Senate Environment & Public Works CommitteeTransportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee — Karina Ricks Testimony on Safer Streets

by Karina Ricks

Honorable Chair and Members of the Subcommittee, I am deeply honored and humbled to speak before you and will speak truthfully and candidly.

My name is Karina Ricks. I am a former city transportation Director and federal DOT Associate Administrator; currently a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, previously a long time resident of Washington, DC and a Michigan native.

For over 50 years, my parents have lived in a rural subdivision off a county highway in Michigan; just over a mile from the town post office, library and donut shop. At 70, they would love to walk or bike to town. But they can’t. The county road has two lanes, no shoulder and fast traffic. While a parallel state road has been widened twice in 50 years, their county road remains without a sidepath or shoulder. And people have died.

I would wager every single one of you knows someone who was killed in a traffic-related crash. We all do.

Not taking more urgent action on this is frankly inexcusable and saying that safety is our highest priority is quite simply dishonest. Roadway deaths have skyrocketed — increasing 13% in California and a whopping 26% in Arkansas.

We lag embarrassingly behind other nations. The traffic-related death rate in the U.S. is 12.4 per 100,000 residents — putting us in the same class with Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico. Even if we don’t think we are comparable to Norway or Sweden, we cannot claim to be all that different from other auto-oriented nations like Canada or Australia and yet our roadways are more than twice as deadly.

It isn’t because Canadians don’t text or Australians don’t drink. To my knowledge, neither has superior cars or smarter teenagers or better engineers.

Their roadway death rate is lower because their national leaders have adopted sensible, proactive roadway designs that recognize that people can make poor decisions and that time-tested, sensible street design can stop poor decisions from becoming fatal mistakes.

Our roads are designed to encourage high speed driving. We pretend that 24 x 30 inch speed signs will slow a driver when every other environmental cue of the road is telling them to drive faster. It is nothing short of entrapment. Adopting roadway standards that self-regulate speed through design is safer for users and less punitive to drivers.

We need to prioritize resources for safer streets and make it easier to actually build them. But today easy, cheap and effective measures are made hard by federal and state DOTs.

While I was Director of Transportation in Pittsburgh, we secured $1 million in CMAQ funding to fix more than 80 critical sidewalk gaps in the city. We chose the highest priority locations near senior buildings, schools and bus stops. Most of the gaps were only 20–30 feet in length and restoring them would have benefited more than 35,000 residents.

BUT, in order to use these federal funds we would have had to produce full scale engineering drawings for each and every one of the 80 locations costing us 10 months and $300,000 of local money. No self-respecting professional contractor needs engineering drawings to pour a 6 foot wide, 6 inch deep slab of concrete. So we didn’t do the project.

In another example, the city funded a protected bike lane on a state route then had to go round and round with state and federal reviewers. By the time the proven safety countermeasure was approved over a year later, it was 30% more expensive to build.

On another state route, serious injuries actually increased after the state had “improved” the street by removing one travel lane and widening the rest. After a horrific crash that left a young woman hospitalized for 8 months, City and State DOT engineers crafted a package of low cost, but effective safety improvements. However, the state couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come up with the funding to implement them and the street remains dangerous today.

This is ludacris, wasteful and fiscally irresponsible. If Congress and the Administration want to save taxpayer money and deliver projects faster, these practices have to change.

As a citizen and professional, I am frankly dumbfounded that a nation as smart and wealthy as the United States, with billions of federal dollars flowing to states every year, cannot fund and build a $5,000 crosswalk or any of a number of other low cost proven safety countermeasures.

You can change this. The Building Safer Streets Act will meaningfully reduce cost and speed delivery of no nonsense, no debate safety measures. With this you can eliminate outdated and restrictive provisions in the MUTCD that limit local flexibility and the exercise of best engineering judgment. You can incentivize States to facilitate and fund low-cost, quick build safety improvements. As we start to think about the next infrastructure authorization, you can craft transportation programs and policies that actually reflect safety as the highest priority, rather than just saying it.

I deeply appreciate the work of this subcommittee and all that you do for the communities I have been pleased to live in, serve and advise. I look forward to your questions.

Thank you.