Missouri Bicycle News

Much of MoBikeFed's legislative platform is aimed towards greater safety and equity for all road users, including bicyclist and pedestrians.

In short--it is aimed at "Traffic Justice".

The Traffic Justice Institute is a new national movement that gives a voice to ideas that many of us across the country have felt. Charles Komanoff writes:

We often speak of "road danger," less often of road violence; and we almost never treat it as a matter of systematic injustice. Yet the profoundly wrong-headed road regime of contemporary America is more than an engineering problem; it constitutes a deeply violent and anti-social assault on life, health and community. . . .


The ubiquity of automotive death, equivalent to losing several fully-loaded jumbo jets each week, cannot be rationalized as the ineluctable price of our ever-increasing “mobility.” Over the past thirty years the U.S. has fallen from first to ninth place among the industrial countries in miles driven between road deaths6 — a metric which compensates for any increase in distances covered. By the more tangible measure of traffic-caused funerals per million people, the U.S. scores 5th worst in a 30-nation industrialized-countries road-crash database, with at least twice the per-capita automotive death rate of Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, and the U.K. Yet just a few decades ago the U.S. population-based fatality rate was close to the middle of the pack in relation to other highly motorized societies.

Simple, proven, inexpensive measures are available to cut U.S. traffic deaths in half--or maybe more.

Read more about Traffic Justice in Charles Komanoff's Traffic Justice Policy Project (PDF file). permanent link to article: "Traffic Justice: Over 20,000 annual U.S. traffic deaths are preventable"
posted by Brent Hugh at 5/23/2007 10:08:00 PM |comment on this article