Red light running: "The real way to save lives is to #slowthecars through road design that makes drivers feel uncomfortable moving quickly."

"Pedestrians and cyclists should make eye contact with drivers, according to AAA, which also recommends not wearing headphones while commuting."

I've known about the "eye contact" rule for years. You?

It's essential for bicycling, but increasingly difficult to manage because of drivers opting for tinted glass. That's why I refer to tinted glass as the last refuge of narcissistic sociopaths.

Strong Towns commented:

Here's the thing: of *course* people race yellow lights and end up running reds. You and I do it too, especially when every other thing about the road you're driving on besides that one little light is signaling to you that it's time to drive fast.

Most good traffic control really isn't about traffic signals or signs at all. The real way to save lives is to #slowthecars through road design that makes drivers feel uncomfortable moving quickly. (Bonus? Those road designs are exactly the kind we can actually afford to maintain—unlike the stroads we've got in our neighborhoods now.)

AAA's spokesperson predictably is a tad too harsh on "distracted" pedestrians, a phenomenon that largely isn't, being the invention of imaginative car-centrists to condone their own imperialistic impulses.

Sorry, but there's nothing in the Constitution about the supremacy of your vehicle. It speaks instead of the equality of all, including those of us wishing to walk or ride a bicycle.

Deaths From Red Light Running At A 10-Year High, AAA Study Finds, by Bobby Allyn (NPR)

Deaths caused by motorists running red lights have risen to a 10-year high, a newly released study finds.

At least two people are killed this way every day in the U.S., according to the study of government data by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

The study looked at fatalities from 2008 to 2017, the most recent year data are available. Drivers blowing through red lights killed 939 people in 2017. That's an increase of 31% from a low in 2009, when 715 people were killed.

More than half of those killed were passengers or people riding in other vehicles. About 35% were the drivers who ran the red light. Pedestrian and cyclist deaths connected to red light running represented about 5% of total deaths.

The precise reason for the jump in fatalities isn't clear. But AAA's director of traffic safety advocacy and research, Jake Nelson, says distracted driving is likely a major contributor ...

"There have been 18 cyclist fatalities in New York so far this year. Perhaps drivers should face more serious consequences."

"But without a systemic rethinking of the primacy of cars in urban life and the implementation of more aggressive ways to de-incentivize driving and particularly careless driving, it is hard to imagine a new world emerging."

I can't recall a time since he was elected prosecutor that Keith Henderson has "held accountable" a driver who has killed a non-driver. Maybe I missed one, but I think the trend is clear. It isn't a very good trend, either.

We’ve Blamed Traffic Deaths on Bicyclists Since 1880. What About Drivers?, by Ginia Bellafante (New York Times)

There have been 18 cyclist fatalities in New York so far this year. Perhaps drivers should face more serious consequences.

 ... However much cyclists might need to heighten their awareness on the roads, cars and trucks kill people in far greater volume than cyclists kill people. Of the 711 pedestrians who have died in traffic collusions since 2014, only four have been killed by bicycles.

The law, however, protects some forms of human error more assiduously than others. In the same week that a driver was punished with a summons for opening a car door in such a way that it led to a young woman’s death, Juan Rodriguez, a social worker and the father of 1-year old twins, was charged with manslaughter for accidentally closing the door to his car, leaving his children in the back seat, where they died from the excessive heat. He believed that he had dropped them off at day care, in a scenario that has become tragically common among distracted parents since the late 1990s.

Just over a week ago, the mayor introduced a $58.4 million plan directed at promoting bike safety in the wake of the current crisis in fatalities. The plan calls for the installation of more bike lanes, the redesign of certain intersections and various traffic signaling adjustments ...

In Tampa with bicycles, in New Albany with all of us: "The yellow-blinking-light crosswalk there now gives pedestrians and cyclists a false sense of security."

On Twitter, Jeff Speck retweeted an important link: The Most Dangerous Place to Bicycle in America, by Scott Calvert and Max Rust (Wall Street Journal)

At 10:00 a.m., the weekly meeting of New Albany's Board of Public Works and Safety will convene. Will any of the city employees, elected officials, engineers, vendors and contractors in attendance have read this WSJ report?

Probably not, and that's unfortunate.

Here's the first section.

Trung Huynh used a marked crosswalk with flashing yellow lights when he rode his bike across busy, six-lane Park Boulevard in Pinellas Park, Fla., one morning in June.

The 18-year-old didn’t make it to the median.

A white Chevy Malibu going an estimated 45 mph slammed into him and his bike, police said. Mr. Huynh died at the scene.

The collision added to the already-high cyclist death toll in Pinellas County. Its per-capita cyclist death rate for the past decade ranks No. 1 among the four counties in the Tampa Bay metro area, which has the highest fatality rate of any major metro area in the U.S., according to federal data.

Here's the conclusion.

The state transportation department recently conducted a study of Park Boulevard, one of the county’s most perilous thoroughfares. Officials found a majority of the cyclists ride on sidewalks rather than on the road, which doesn’t have bike lanes.

Many bike crashes occur when cyclists don’t use a crosswalk, a department spokeswoman said. The department plans by next summer to install three mid-block crosswalks on Park Boulevard featuring a red light that pedestrians or cyclists can activate.

Pinellas County officials said they plan to install this type of signal at the intersection where Mr. Huynh was killed. Construction is scheduled to begin by early 2019.

Rob Angell, deputy chief of operations of the Pinellas Park Fire Department, said the upgrade can’t come soon enough. The yellow-blinking-light crosswalk there now gives pedestrians and cyclists a false sense of security, he said. There is no guarantee drivers will stop, he said, and cars go “flying through there.”

As a closing note to self-identified progressives who may be reading today, be aware that the city's street grid is a social justice issue. For the sake of consistency, you can't pick and choose when you wish to be progressive and when you don't.

Especially if you're a candidate for office.

If the pickup truck killed the boy, then charge it. Charge SOMETHING or SOMEONE.

Three times, the newspaper of record stated that a pickup truck struck a boy. Italics have been added.

Texas Boy Killed by Truck as His School Held a Walkout on Guns, by Christina Caron (New York Times)

Photo credit: An 11-year-old boy died after being struck by a pickup truck as he tried to cross a busy highway in El Paso on Friday, the same day that his school and others nationwide held walkouts to protest gun violence.

An 11-year-old boy in El Paso died on Friday after getting hit by a pickup truck while his school held a walkout to protest gun violence.

“Obviously everybody’s in a state of shock,” Xavier De La Torre, the superintendent of the Ysleta Independent School District, said at a news conference on Friday.

The boy, Jonathan Benko, and a group of about 12 to 15 other students from Parkland Middle School in El Paso decided not to participate in the walkout, and instead left the campus to visit a park on the other side of Loop 375, a busy highway that surrounds parts of the city, officials said.

Jonathan, a sixth grader and the last one to try to cross, was struck by a Ford F-150 pickup truck, Officer Darrel Petry, a spokesman for the El Paso Police Department, said on Saturday. He was transported to the University Medical Center of El Paso, where he died.

All that, and only then did the driver belatedly enter the story.

None of the other children were injured, Officer Petry said. The driver of the truck, who stayed on the scene, was uninjured. He was not charged, the police said.

Granted, it's important to know whether this was one of those newfangled driverless pickup trucks -- and it wasn't -- but moreover, given that the pickup truck hit the boy, why not charge the pickup truck, or not ... seeing as we seldom charge the driver?

Or do we always lede by blaming the vehicle so there's a reason not to think about the driver's role? Except, of course, the authorities would have gone after the driver full bore had he been drunk, as opposed to sober.

It's all very confusing.

Couldn't we just charge drivers who kill people?

Isn't that important?

In Sicily, too: Put down your device and pay attention to driving.

The Sicilian debriefing might take a while, but in the interim, I'll simply note that our Mt. Etna excursion driver/guide offered scathing comments about the encroachment of distracted drivers in his neck of the woods. Given that driving in a place like Sicily involves a good deal more negotiation than we're accustomed to indulging in L'America, my hunch is that enforcement there eventually will be as draconian as the drunk driving laws, which typically involve zero tolerance.

Biggest Spike in Traffic Deaths in 50 Years? Blame Apps, by Neal E. Boudette (New York Times)

The messaging app Snapchat allows motorists to post photos that record the speed of the vehicle. The navigation app Waze rewards drivers with points when they report traffic jams and accidents. Even the game Pokémon Go has drivers searching for virtual creatures on the nation’s highways.

When distracted driving entered the national consciousness a decade ago, the problem was mainly people who made calls or sent texts from their cellphones. The solution then was to introduce new technologies to keep drivers’ hands on the wheel. Innovations since then — car Wi-Fi and a host of new apps — have led to a boom in internet use in vehicles that safety experts say is contributing to a surge in highway deaths.

After steady declines over the last four decades, highway fatalities last year recorded the largest annual percentage increase in 50 years. And the numbers so far this year are even worse. In the first six months of 2016, highway deaths jumped 10.4 percent, to 17,775, from the comparable period of 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now,” Mark R. Rosekind, the head of the agency, said in an interview ...