Roadway deaths prompt revival of safety council
25-person panel will study data, devise solutions
Struggling with a “traffic safety epidemic,” Houston-area transportation officials are poised to revive a dormant safety committee in the hopes of drawing attention, and possibly funding, for road safety measures.
Members of the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s Transportation Policy Council on Friday are scheduled to approve 25 appointees to a reconstituted regional safety council. Members would work with planners, police and transportation officials to provide perspective on safety issues and to measure results.
“We have a lot of issues to cover,” said Jeff Kaufman, H-GAC’s chief planner and the staff liaison to the safety council.
Making roads safer will take a combination of education, enforcement and engineering, officials said. H-GAC already funds DUI enforcement activities — Harris County has more DUI-related fatalities than any other county in the country, even though Los Angeles County, Calif., has twice as many residents.
The regional council also sponsors various teen driving and car seat safety programs. The safety council was formed in 2005, but went dormant in late 2014 as H-GAC focused on other issues and members came and went from public office.
According to newly released 2015 numbers, serious crashes on roads in the 13-county Houston region
increased 2 percent from 2014, to 209.7 crashes per 100 million miles driven. That followed a 13 percent jumpin the crash rate from 2013 to 2014.
There are some signs of progress, however, said Alan Clark, H-GAC’s director of transportation planning. A graduated license program passed by Texas lawmakers in 2002 has achieved the hopedfor reductions in crashes involving teen drivers, Clark said. The program eases teens into driving via a two-phase license that restricts the hours and conditions during which they may drive.
The same preliminary data that indicates crashes are more common also found that collisions between motor vehicles and bicycles dropped 6 percent from 2014 to 2015. Railroad crossing crashes declined by 44 percent.
Clark cautioned that the figures are preliminary and less-common safety incidents, such as railroad crossing collisions, are more prone to annual variations.
The hope is the safety council can mesh the data with upcoming projects and come up with solutions officials can support. Options, much like the makeup of the committee, come from different subject areas.
Clarksaid officials made a conscious decision to in- clude appointees from law enforcement, emergency medical personnel, educators, transit officials, engineers and bicycling advocates, among others.
“This is a thing you use a shotgun on, not a rifle shot,” Clark said of the safety challenge.
Houston-area drivers, pedestrians and cyclists find themselves in increasingly difficult circumstances for a variety of reasons. On Tuesday night alone, two people died on area roads: a man whose sports car slammed into a tree, and a bicyclist struck and killed by a motorist who left the scene.
The car struck the tree in the 2500 block of South Braeswood near Kirby. Witnesses attributed the wreck to excessive speed.
An hour prior, Clepatrick Palmer was struck and killed while riding his bicycle eastbound in a traffic lane in the 17000 block of Beaumont Highway in northeast Harris County, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. The driver of an older-model Chevrolet Suburban, also eastbound, struck him. Palmer was pronounced dead a short time later at a local hospital.
Witnesses told investigators the driver stopped, got out of the SUV, looked down and then climbed back into the Suburban and sped away.