“So many deaths”: Lawmakers consider lower speed limits and safer roads

The party was coming to an end. The young hostesses, María Rivas Cruz and her fiancé, Raymond Olivares, had accompanied friends to their car to say goodbye. As the couple crossed a four-lane main road to return to the house they had just purchased, Rivas Cruz and Olivares were struck by a car fleeing an illegal street race. The driver was traveling 70 miles per hour in a 40-mile-per-hour zone.

Despite years of calls for a two-lane road, lower speed limits, traffic islands and better marked crosswalks, residents say the county has done little to combat speeding in this unincorporated area of ​​southeast Los Angeles. Since 2012, there have been 396 crashes on this half-mile stretch of Avalon Boulevard, injuring 170 and killing three.

Olivares, 27, a civil engineer in Los Angeles, was the fourth fatality when he was thrown across the street, struck by a second car and killed instantly. Rivas Cruz was taken to a hospital where she remained in a coma for two weeks. When she came to, the elementary school teacher underwent a series of reconstructive surgeries to restore her arms, jaw and legs.

After the accident in February 2023, the county installed steel guardrails halfway along the road. But residents who had wanted a median guardrail and speed cameras said that was not enough.

“It’s just a Band-Aid on a cut. It’s supposed to fix the problem, but it doesn’t, and that’s what hurts,” said Rivas Cruz, who now walks with a cane at 28 and lives with chronic pain. “I go to sleep and think, ‘It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream.’ But it’s not.”

The nation’s road network is 4 million miles long and managed by a patchwork of federal, state and local agencies that often operate in silos, making systemic change difficult and expensive. But with pedestrian deaths at their highest in decades, local governments are pushing to control speed limit setting and take more responsibility for road design. This spring, New York and Michigan passed laws allowing local governments to lower speed limits. In Los Angeles, voters approved a measure that forces the city to implement its own safety improvement plan, requiring the car-loving metropolis to redesign its streets, add bike lanes and protect cyclists, passengers and pedestrians.

Still, there is plenty of political opposition to speed enforcement. In the California legislature, Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) proposed mandating GPS-enabled smart devices in new cars and trucks to prevent speeding. But after opposition, the state representative watered down his bill and now requires that all vehicles sold in the state by 2032 only have warning systems that alert drivers when they exceed the speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour.

Although the Biden administration is committed to Vision Zero—a commitment to reducing traffic fatalities to zero—and is investing more than $20 billion in funding for traffic safety programs through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, traffic safety advocates and some politicians argue that the country is still far from making roads and vehicles safer or reducing drivers’ speeds.

“We are not showing the political will to use the existing and proven safety tools,” said Leah Shahum, founder of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit that advances Vision Zero in communities across the country.

Still a crisis

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for safe streets became even more urgent. Death tolls rose even as streets were empty due to lockdowns. In 2022, more than 42,500 people died on American roads and at least 7,522 pedestrians were fatally struck – the highest number of pedestrian deaths in more than four decades.

Experts cite several reasons for the decline in road safety. During lockdowns, reckless driving increased while traffic enforcement decreased. SUVs and trucks have become larger and heavier and therefore more deadly when they hit a pedestrian. Other factors remain as roads are wide enough to accommodate vehicles and in some states, speed limits have been gradually increased.

Initial estimates of traffic fatalities show a slight decline from 2022 to 2023, but pedestrian deaths are still well above pre-pandemic levels. “This is an encouraging start, but the numbers still represent a crisis,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wrote in February about the number of traffic fatalities.

The Biden administration has allocated $15.6 billion for traffic safety through 2026 and provided $5 billion in local grants to prevent traffic deaths and injuries. Under the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new “vulnerable road user” rule, states where 15% or more of the traffic fatalities are pedestrians, bicyclists or motorcyclists must pay the same amount as the federal government for safety improvements.

Traffic safety advocates argue that the federal government missed an opportunity to eliminate outdated speed limit standards when it overhauled traffic guidelines last year. The agency could have eliminated the recommendation to set speed limits at or below the speed at which 85% of drivers travel on traffic-free roads. Critics say the so-called 85th percentile rule encourages traffic engineers to set speed limits at a level that is unsafe for pedestrians.

However, the Federal Highway Administration wrote in a statement that while the 85th percentile is the usual method, engineers rarely rely solely on that rule. It also noted that states and some local authorities have their own criteria for setting speed limits.

In response, many communities began initiatives to curb speeding. In April, Michigan passed a law giving municipalities the right to round off when setting speed limits.

And after four years of lobbying, New York State passed Sammy’s Law, named after 12-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein, who was killed by a driver in Brooklyn in 2013. The law, which takes effect in June, allows New York City to lower its speed limits to 20 miles per hour in certain areas.

“I hope that with this law, we will learn more about naming children based on their achievements, their personality and their spirit – not on their final moments,” said Sammy’s mother, Amy Cohen.

Push for pedestrian safety

Advocates would also like to see the federal government consider pedestrian safety on the five-star vehicle safety scale. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed a separate pass/fail test that would be posted only on the agency’s website, not on labels that consumers would see at the dealership.

Automakers such as BMW have questioned the effectiveness of a program to test pedestrian protection in vehicles, arguing that in European countries that have adopted such a rule, it is not clear whether it has resulted in fewer deaths and injuries. According to campaign finance site Open Secrets, automakers spent about $49 million on lobbying in 2023, compared with $2.2 million spent by highway and car safety advocates.

“When it comes to demanding improved safety designs for vehicles, the federal government has the strongest clout,” says Wiener, the California state representative.

While Wiener has amended his proposal to restrict speeding, he has also pushed a companion bill that would require Caltrans, the state transportation agency, to make improvements such as building crosswalks and curb extensions on state roads to better serve pedestrians, bicyclists and public transit users.

When that bill was being debated in committee, opponents, including engineering firms and contractors, warned that it would limit flexibility and hinder the state’s ability to provide a safe and efficient transportation system. Lawmakers have until August 31 to vote on their bills.

In Los Angeles, hope for change emerged in March when voters passed Measure HLA, which requires the city to invest $3.1 billion in traffic safety over the next decade. But Rivas Cruz’s home is eight blocks outside the city’s jurisdiction.

It has been over a year since the accident, but Rivas Cruz finds reminders of it everywhere: in the mirror, when she looks at the scars left on her face by the numerous surgeries, when she walks through the streets that still lack the infrastructure that would have protected her and Raymond.

Stories of pedestrians killed in this predominantly Latino working-class neighborhood are all too common, said Rivas Cruz, who attended a memorial service in September for a 14-year-old killed by a reckless driver.

“There are so many deaths,” the Los Angeles Unified School District teacher said from her mother’s living room on a recent spring afternoon. “The officials have failed us. Raymond and I wanted to give back to the community. He was a civil engineer and worked for the city, and I’m a teacher in LAUSD. Where is our help?”

This article was produced by KFF Health News, publisher of California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth coverage of health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF – an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism. For more information about KFF, visit kff.org.

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