Tens of thousands of commuters travel each day along Byron Highway, a vital two-lane route in the easternmost corner of Contra Costa County, about four miles south of Discovery Bay.
Local law enforcement officers say motorists on the rural road are known to drift, rollover, strike debris, swipe oncoming traffic or just get stuck in the ditch. In court filings, one commuter called it a “spooky highway” with little room for error.
Since the fall of 2020, statewide crash data records show that the majority of vehicular mishaps there haven’t turned deadly. That’s a starkly different reality compared to its reputation decades prior, when a 2016 analysis found that impatient driving, unsafe passing and a lack of shoulders along the burgeoning residential corridor led to one of the highest concentrations of severe or fatal collisions in Contra Costa County.
A big rig and recreational vehicle travel a section of the Byron Highway in Byron, Calif., on Friday, July 25, 2025. An $800,000 settlement was tied to a fatal big rig accident on the road in Oct. 2020. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
However, the Board of Supervisors agreed this week to pay $800,000 to settle wrongful death claims after a 35-year-old truck driver drifted off his typical morning commute nearly five years ago.
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While hauling steel coils south from Pittsburg to Oakdale before dawn in Oct. of 2020, court records say the front right tires of Dustin Ortiz’s Freightliner flatbed rumbled off the two-foot asphalt shoulder and dropped onto the unpaved, gravel embankment. He then yanked the wheel left, over-corrected, struck the nearside of an oncoming pickup and steered the cab back onto Byron Highway’s southbound lane. But the momentum continued to propel his trailer off-road, where the big rig rolled over into the field below.
The fatal accident illustrates how there’s not enough time or money for Contra Costa County planners to engineer around every tragedy that occurs on the 600-plus miles of roadway maintained by public works crews.
Ortiz is listed as being “at-fault” for the accident, according to statewide traffic records and crash data compiled within UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System.
But his parents, Philip and Kimberly Ortiz, sued the county in Oct. 2021, alleging that government officials were responsible for their son’s death because they failed to remedy – or adequately warn motorists about – the minimal shoulders that line Byron Highway’s narrow lanes, despite prior knowledge of the potential danger.
Byron Highway, which is marked on some signs as County Route J4, is subpar by California’s current standards, but its design was deemed reasonable and fully compliant when the roadway was first planned in 1921, constructed in 1937 and resurfaced in 1964 – the basis of the county’s initial stance that government agencies are largely immune from liability in lawsuits like the Ortiz’s, according to court filings from Thomas Geiger and Dylan Radke, two of the attorneys leading Contra Costa’s defense.
Big rigs traverse a curve along the Byron Highway in Byron, Calif., on Friday, July 25, 2025. An $800,000 settlement was tied to a fatal big rig accident on the road in Oct. 2020. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Additionally, they pointed to a $2 million safety improvement project that by Oct. 2019 installed double-yellow no-passing lines, center rumble strips, reflective signs and other retrofits between Byron Hot Springs Road and the Alameda County line.
However, the county’s risk management office in early July gave the final sign off on the settlement agreement, which fully protects the county from any past or future liability. The nearly million-dollar payout avoids a jury trial that was previously scheduled for August.
There are a lot of practical reasons that a public entity will settle cases like this, according to Brad Bening, a San Jose-based “neutral” insurance attorney — meaning he acts as a mediator between plaintiffs and defendants — who has taken on more than 3,000 cases and helped to negotiate settlements in 98% of them. Unpredictability is the biggest factor in a defendant settling a case like the Ortiz family’s, he said.
“There’s a lot of people that pay a lot of money in cases where they didn’t think they screwed up, but a jury might,” Bening said in an interview, explaining how verdicts can vary widely, depending on jury emotions, witness credibility and attorney talent. “We all can relate to losing a son, even an adult child – that’s something a jury is going to be inherently sympathetic toward.”
Those risks are compounded, he said, as public perception of local government entities has trended negative in recent years – sentiments that could add several hundreds of thousands of dollars to a public agency’s legal bills.
“When people settle cases, they never like it,” Bening said. Even when defendants believe they could win a trial, “if the settlement is a less repugnant alternative, then you settle … looking at a settlement as a Monday morning quarterback, it’s almost impossible to really evaluate it.”
However, the Ortiz’s lawsuit specifically references a recent case out of Southern California that affirmed the public’s right to sue the government for failing to warn about dangers that linger on its roads, particularly when officials had prior notice of the risk.
The California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that the city of Rancho Palos Verdes wasn’t immune from claims tied to the 2016 death of a cyclist at an intersection where a designated bike lane abruptly ended without warning.
After a cyclist’s fatal collision with a tractor-trailer, Justice Joshua Groban wrote in his April 2023 opinion that prior precedent on immunity “was not intended to allow government entities to remain silent when they have notice that a reasonably approved design presents a danger to the public.”
New improvements for Byron Highway are already in the works, including a plan to build State Route 239 — a new, four-lane highway, which has tentatively eyed the curve near the location of Ortiz’s fatal accident for the first leg of construction.
Big rigs and cars traverse a curve along the Byron Highway in Byron, Calif., on Friday, July 25, 2025. An $800,000 settlement was tied to a fatal big rig accident on the road in Oct. 2020. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
That proposal has been in the works for more than six decades. Officials with the Contra Costa Transportation Authority, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and Contra Costa County say the full 17-mile project will improve traffic commutes and connectivity between eastern Contra Costa and the Central Valley. Draft reports on the anticipated environmental impact of the project are anticipated to be circulated for public review and comment before the end of 2025.
There’s also another $2 million project in the works for the stretch between Clifton Court Road and the California Aqueduct, where construction crews will start installing rumble strips on the edge of travel lanes and streetlights along intersections near the bend in the road – a timeline estimated to kickoff in the summer of 2026.
County officials declined to comment on the $800,000 settlement approved last week.
However, Jeff Valeros, a senior civil engineer within Contra Costa County’s public works department, said evaluations of collision data will continue to drive the county’s advanced planning efforts — part of its commitment to Vision Zero on all 657 miles of unincorporated roadway.
“There is a need to triage and really stretch the resources we have to the best extent possible to address as many needs and issues as we can,” Valeros said Tuesday, adding that capital improvements try to identify collision hot spots every two years. “I’m hoping that instills a bit of public trust — we do have a long record of all the improvements that we have been doing. These funds and tax dollars are really being used for the public at the end of the day.”
