On the front page of today’s Houston Chronicle is an article written by Chronicle staff writer Dug Begley with the above headline. Below it is a subhead of “Federal assessment gives appearance of ‘acceptable deaths,’ transit leaders say”.
This is really disturbing, but perhaps not surprising given the Trump administration. Here are the leading paragraphs from the article which explain the reasons why our local transit leaders are concerned:
As state and local agencies take steps to reduce roadway deaths in the Houston area, officials are bristling at a federally-required assessment that sets a goal of no more than 728 deaths around the region this year — up from a goal of 699 in 2019.
“It is not OK for 699 people to die,” Jeff Weatherford, deputy director of Houston Public Works, told other members of a Houston-Galveston Area Council committee Friday. “I am going to keep on hammering at that. … Fundamentally, our process is flawed.”
Though more an issue of semantics, the concerns arise because local officials — notably Houston and the Texas Department of Transportation, where officials have signed pledges to end roadway fatalities — do not want to set a target that implied a number of deaths they consider acceptable.
”No one is happy about this,” said Trent Epperson, assistant city manager in Pearland and chairman of H-GAC’s Technical Advisory Committee.
Even though some roadway deaths are sadly inevitable given Houston’s traffic and roadway conditions, they should never be or become acceptable. How much more tone-deaf can our federal agencies become? Does no one there have any common sense? Are we all just numbers on a piece of paper to them? Does no one in Washington talk to anyone in the local community?