Green Jersey

Groups call for new policy on pedestrian safety

Photo via pressofatlanticcity.com.

The very act of walking to work or to lunch puts some in New Jersey in grave danger.

Through the end of September, 121 pedestrians have been killed in traffic accidents, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign said today. That is a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2008, during which 91 pedestrians died.

The problem of pedestrian safety in this packed and busy state is huge, and inextricably linked to its environmental future. About 36 percent of New Jersey’s global warming pollution results from transportation, according to researchers. The more people that leave their cars to commute by foot or bicycle, the better — but that can be a hard sell when personal safety is at stake, along with convenience and cost.

Today, Tri-State, New Jersey Future, the New Jersey chapter of AARP, Environment New Jersey, Disability Rights New Jersey and the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia called on Gov. Corzine to enact a “Complete Streets” policy in New Jersey that would entail new thinking about transportation from the road up.

Engineers would design roads “to accommodate the needs of all users, except where infeasible, any time a new road is built or an existing road is retrofitted,” says an article posted to the websites of Tri-State and Garden State Smart Growth.

Tri-State helped win passage of complete streets legislation in Connecticut this year; other states with complete streets policies include Delaware, Oregon, and Illinois (a complete list can be found here).

There’s no guarantee that better street infrastructure would have prevented the deaths of any of the 121 people who lost their lives while walking in New Jersey this year. But… when transportation planners prioritize automobile movement and treat other considerations as afterthoughts, the result is incomplete streets that create dangerous conditions.

Three years ago, Gov. Corzine announced a five-year, $74 million pedestrian safety initiative that has had visible results around the state, according to the Tri-State, which is a nonprofit advocacy group. “The Corzine administration has done a lot for bicycling and walking, but we looked at the demand for these funds, and the number of applications versus the number of awards is about 10 to 1,” Michelle Ernst, a staff analyst with the group, told me for a magazine article I wrote earlier this year.

The group says the fatality rate for pedestrians in New Jersey is more than 20 percent higher than the national average; while pedestrians accounted for 11 percent of all traffic fatalities in the U.S. in 2007, they made up nearly 21 percent of traffic fatalities here. And more people are getting out of their cars now and walking or cycling to work.

All this means we need to look harder at the culture of commuting — a culture that often puts pedestrians at risk.