DOT head challenges mayors on bicycle, walking safety

As more people opt to walk instead of drive and as bicycling continues to grow in popularity, traffic deaths of pedestrians and bicyclists have been trending upward for several years, at a rate higher than motor vehicle fatalities.

While pedestrian deaths dropped slightly in 2013, bicycle fatalities continued to rise, and bike and pedestrian fatalities combined now account for nearly 17% of all road deaths, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who became all-too-familiar with the issue as Charlotte's mayor when two young boys were killed by a truck as their father walked them to day care, wants to change that.

Today in Washington, D.C., he will challenge mayors and other elected officials to improve safety for walkers and bicyclists in their cities over the next year. His " Mayor's Challenge" will urge participants at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting to attend a special summit in March and then spend a year working to make their cities safer for bikers and walkers.

The mayors and others will have access to DOT data and resources – along with proven approaches from their own cities – to create bike and pedestrian safety programs. "(The summit) is open to all mayors," Foxx said in an interview. "If we can get a critical mass of mayors involved in this … it will create a groundswell across the country.

In 2013, the most recent year with data available, 743 bicyclists were killed in traffic crashes in the USA, a 1.2% increase from the previous year. There were 4,735 pedestrian fatalities, a 1.7% drop from 2012; before that, these deaths, along with bicyclist fatalities, had been increasing since 2009.

The surge in fatalities of walkers and bicyclists – which had been trending downward for almost 30 years – came as nearly every other category of road death was decreasing.

Foxx said that pedestrian and bicyclist safety came to his attention in February 2012, when brothers Kadrien Pendergrass, 5, and Jeremy Brewton, 1, were killed in west Charlotte on a street that had no sidewalks or shoulders.

"It really informed the community, and me, because it spoke to the type of infrastructure that communities need in order for people to travel safely by foot or in some cases, by bicycle," he said. "Then I came to Washington, and the one area where road deaths were increasing was pedestrian and bicyclists. That's really become a concern for me because I see more people walking and riding bikes, and not just as a means of staying healthy, but as a means to get to work, to get to school."

One key is street design, and "making sure everybody's at the table from the very beginning," said Mayor Paul Soglin of Madison, Wisc., which has won praise from the League of American Bicyclists for its efforts to improve bicyclist and pedestrian safety. "Our city engineers, traffic engineers, city planners and the biking and pedestrian community are all involved in the design of new intersections and streets, or the re-design of old ones.

"The typical city street is designed curb-to-curb for automobiles, and there might not even be a sidewalk," he said. "Now, more and more people are walking. We're perhaps adding buses as public transit ridership is on the increase. And now we're integrating bicycles in the same right of way. This is a challenge to both behavior and design."

The number of people who regularly walk or ride bicycles has been increasing slowly but steadily, according to the Alliance for Biking and Walking, a non-profit coalition of more than 220 bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organizations.

But counter-intuitively, bicycle and pedestrian fatalities tend to drop in areas where more people walk and ride, and go up in areas where fewer do so, says Jeffrey Miller, president and CEO of the Alliance. He says bicycling and walking simply have not been part of the nation's transportation safety efforts.

"The improvements in safety have really been reaped by motorists because that's where the Federal Highway Administration and state safety offices have focused their attention," he says. His group reported last year that in 2013, 11.4% of all trips were by bike or on foot and 15.9% of road deaths were pedestrians and bicyclists; however, 2.1% of federal transportation funding went to bike and walking projects.

Foxx says he's aware that some advocates see a discrepancy in funding. "But there's always an active conversation in Washington about the mention of any federal dollars being spent on bike and pedestrian projects," he says. The Mayor's Challenge "isn't a funding program. This is a search for best practices."

In Charlotte, a sidewalk was completed last July along the stretch of road where the boys died. It cost $344,000.