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Is pedestrian safety anybody’s priority?

According to a new national study, Connecticut under-invests its federal transportation dollars in pedestrian safety.
Statistics gathered by Transportation for America and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership show that 12.6% of our state's traffic fatalities in 2008 were pedestrians. But when it comes to spending for pedestrian safety, less than 2% of the transportation funding we got from the federal government was used to make roads safer for walkers and joggers.
When the pressures of hard economic times seem to bring out the worst in many of our drivers, when more people are walking to get where they have to go, and when even Governor Rell urges us to vacation close to home and enjoy our cities' cultural events, doesn't it make sense to devote a larger share of our federal transportation dollars to protect pedestrians? This is not a call to spend more-just to consider spending what we're already getting a little differently than we have been.
Of course, there are worse places to be walking than in Connecticut. In fact, the most dangerous large metropolitan area in the country for pedestrians was in Florida: Orlando-Kissimmee. So if you choose to travel to Disneyworld instead of visiting a nearby Connecticut attraction, think twice before you walk outside the resort!

 

If you want to read the entire report, you can find it at:
http://t4america.org/resources/dangerousbydesign/