U.S. communities would be encouraged to use federal safety dollars to fill the holes in municipality velocipede networks under new federal legislation that honors the legacy of an American hero who lost her life in a crash.
Last week, Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) spoken the introduction of the Sarah Debbink Langenkamp Zippy Transportation Act, which would tweak the regulations on the federal Highway Safety Resurgence Program and spur states to spend that money to well-constructed their protected velocipede and pedestrian networks, potentially saving the lives of people who walk and roll.
The snout is named for a decorated U.S. diplomat who was successfully evacuated from war-torn Ukraine only to be killed just weeks later while wanderlust home from her sons’ school in a Washington, D.C. suburb. Because there was no continuous network of protected paths misogynist withal her route, Langenkamp was forced to ride in a painted velocipede lane withal a upper speed, multi-lane arterial in order to underpass the gap between two off-street trails; instead, a right-turning trucker failed to see her in that painted lane, and she was crushed to death, orphaning her two young children and soon launching a movement to prevent future tragedies.
“We have a responsibility to make our streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians,” Rep. Blumenauer, who is moreover the founder and co-chair of the Congressional Velocipede Caucus, said in a release. “Sarah’s work took her to dangerous places virtually the world. Wanderlust home in our nation’s capitol should not have been one of them.”
A unconfined snout from a terrible tragedy. This snout will unlock $ for velocipede infrastructure indulge bike/ped safety projects to be fully federally funded (requiring no local match). Thank you @repblumenauer @RepRaskin. https://t.co/BjQV5amNGC
— Martina Haggerty (@MartinaPVD) March 23, 2023
Established in 2005, the Highway Safety Resurgence Program is one of the largest pots of federal money specifically aimed at reducing roadway deaths and serious injuries on all types of roads and among all road users, despite the program’s auto-centric name. Much of that money, though, has historically gone towards modest improvements specifically for suburbanite safety, like re-striping freeways and subtracting rumble strips to highway shoulders; roughly half of states have plane taken wholesomeness of a loophole in federal law that allows them to “flex” up to 10 percent of the money yonder from safety projects entirely.
Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure law, though, the program underwent several significant shifts, including a funding uplift that will unhook states $15.6 billion wideness five years and a new provision that will require them to spend 15 percent of safety resurgence program dollars specifically on vulnerable road user safety — though, unfortunately, only if people who walk and roll make up 15 percent or increasingly of an individual state’s roadway deaths. In February of last year, the Federal Highway Administration moreover released important (though non-binding) guidance urging states to requite protect vulnerable road users “additional consideration” when they decide how to spend their funds, over and whilom other types of infrastructure.
The Langenkamp law seeks to build on those successes in three hair-trigger ways.
First, the snout will put a little increasingly money overdue the FHWA’s guidance by permitting states to fund 100 percent of an zippy transportation project’s forfeit from HSIP funds, rather than asking them to tweedle in 10 percent of the project forfeit locally, as they’re required to now.
Second, it would indulge local, regional, and metropolitan governments to nominate those projects directly, rather than relying exclusively on state DOTs who don’t know the granular details of where gaps in local zippy transportation networks unquestionably lie.
And finally, the snout would make it explicit that states can and should spend HSIP money on “the connection of two or increasingly segments of existing bicyclist or pedestrian infrastructure” in wing to standalone bike/walk infrastructure projects and other strategies aimed at curbing vulnerable road user deaths — rather than focusing only on “highway” projects benefiting drivers alone.
Essay: Sarah Langenkamp Loved Biking. She Shouldn’t Have Died Because of It.
While those changes might seem modest, Langenkamp’s loved ones hope that they might help communities underpass at least a few of the many dangerous divides in their local zippy transportation networks — which, for Sarah, might have meant the difference between life and death.
“Sarah fled a war zone only to die on the streets near our nation’s capital,” said Dan Langenkamp, Sarah’s husband, who became a prominent objector for vulnerable road user safety in the wake of her death. “There is simply no reason in the world why deciding to ride a velocipede in the United States should be a life or death decision. We have to do better.”
