Senate District 8 is based in Newark and also extends north to include parts of Hockessin and North Star. It borders both Maryland and Pennsylvania. (If you are not 100% sure whether you live in Senate District 8, 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 Dave Sokola and his challenger Victor Setting. 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.
Setting: “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.“
Sokola: “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.“
2) There is significant disagreement among transportation professionals about how limited resources for government traffic safety efforts should be allocated.
Setting: “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.“
Sokola: “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).
Setting: “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..“
Sokola: “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.
Setting: “DelDOT should partner with counties to consolidate driveway entrances and exits onto busy, high-speed, multi-lane highways.”
Sokola: “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?
Setting: “Other things to take into consideration when building or redoing roads, bike lanes should be encouraged where the space allows for it. When redeveloping, should take into consideration of the designing spaces that don’t require cars as much, more walkable areas and public transportation. As I real estate agent, I drive up and down the state weekly, I know our state could use better public transportation, which in turn would get more cars off the road which then lowers the chances of accidents/crashes. A statewide train system would be very beneficial for everyone.”
Sokola: “Since many of these “deadliest roads” have pedestrian fatalities as components to their designation, curb cuts are certainly not the only reason there are significant fatalities. Just reducing the entrances may not reduce the poor decisions by pedestrians to cross at points that are not designed for crossing.”