Nearly 40K people have died on California roads in the past 20 years. State law hasn't changed

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.

Jennifer Levi started working with MADD after her son, Braun, was killed in May while he was out walking with friends in Manhattan Beach. She said they'd only recently relocated to the area after the family home burned down in the Palisades fire, destroying "all of Braun's pictures, videos from when he was born."

The driver who killed her son was allegedly intoxicated and had a prior DUI arrest.

"The worst day of my life is now my life's work. I will not stop until California changes," Levi said.

In the months since her son's death, Levi said, she's met with any officials or influential people she could — current and former lawmakers, district attorneys, local council members, a lobbyist, and members of the media. Among the changes she wants: to make it easier to charge repeat DUI offenders with murder when they kill someone, to make fatal DUIs a violent felony and to increase penalties for hit-and-run fatalities. As CalMatters reported in October, California law often treats drunken vehicular manslaughter as a nonviolent crime with minimal time behind bars.

Levi calls her push to reform the system "Braun's Bill."

Many grieving families share a similar goal: for those they lost to be remembered by a state and society that seem indifferent. That desire was on display last month during an event in Sacramento to mark the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.

On a cold Sunday evening in mid-November, after a break in the rain, dozens of relatives of people killed in car crashes gathered on the dark steps of the state Capitol for a candlelight vigil. They fought to keep photos on posterboards upright in the gale-force winds. Family by family, they ascended the steps, stood above a display of orange cones lit with strands of white lights and addressed the onlookers, talking about their loved ones and what was lost — children left without their mother, mothers without their children, a wife left without the love of her life.

"Every day I live and I wake up and I pretend like I'm happy. Every day I wish my stairs would make noise. I miss being called mom," said Angel Dela Cruz, whose 17-year-old son Edward Alvidrez Jr. was hit by a truck while riding a dirt bike in Madera County in 2022.

"I hope we all get justice," she said.

The event ended with a moment of quiet reflection and a prayer before the families put away their pictures and walked off, the Capitol behind them locked, silent.