At a California State Senate committee hearing this year, the director of CalTrans, Tony Tavares, showed a simple chart that might have caused the assembled lawmakers some alarm.

It was a series of black bars representing the death toll on California’s roads in each of the past 20 years.

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

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