Here’s Roadguy’s column from the Sunday paper. If you’ve already read it elsewhere, please skip on down to the comments below. Thanks.

A couple of weekends ago, alert reader Jill was driving on Interstate 694, and …

…I saw two complete intact bumpers, license and all, lying alongside the driving lane by the inside barricade. Leftovers from an accident of course, but, WHY IS NO ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR PICKING THESE UP WHEN THE ACCIDENT IS CLEARED?

Do we need another law to get people to do the right thing? … I’m getting cranky all over again just thinking about people’s stupidity.

There, there.

The general practice, according to Lt. Mark Peterson of the State Patrol, is that the tow truck operators take everything away. If they don’t, it can take a couple of days for Minnesota Department of Transportation crews to come get anything left behind. And Peterson notes that the bumpers might not have been there because of a crash; sometimes they simply fall off cars or fall out of trucks that carry them.

Alert reader Mary, who doesn’t want to gawk, has another question inspired by roadside debris:

This past week I was caught up in a traffic jam on Hwy. 10 near Anoka; [it was] caused by an accident (the highway patrol had both directions down to one lane each way — a major slowdown). But I never saw anything in the paper about it.

If one is curious about what happened there, how does one find out? … It seems to me that when getting “from here to there” is significantly impeded that it should be news in some fashion.

The sad reality is that there are too many crashes and too much congestion to cover. Statewide, there can easily be a hundred crashes and a hundred vehicles off the road on a winter morning. If the Star Tribune printed a story about every incident, the paper would read like one long insurance claim.

Duchesne Drew, the assistant managing editor for local news, said that the details are what make the difference. Was there a fatality? Was a road closed because of a hazardous spill? Was a woman thrown onto a highway by another motorist, as happened this past week?

Crashes seem urgent while they’re happening, but by the next morning, the value to readers is often greatly diminished. That’s why some crashes that are covered at startribune.com don’t make it into the printed version.

If Mary is still curious about a crash, one option is to go online to find out whether there was a fatality or “life-changing injury.” That info is often available at the State Patrol’s media web page. (Click on “current information,” then “current incident records.”) So while Mary may never know how that trailer ended up on her side of the median, she can at least find out if anyone was hurt.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.