House District 39 is based in Seaford and also includes the mostly rural areas surrounding the city. The district extends west to the border with Maryland. (If you are not 100% sure whether you live in House District 39, 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 Dan Short and his challenger Susan Clifford. 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.
Clifford: “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.”
Short: “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.
Clifford: “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.”
Short: “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.“
3) Traffic safety professionals often describe their work in terms of the ‘3 Es’ (education, enforcement and engineering).
Clifford: “All 3 “E”s – education, enforcement and engineering – are indispensable and we need to do more of each in order to make progress in solving Delaware’s traffic safety crisis.”
Short: “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.”
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.
Clifford: “DelDOT should use all of its available authority to consolidate driveway entrances and exits onto busy, high-speed, multi-lane highways.”
Morrison: “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?
Clifford: “I have not been elected to the Assembly (yet!). One of the issues that residents have raised to me over and over as I have been going door-to-door since January concerns the gaps in and condition of the transportation infrastructure in southern Sussex County. Here are three examples: an inadequate number of signals on heavy-traffic roadways; a lack of or limited signage (regarding speed limits, other regulations); and an appallingly high number of roadways that lack shoulders despite a steadily increasing population and traffic on those roadways. All of the foregoing pose safety risks for people biking, walking, or using motor vehicles, and I intend to work with my colleagues, DelDOT, and local elected officials in my district (and surrounding districts) to develop common-sense, EFFECTIVE solutions to lessen fatalities, injuries, and property damage.”
Short: “Biking is a great attraction in Delaware with our unique scenery and rural opportunities, I will continue to support funding of the biking amenities we have built and will build. Like Bike Delaware I also am interested in safety and also for the other bikers out there as co-chair of the Motorcycle Rider Safety Education Committee. Bike Delaware keep up the good work and if I can help please call.”
