TIME Magazine features Dangerous by Design report on pedestrian safety, culminating three weeks of coverage nationwide
By Sean Barry
--newspapersThis week’s issue of TIME Magazine topped off three weeks of nationwide coverage of Transportation for America’s Dangerous by Design report ranking communities according to the risk for pedestrians.
The excellent TIME piece opens with the tragic story of Ashley Nicole Valdes, “a smart, pretty 11-year-old girl” who was killed while crossing the street in Miami earlier this year and became “a heart-wrenching symbol of South Florida’s notoriously reckless car culture.”
Florida was identified in the report as being the most dangerous for pedestrians. “You see all these people getting run over,” said Ashley’s mother, Adonay Risete, “and you ask yourself: What’s happened to us as people here? We need to get tougher and change attitudes.”
The phenomenal response to Dangerous by Design is a hopeful sign that change may be under way.
More than 150 newspapers, 300 TV broadcasts and 50 radio programs have covered the report, co-authored by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, since its release three weeks ago. The report’s findings speak to the need for action: America has a pedestrian fatality rate equivalent to a jumbo jet full of passengers crashing every 31 days. This decade alone, 43,000 Americans – including 3,906 children under 16 – have been killed while walking or crossing the street.
We could make great strides on pedestrian safety by adopting “complete streets” policies, ensuring that roads are designed to be safe and accessible for everyone who uses them, whether motorist, bicyclist, transit rider or pedestrian. You can help by asking your member of Congress to support the pending national Complete Streets Act.