Pedestrian safety advocated Emiko Atherton called on Congress to direct states to prioritize infrastructure as a means of preventing pedestrian deaths in an interview that aired Mondy on “Rising.”
“We really need Congress to tell the states you really need to start prioritizing your safety areas,” Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball last week.
“We’re choosing to kind of put band-aids on something that we know we fundamentally need to fix, which is the design of the road,” she said. “We know what an unsafe road looks like, and we also know how to fix it.”
Smart Growth America, which includes the National Complete Streets Coalition, published a report on Wednesday that found that from 2008 to 2017, over 49,000 people were hit and killed by vehicles across the country.
The latest number is up 35 percent over the last ten years, according to the report.
Infrastructure has been a rare policy area that Republicans and Democrats have signaled they could work together on.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last year that she and President Trump had discussed the two parties’ common ground on the issue.
“Last night I had a conversation with President Trump about how we could work together, one of the issues that came up was … building infrastructure for America, and I hope that we can achieve that,” Pelosi said.
“He talked about it during his campaign and really didn’t come through with it in his first two years in office. But that issue has not been a partisan issue in the Congress of the United States,” she continued.
However, bipartisanship between the two parties appears to be on shaky ground as Republican and Democratic lawmakers work to reach a deal on border security on February 15 in an effort to prevent to the government from shutting down again.
— Julia Manchester
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