Cyclists are dying because Houston lacks culture of safety
City Hall must take responsibility for fixing dangerous, deadly streets
On Monday morning, Houstonians at major energy companies will arrive at work with Safety First signage proudly announcing the number of days without a workplace injury. Meetings will begin with an explanation of emergency exits and muster areas. Huddle-ups at construction sites will kick off with a fiveminute safety discussion. Promotions will be won or lost on group safety records. Lockout-tagout procedures will be reviewed. Suppliers will open their customer pitches extolling their safety records.
Contrast that with the public realm between home and work. Drivers text or talk distractedly on the phone and run red lights. People play frogger across high speed roads with no safe crossings for thousands of feet in either direction. The few folks riding bicycles look warily about in fear. Meanwhile, Texas racks up dozens of road fatalities, and, on Houston roads, too many cyclists are run over and killed.
Meanwhile Houston’s Department of Public Works continues to crank out patently unsafe road designs like Emancipation Avenue, where the city recently spent millions rebuilding a road designed for high speeds in front of the recently revamped Emancipation Park. Yet crossing the road over to the park is highly unsafe. Metro and Public Works squabble endlessly about mismatched signals, encouraging jaywalking as an alternative to waiting up to five minutes for the pedestrian stars to align. TxDOT’s drafts for the I-45 expansion include hundreds of millions of dollars for notoriously deadly, over-wide highspeed feeder roads, and demonstrably unsafe highway/urban intersections. And despite passage of a bike plan a year ago, no dollars have been spent and it took a year to name a commission to guide the effort. There is no notion of “safety first” for Houston’s roads. Safety’s not even in the top 10.
Nowhere does the contrast between how our major industries manage safety and our public approach to safety come into brighter focus than the deadly stretch between Mecom Fountain and the Texas Medical Center. Three members of the Rice University family have been killed in as many years. If three people were killed on Exxon Mobil’s new campus, bosses would lose their jobs, root cause analyses would be exactingly performed and corrective measures taken. If the deaths happened just outside Exxon Mobil’s hedges, a similar all hands on deck reaction would swiftly ensue.
The public sector lets itself off the hook by blaming the dead victims. Witness Asst. Chief Wendy Baimbridge comments on Tuesday’s death of a wife riding home from lunch with her husband, run over by a dump truck, “Cyclists have to abide by all laws of a motorist when they are on a street.”
The veteran officer of the Houston Police Department publicly blamed the victim despite zero evidence she was doing anything but fully com-
“There is no notion of “safety first” for Houston’s roads. Safety’s not even in the top 10.”
plying with the law. In the private sector, Baimbridge would be summarily dismissed for such victim blaming.
This attitude is prevalent throughout police reports: it’s the victim’s fault, not the dangerous design. Two years ago, a 4-year old child was killed in a crosswalk on the first day of school. The police said the poor child had failed to yield.
In industry, such abdication of responsibility for safety is long gone. In our work lives, we expect designs that don’t lead to deadly outcomes. We hold companies responsible when their systems fail. Accidents are documented and evaluated, as are near misses. We demand that every accident is investigated. We demand corrective actions. Leaders at the very top lose their jobs if safety lags.
We should demand nothing less of the public sector.
Public Works, HPD and political leaders should be evaluated on how dangerous our streets are. TxDOT commissioners should be fired if they can’t come up with a strategy to reduce the appalling carnage on our highways.
We know the path forward. Measure the problem and hold the appropriate persons responsible for the outcomes. Measure results. Identify systemic causes. Start immediately with a few simple steps. Safety first for all road designs, starting with a complete overhaul of Houston’s road design manual. No more public money for dangerous infrastructure. Investigate crashes and identify design fixes. Require the police and Public Works to jointly investigate crashes. Implement the bike plan — it’s the cheapest transportation option available. Tell TxDOT that if they want to build highways in Houston, they must meet the safety needs of the city. TxDOT must be put on notice that their absurd non-goal “goal” of reducing road fatalities by a mere two percent over the next four year is a bad joke. And stop blaming the victims for unsafe road designs.
Houston is a city where big organizations manage astonishing risks. We send humans into space. We scour the planet for natural resources in incredibly risky environments. Our companies build some of the most complex projects on earth, and we do so with a keen eye to safety. Let’s build the same culture of safety in the public realm that we demand from industry.