Signs at I-75 ramp incomplete, 2 years later

At I-75 and Northside Drive, where seven people were killed two years ago after a bus driver mistook an HOV exit ramp for a through lane, another bus nearly made the same mistake last week.

And the Georgia Department of Transportation —- harshly criticized for bad signage that contributed to the fatal accident —- acknowledged after the latest incident that it has yet to finish putting in all the new signs it has promised to warn drivers about the ramp.

Rick Obertein, a driver for Michigan-based Blue Lakes Charters & Tours, was driving a high school band from Michigan to a competition in Orlando when he took the ramp Thursday morning, thinking it was a continuation of I-75’s southbound HOV lane.

Obertein realized it was an exit in time to brake to a stop at the top of the ramp.

“That ramp is very deceiving,” said Obertein, who has driven 13 years for the charter bus company. “You’re driving along and all of a sudden it goes up and there’s a stop sign. I can see where it would be confusing, especially if it was foggy or raining.”

In the March 2007 accident, a driver for the bus carrying the Bluffton University baseball team from Ohio didn’t realize the HOV ramp was actually an exit until it was too late to stop.

The vehicle crashed through a barrier wall and fell to the highway below, killing five baseball team members, the driver and his wife.

More than two years after that crash —- and a harsh condemnation last July from the National Transportation Safety Board, which blamed the tragedy on bad signs and driver error —- a spokesman for the state DOT acknowledged Friday that the agency was still working to fix the signage.

“The footings for the new signs just went in,” David Spear said. “The … signs will be completed by summer.”

The new signs are part of a $3 million project to put new and brighter signs at all eight HOV interchanges across metro Atlanta with left-hand exits like the one at Northside. At that interchange in particular, the state has put in some of the new signs and pavement markings to more clearly identify the HOV ramp.

Obertein still nearly missed the warnings. He saved his bus, but was ticketed by Atlanta police for obstructing traffic after he left the ramp and tried to turn around in a nearby parking lot.

The bus became wedged in the steep lot, its rear sticking into the street.

“It’s going to cost me $350, when you add the ticket to the $250 towing charge to move the bus,” the driver said in a telephone interview from Orlando.

A second bus following Obertein’s also took the Northside exit, believing it was a continuation of the HOV lane. That bus also stopped in time.

When the NTSB issued its findings of the Bluffton bus crash last summer, safety board Chairman Mark V. Rosenker called it a “terrible and tragic accident … that didn’t have to happen.”

Georgia DOT spokesman Spear said the agency has no plans to close the ramp because many metro Atlantans take the left-hand exit and follow Northside into the central city, avoiding the Downtown Connector.

He said, “We think that’s safer than closing it and forcing people on the left to have to weave through all that traffic on the connector to get to a right-hand downtown exit.”