Senate District 21 covers the most southwest part of Delaware and includes the communities of Seaford, Laurel, Delmar, Bethel, Gumboro, and Reliance. (If you are not 100% sure whether you live in Senate District 21, you can search here using your address.) If you live in this district your choice on November 8 to represent you in the Delaware Senate is between the incumbent Senator Bryant Richardson and his challengers Chris Dalton and Sonja Mehaffey. Using a multiple choice format, we asked Senator Richardson and Mr. Dalton to share their views on four questions related to traffic safety in Delaware. (We were unable to find an email address, web site form or social media account to contact Ms. Mehaffey, unfortunately.) We did not receive a reply from Mr. Dalton but here is how Senator Richardson 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.
Richardson: “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.
Richardson: “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).
Richardson: “All 3 Es – 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.“
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.
Richardson: “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?
Richardson: “Drug-impaired driving is an increasingly critical issue for states and state highway safety offices.
In 2015, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System reported that drugs were present in 43% of the fatally-injured drivers with a known test result. Over one-third (36.5 percent) of the identified drugs were marijuana in some form.
When House Bill 371 came before the Senate, the evidence of the dangers to mental health and highway fatalities were ignored. Instead the focus was on the revenue legalization would generate.
We are fighting a drug death epidemic. We are looking at fatal and near-fatal child abuse cases.
What we know about the dangers should convince us that the risk is too high to pursue legalization in Delaware.”