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Buttigieg unveils strategy to reverse US traffic deaths


U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Thursday announced that the Biden administration will be implementing a new strategy to limit the recent rise in traffic-related injuries and deaths. After three decades of steady decline, US traffic deaths have tend to come back since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

Of the more than 370,000 people who died in transportation-related incidents between 2011 and 2020, nearly 95% (more than 350,000) were killed on US roads – a situation United States Department of Transportation (DOT) calls “both unacceptable and solvable.” DOT has faced criticism from both within the administration and without encourage a lax attitude towards road deaths.

“It doesn’t seem right, and I continue to be extremely interested in the trend,” Buttigieg Talk to Related press. “Somehow over the years and decades, it became normal, like the cost of doing business,” he said.

DOT is applied”Safe systems approach“works on the premise that fatal accidents are preventable, provided that all parties involved work towards the common goal of reducing accidents and injuries. This is an approach that DOT said it was effective in Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Norway and is spreading in Europe. In Sweden and the Netherlands, traffic death rates fell by 50% between 1994 and 2015.

The strategy focuses on five key components: safer people, safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds, and improved emergency response and post-crash care.

The last item is especially important for rural areas, where response times are often slower than even in some depressive urban environments. 39% of fatal crash victims in rural areas don’t go to a hospital one to two hours after the accident, compared with 10% in urban areas, according to the study. government report.

“We can’t stand the continuing crisis of road deaths in the US. These deaths are preventable and that’s why we launched the Road Safety Strategy. Nation Today – a bold, comprehensive plan, with substantial new funding from President Biden’s The Infrastructure Law is bipartisan,” Buttigieg said in the announcement.

“We will work with every level of government and industry to deliver results, because every driver, passenger and pedestrian has to make sure they get to their destination safely,” Buttigieg said.

Jonathan Adkins of the Governors Highway Safety Association praise noticerecent citations from the organization report asserts the need for a multifaceted solution to what it calls a “national traffic safety crisis.”

“We completely agree that the US needs to change its culture when it comes to road deaths – no motor vehicle deaths is acceptable,” says Adkins. “The entire traffic safety community must work together, not in silos, to make progress in achieving our common goal of zero traffic deaths.”

To dig deeper, DOT’s “Public Roads” magazine has an article details on how this all works in particular and how some of these principles have been implemented in the states of California, Florida, and Washington.



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