Man killed at rural California intersection with a history of deadly and severe crashes
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A 79-year-old man died of his injuries and two other people were hospitalized after a three-vehicle crash Friday afternoon on Highway 12 in Rio Vista, police said.
The Rio Vista Police Department said in a statement on Facebook that the crash occurred at the intersection with Church Road. A truck had crashed into a fence and two other vehicles were blocking the road when investigators responded to the scene at 3:15 p.m.
The small Delta city of about 10,000 people in Solano County doesn’t see many fatal crashes, but those that do occur follow clear patterns. Of the four fatal crashes between 2013 and the end of 2023 that are mapped by UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System, three happened either on Highway 12 or Church Road, and one happened in 2015 at the intersection of Highway 12 and Church Road.
Those four crashes in Rio Vista killed seven people.
At the intersection where Friday’s deadly collision happened, Highway 12 is a straight road with no divider, and speeding vehicles on the highway proceed without stopping. Traffic on Church Road, one of the few main roads that connects drivers in the city to Highway 12, is controlled by a stop sign.
The Federal Highway Administration says that although rural populations are more sparse, significant numbers of fatal crashes nationwide occur on rural roads. Two of the contributing factors are speed and infrastructure, the agency says. Drivers tend to travel at higher speeds on rural roads because traffic is lighter; safety-oriented infrastructure, such as highway dividers to prevent head-on collisions, is often also lacking.
