Senate District 4 covers many of Wilmington’s northwestern suburbs in New Castle County, including Hockessin, Greenville, Pike Creek, Talleyville, Granogue, Brandywine, Alapocas, Montchanin, Runnymeade, Delaware Heights, Rockland, Winterthur and Wooddale. (If you are not 100% sure whether you live in Senate District 4, 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 Laura Sturgeon and her challenger Ted Kittila. 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.
Kittila: “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.“
Sturgeon: “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.
Kittila: “Resources should be allocated to reducing all types of crashes (property damage, injury and fatal).“
Sturgeon: “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).
Kittila: “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.“
Sturgeon: “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.
Kittila: “DelDOT should use all of its available authority to consolidate driveway entrances and exits onto busy, high-speed, multi-lane highways.“
Sturgeon: “DelDOT should use all of its available authority 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?
Sturgeon: “Something the survey does not touch on that I thought was worth bringing up is my commitment to reducing carbon emissions. Everything we can do to make biking safer and more enticing also contributes to cleaner air and to slowing global warming. My constituents who live near shopping centers are asking for sidewalks and bike lanes so they don’t have to get in the car to drive three blocks that could easily be walked or biked, but there is no infrastructure to walk or bike safely in most of these places. The roads are either too narrow, lack a shoulder, or, in the case of wide, multi-lane high speed roads, they need dedicated bike paths and sidewalks. Providing the infrastructure that allows for safe cycling and walking also encourages exercising–it’s so much easier to incorporate exercise into our daily routines if we can walk or bike to the places we need to go on our daily errands rather than having to set separate time aside to exercise. From an environmental protection perspective and from a personal health and wellness perspective, better bike and ped infrastructure is a win-win. It helps motorists who must drive too by reducing traffic. Win-win-win.”
