U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg launched a plan Thursday to revamp roads, cut back speeds and push for extra car security options, vowing to chop fatalities nationwide simply weeks after Los Angeles closed out a 12 months that noticed a big enhance in lethal collisionson this car-centric metropolis’s traffic-clogged roads.
The plan, referred to as the Nationwide Roadway Security Technique, can be paid for by funds from the Biden administration’s $1-trillion infrastructure regulation, with the impossible-sounding aim of “zero roadway fatalities.” It will incorporate what it calls a “secure system strategy” that acknowledges human error and bodily frailty and designs a transportation system that minimizes the prospect for dying or severe damage when crashes happen.
New federal knowledge to be launched subsequent week will present that fatalities have spiked nationwide, Buttigieg advised the Related Press in an interview earlier than the plan was launched.
“It doesn’t look good, and I proceed to be extraordinarily involved in regards to the pattern,” Buttigieg mentioned. “One way or the other it has change into over time and a long time as regular, kind of the price of doing enterprise. Even by means of a pandemic that led to significantly much less driving, we proceed to see extra hazard on our roads.”
Site visitors collisions killed 294 individuals in Los Angeles in 2021, metropolis officers mentioned Thursday, a 24% enhance from the earlier 12 months. The variety of bicyclists and pedestrians killed by drivers additionally rose final 12 months in contrast with 2020.
L.A. officers say the 2021 knowledge recommend motorists are distracted by cellphones, rushing and driving recklessly. Officers additionally level to car design developments that make automobiles heavier and extra harmful.
“For generations on this nation we've prioritized automobiles, pace and capability on our streets, over individuals,” Seleta Reynolds, normal supervisor of the L.A. Division of Transportation, mentioned Thursday. At the moment, federal transportation “leaders have signaled an enormous tradition shift that places security first, with a transparent technique that features funding, actions and timelines.”
Reynolds referred to as the plan “an amazing win for cities like L.A., the place we’ve been implementing a safety-first strategy for years ... With the sources and focus of the federal authorities, we've a significantly better alternative to handle the wave of site visitors violence that has torn aside far too many households and communities in our metropolis and nationwide.“
General fatalities from site visitors collisions in L.A. had remained flat or dropped solely barely within the years earlier than the pandemic, irritating activists who wish to see extra progress on a metropolis program to finish site visitors deaths by 2025.
That program, Imaginative and prescient Zero, was launched by Mayor Eric Garcetti however wants extra funding and a spotlight from metropolis leaders to be efficient, transportation activists say.
Michael Schneider, founding father of the Los Angeles-based advocacy group Streets for All, mentioned he was inspired by Buttigieg’s consideration on making the roadways secure for all modes of transportation.
“It's so refreshing to see a Transportation secretary acknowledge that the aim of roads isn’t simply to get automobiles by means of as rapidly as potential,” Schneider mentioned.
The 42-page plan acknowledges the uneven ache attributable to site visitors deaths. The fatality price is about twice as excessive in rural areas as it's in U.S. cities, it mentioned. The nation’s poorest counties have a better dying price from roadway collisions than the nation as a complete.
“Fatalities amongst Black individuals elevated by 23% between 2019 and 2020 in comparison with an general enhance of seven.2 %,” the report acknowledged. “People who find themselves American Indian and Alaska Native have roadway fatality charges greater than double the nationwide price on a per inhabitants foundation.”
During the last decade, deaths of pedestrians and bicyclists have risen quicker than roadway fatalities as a complete, which has had a “chilling impact” on human-powered climate-friendly modes of transportation.
To fight these alarming developments, the safe-system strategy focuses on 5 components: safer individuals, safer roads, safer automobiles, safer speeds and what it calls post-crash care.
The plan would give attention to growing means to extra precisely measure drug and alcohol impairment and require state driver licensing businesses to “take licensing actions towards industrial drivers who've medicine or alcohol violations within the system and should not cleared to return to responsibility.”
It will push for native governments to plan, design and assemble safer roads, efforts that might be paid for with federal funds. It will prod automakers to include crash-avoidance options corresponding to automated emergency braking into new passenger automobiles. And it will give attention to shortening ambulance response instances when collisions happen.
“Sadly, many roads should not designed to make sure secure journey at secure speeds for everybody, particularly essentially the most susceptible highway customers,” Stephanie Pollack, deputy administrator of the Federal Freeway Administration, mentioned in a written assertion. Funding offered by the infrastructure regulation will permit state, native, federal and tribal governments to include “security for all customers into each federally-funded highway challenge.”
Shannon Frattaroli, a public well being researcher at Johns Hopkins College who focuses on damage, has lengthy studied the troubling highway site visitors fatalities. On Thursday, she welcomed information of the plan.
“We’re shifting from a system that’s all about shifting automobiles to a system that’s about shifting individuals,” Frattaroli mentioned. “We haven’t ever seen management within the transportation world put security, or fairness, or environmental issues entrance and middle. It’s very thrilling.”
Frattaroli mentioned that transportation infrastructure within the U.S. has lengthy been designed with the first aim of shifting automobiles as rapidly as potential, quite than shifting individuals as safely as potential. She believes roadways needs to be designed with imperfect drivers in thoughts.
“In the US, we’ve had approach an excessive amount of emphasis on the motive force behaving safely, and never sufficient on the highway itself,” she mentioned. “We all know that folks can’t be secure on a regular basis, and after they make errors, we don’t need them to be lethal.”
Buttigieg “is headed in the precise course,” she mentioned, “However I’m on the lookout for this imaginative and prescient to be realized. There are numerous good concepts, and I’m optimistic, however I've an appreciation for the work that should occur now.”
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