Not Everything Needs State Action

The Greenwich Time has a major story today about Connecticut's "deadliest road for pedestrians" and proposals for new state policies and investments to make the road safer.  Since the road in question passes right through my town, the story caught my attention.  It turns out that the so called deadliest road is US Route 1 which crosses the entire state from east to west.  It won the title of "deadliest" because in a decade, there were six pedestrian fatalities on the road across the state; that is a rate of less than one per year.

Now I do not minimize the tragedy of these people being killed, but I still had to laugh when I saw that the paper was supporting a proposal to build all sorts of bike lanes, sidewalks and other "improvements" to make the road safer.  Indeed, at least two of the six folks killed during the decade in question were hit by cars when they tried to cross the street away from nearby traffic lights and cross walks.  Most of the other four were killed in areas with sidewalks.  Since the details on all of the accidents were not given, I do not know if any of the fatalities involved bicycles.  In other words, the big program of state action that the paper is supporting to rememdy the "problem" seems to have nothing to do with the reason why the six people died.

It is no wonder that local newspapers are dying.