee, lost his granddaughter to a drunk driver just before Christmas last year. He said he recently met with representatives from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and is considering possible bills.
“This is not a Republican issue, a Democrat issue, an independent issue — or political issue. This is a life-saving issue,” he said. “We should all take it as seriously as the family that lost a loved one.”
Democratic Assemblymember Nick Schultz of Burbank said he is considering introducing at least one measure next year to address loopholes and weaknesses in state law.
Schultz, who started his career prosecuting DUI cases in Oregon and now chairs the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, said he is weighing several potential measures that would address issues CalMatters highlighted in its reporting this year, including lengthening license suspensions after fatal crashes, lowering the bar to charge repeat drunk drivers with a felony, strengthening breathalyzer requirements and making sure vehicular manslaughter convictions get reported to the DMV.
“People are tired of seeing the needless loss of life on our roadways,” Schultz said. “There’s no way to legislatively make someone make the right choice. But what we can do is create an incentive structure where there are consequences for bad decisions.”
In the absence of more leadership at the state level, road safety advocates — many of whom joined the cause after losing a loved one to a preventable car crash — are taking it on themselves to try to force change. They’re meeting with lawmakers and officials, holding public events, telling their stories.