House District 41 covers a far southeastern section of Delaware bordering Maryland and includes the towns of Millsboro, Dagsboro, Frankford and Selbyville. (If you are not 100% sure whether you live in House District 41, 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 Rich Collins and his challenger Joseph DiPasquale. Using a multiple choice format, we asked these two candidates to share their views on four questions related to traffic safety in Delaware. Representative Collins did not respond to the survey but Mr. DiPasquale’s answers are here:
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.
DiPasquale: “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.
DiPasquale: “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).
DiPasquale: “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.
DiPasquale: “No new driveways should be permitted on 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?
DiPasquale: “We need to expand lanes and enforce the “no semi trucks in the left lane unless turning left” rule.”