Safety

For many troops who have served in U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combat is just one of many dangers they face. Upon returning home, they have higher rates of suicide, homelessness, and mental illness. Now we can add another threat to the list:  Car crashes.

Deaths from motor vehicle crashes rose 5.3 percent in 2012, according to new numbers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [PDF]. It's the first time since 2005 that fatalities have gone up. Vehicle miles traveled only rose 0.3 percent last year.

“In 2014, federal investment in surface transportation -- which is currently about $50 billion per year -- will drop to $6 billion or $7 billion. In one year.”

After seven years of declines, traffic deaths in America rose again in 2012, according to a preliminary estimate by the National Safety Council.

Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a new rule requiring automakers to install event data recorders, known as EDRs or black boxes, in all light passenger vehicles. While the rule would expand the number of vehicles equipped to record critical information in the moments preceding a crash, that alone won't aid investigations of traffic deaths or strengthen cases against reckless drivers. For black boxes to help get to the bottom of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, changes to local crash investigation procedures and to EDR technology itself need to happen as well.

Public interest journalist Stuart Silverstein at FairWarning.org has uncovered the fact that red states (defined as those that went for Mitt Romney in the last election) have higher traffic fatality rates than blue states (those that went for Barack Obama). The correlation is striking, Silverstein says, but he's at a loss to explain it:

The vice presidential debate last night took an unexpected turn toward traffic safety, amid a lot of predictable chest-thumping about saving Detroit. After Vice President Joe Biden said what is by now a standard favorite in the administration repertoire -- "Romney said, let Detroit go bankrupt" -- Rep. Paul Ryan countered with this: "Mitt Romney’s a car guy."

When to take grandma's keys away: In the United States, this question treated is largely treated as a family matter.

Last week, U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood helped NYC transpo commish Janette Sadik-Khan launch a new phase of the "LOOK!" campaign, with pavement markings instructing texting pedestrians to wake the hell up. He made a comment that made its way into his blog post about the event, as well as other media reports on the event, and it caught the attention of Streetsblog NYC's crack reporting team.