People will gather today at 10 a.m. at the foot of the new Austin Road interchange on the north side of Highway 99.

There will be the usual congratulatory words spoken before the ceremonial ribbon is cut officially marking the completion of the $50 million first phase of the Highway 120 Bypass/Highway 99 Connector Project.

Those words, no matter how insightful or inspiring, will quickly fade from memory.

What will not are the last words spoken by those who have died on the 120 Bypass heard by firefighters, emergency medical technicians, law enforcement officers, and those that survived in vehicles where their death — or deaths — occurred.

The Bypass was literally christened in blood.

Within days of its opening in the early 1980s to address traffic jams that stretched for miles on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons through Manteca where Highway 120 did double duty as Yosemite Avenue, the first fatality occurred.

Before barriers consisting of concrete K-rail were installed within two years, there were 32 deaths during 18 months on the Bypass.

That was a fatality every 2.5 weeks. Serious injury only accidents were even more frequent.

It was the era of the Bypass being known as Bloody Alley.

Some say it was the cause of bad design.

But the reality it was the fault of impatience and/or bad decision making of motorists.

The initial lane configuration was a varying mixture of 4, 3, and 2 lanes from Highway 99 to Interstate 5.

The four lanes were on both ends. In between, they went back and forth between 3 and 2 lanes.

Caltrans called them passing lanes.

The public called them suicide lanes.

A city firefighter in 1991 who was about to retire shared the horror of what the Bypass was to emergency personnel.

One of the victims of Bloody Alley was a woman who had been pinned behind her steering wheel after being hit head-on by another driver who pushed their luck when two lanes in their direction went down to one.

He recalled how the woman talked coherently with emergency personnel about her family, how much she loved them, the weather and such, as well as how much she appreciated what the firefighters and EMTs were doing as they spent close to an hour laboring to free her from behind the steering wheel.

Within seconds after they freed her and the pressure was taken off her chest, she was dead.

The barrier solution basically eliminated head-on collisions but the carnage continued but at a slower pace.

Elevating the Bypass to full freeway status with four lanes in each direction in the mid-1990s happened close to 5 years ahead of the state’s tentative timeline thanks to an advance of funding from Measure K sales tax receipts made possible by the San Joaquin Council of Governments.

The state reimbursed SJCOG some 5 years later when the programmed money became available and a somewhat safer Bypass was in place sooner than later.

“Somewhat safer” because Caltrans has no “design” control over impatient, inattentive, and clueless drivers.

For want of a better moniker, the Slinky Era was in full bloom in the Bypass.

The design had the inside lane splitting off to take traffic north on Highway 99 and the outside lane to carry them south.

Traffic over the years grew much faster heading south.

The result was backed up and slowing traffic in the right lane.

This prompted impatient drivers to avoid snaking along in a slow line to try to cut into the lengthy slow-moving back-up whenever they could find a gap closer to the transition lanes.

The gaps are usually bigger in front of semi-trucks that don’t stop on a dime.

One scenario that occurred again and again thanks to slinky effect of traffic movements, was someone would cut in front of a car or a semi to take advantage of a gap.

As they were merging in, there would be a sudden stop in traffic movement.

That usually led to rear-end collisions often involving multiple vehicles.

Truckers — even if they were moving relatively slow and with proper spacing— would face the challenge of trying to slow down tons upon tons of truck and cargo.

On Memorial Day weekend in 1993, such a truck driver at the wheel of an auto transport was able to avoid piling into three cars in front of him that had become entangled.

The driver behind the auto transport stopped in time as well, as did those behind her.

The woman following the auto transport ended up dying anyway.

The stress of the severe braking snapped lines securing a SUV on the back of the top level, sending it down on top of the car crushing her to death.

We all need to remember no matter how safe Caltrans designs freeways and highways, they can’t take impatience, inattentiveness, and wanton behavior on the part of drivers out of the equation.