TOWNSEND — Each of the white crosses that dot the highways and roads in Montana represents someone — a life cut short. Two of them stand at the corner of Highway 287 and Silos Road in Broadwater County, one emblazoned with the name “Pops.”
“It’s my dad, I mean it’s my best friend,” Matt Zeadow said. “You have your best friend die lying on the highway, you tell me how you’d feel.”
Soon, another cross will be added to that intersection.
“I’m going a minute at a time,” Todd Andersen said. “I don’t know if I’m going to get angry, if I’m going to start crying, sometimes I can’t even think, I just have to sit there.”
Andersen’s wife, Jessica, was killed on Sept. 28. Andersen said she was driving to pick up her son in Helena, she was traveling northbound on Highway 287 when her Jeep Grand Cherokee hit a GMC Sierra turning left onto the highway from Silos Road.
“(She was) a beautiful, heartfelt woman that I miss dearly,” Andersen said.
According to Montana Highway Patrol data from the past five years, there have been at least 99 crashes along Highway 287 between mile markers 60 and 80, of those, six resulted in suspected serious injuries and three were fatal. All of those fatal crashes occurred within just about two miles of mile marker 70—which is right by the intersection with Silos Rd.
Now, some people who live near and travel this stretch of Highway 287 want to see a change.
“I don’t have an answer to fix it, but I think the best option is to slow it down,” Andersen said.
Speed limits in Montana are determined by state law. According to the Montana Code Annotated, the speed limit on a “public highway of this state is 70 miles an hour during the daytime and 65 miles an hour during the nighttime,” but exceptions to the law can be made.
“That’s where our process comes into play, the speed study process out of the Traffic and Safety Bureau,” Montana Department of Transportation traffic and safety engineer Gabe Priebe said.
A speed study is just what it sounds like, MDT gathers data on how fast cars are traveling, citations issued, roadway context, sight distance, crashes, public comment and more. Then, they create a report and recommend a speed limit to the Transportation Commission—the appointed body that ultimately approves exceptions to speed limits in the state.
“If we go from here to the other side of Winston (at) 55 mph, it might help—a little more reactionary time,” Zeadow said. “I ain’t telling you people ain’t going to still die — we’re talking about driving vehicles — but the fact of the matter is maybe people will have a touch more time.”
A stretch of Highway 287 in Winston is 55 mph, a change that was made after Cassie Cooper’s accident in 2014. She said she was stopped on the highway by Big Bull, where she was working at the time, when she was rear-ended by a car traveling about 70 mph.
Watch: People are asking for changes on Montana Highway 287 in Broadwater County:
“We went about 300 feet,” Cooper recalled. “The trunk of my car actually hit me in the back of the head and scalped me pretty much, they had to staple my head back together.”
Cooper said she helped get the speed limit reduced from 70 mph to 55 mph in Winston in the wake of her accident. She worked with county commissioners, and due to a school crossing on the highway, she said they were able to reduce the speed limit.
“When I drive by there, people are still passing in those turn lanes; it still is scary,” Cooper said. “It’s a little bit better, but I wouldn’t say it’s great.”
Reduced speeds don’t always mean increased safety. Speed limits are largely set based on the prevailing speed on a roadway, meaning the speed at which most vehicles are traveling under normal conditions.
According to a Montana-specific study done by Penn State University in 2016, if the speed limit is set 10 mph or below that prevailing speed, fatal and serious injury accidents actually increase.
“What oftentimes happens is there’s a certain percentage of the population that abide by those signs, and there’s a larger percentage of the population that they pay attention to the roadway context,” Priebe said.
There are other things that can be done to make a roadway safer. Through the federally-funded Highway Safety Improvement Program, MDT can study an area of road where there are fatal and serious injury crashes, and come up with possible solutions.
“Whether it’s signage improvements, all the way up to adding turn lanes and such,” Priebe said.
Both speed studies and studies through the Highway Safety Improvement Program can be requested by local government bodies, like a county commission.
MDT has plans for a $15-20 million project to widen almost 5 miles of Highway 287, starting just past mile marker 70, tentatively scheduled for 2029.
No matter what changes happen, the families of people killed on the highway live with the grief every day.
“He was lying right there, to the right of that stop sign,” Zeadow said. “I go around the subdivision now, go down to the end to turn right. I will turn left, but I will not turn right.”
