House District 12 covers many of Wilmington’s northwestern suburbs, including Ashland, Greenville, Granogue, Montchanin and Winterthur. (If you are not 100% sure whether you live in House District 12, you can search here using your address.) If you live in this district your choice on November 8 to represent you in the Delaware House of Representatives is between the incumbent Representative Krista Griffith and her challenger Ben Gregg. Using a multiple choice format, we asked these two candidates to share their views on four questions related to traffic safety in Delaware. Here’s how they answered:
1) In May the 151st Delaware General Assembly voted unanimously to approve the Everyone Gets Home resolution (SCR 94). SCR94 called for reducing traffic fatalities in Delaware to no more than 100 people each year and tasked state agencies to meet that goal by 2025.
Griffith: “Traffic safety should be DelDOT’s top priority. If traffic safety goals are unmet, DelDOT’s capital program should be reoriented and reprioritized in order to meet those goals.”
Gregg: “Progress in reducing traffic fatalities is possible and elected state officials have an important role to play in holding state agencies accountable for meeting traffic safety goals.”
2) There is significant disagreement among transportation professionals about how limited resources for government traffic safety efforts should be allocated.
Griffith: “All types of crashes need to be addressed but greater resources should be allocated to reducing fatal crash types compared to property damage and injury crashes.”
Gregg: “Resources should be allocated to reducing all types of crashes (property damage, injury and fatal).”
3) Traffic safety professionals often describe their work in terms of the ‘3 Es’ (education, enforcement and engineering).
Griffith: “Everyone makes mistakes but in a well-engineered system good infrastructure both encourages safer behavior and also prevents human fallibility from turning into human fatalities.”
Gregg: “No infrastructure – no matter how cleverly designed – can be expected to prevent crashes in the face of reckless or stupid human behavior. Education and enforcement therefore are our most important tools for improving traffic safety.”
4) Many of Delaware’s deadliest roads – including Dupont Highway, Coastal Highway, Kirkwood Highway and Pulaski Highway – have become deadlier over time as commercial development along those roads has increased the number of potential conflicts between vehicles, and between vehicles and pedestrians, entering and exiting driveways and changing lanes either to enter or after exiting driveways.
Griffith: “DelDOT should partner with counties to consolidate driveway entrances and exits onto busy, high-speed, multi-lane highways.”
Gregg: “DelDOT should partner with counties to consolidate driveway entrances and exits onto busy, high-speed, multi-lane highways.”
5) Is there anything else about your record as an elected official, your experience or your views that you think is relevant to improving traffic safety in Delaware for the people you wish to represent in the 152nd General Assembly?
Gregg: “Just as evil in this State and Country have become ‘normalized’; so has the traffic fatalities. Tens of thousands of people dying on our streets and we just say ‘well, that’s the way it is’. We don’t need more laws; but, we need the justice system to enforce the laws we have. Almost every day when I go out on the roads, I see people driving thru red lights, talking on their cell phones, driving on the side of the road before the turn lane, stopping at a red light and then just driving thru, etc. I’m not blaming the police; but, I do question the justice and legal system in their support of the police.
I’m not talking about things that people do ‘by accident’ but things people on doing on purpose.
Add that to the ‘stupid’ things people do and it’s where we are today.”
