If you haven't already voted, check out Bike Delaware's Voter Guide. The Delaware General Assembly We're not going to lie: elections to the Delaware General Assembly (our state legislature in Delaware) are not the top coverage priority for news organizations. Their top priority is the presidential election (with sometimes a little bit of coverage left over for federal senate races). We will all go into the voting booth for this election with a lot of information about presidential candidates but most of us will have very little information about the people running for state senator and state representative. Indeed, many of us will go into the voting booth and be seeing the names of candidates for those two offices for the very first time. That's too bad because who we choose to be our two representatives in our state legislature is an important decision. In fact, for a number of issues, it's actually more important than who we vote for for president. For example, the ability of the next president - no matter who that is - to reduce fatal crashes in Delaware is very low. On the other hand, nearly all the roads where fatal crashes occur in Delaware are owned and managed by DelDOT and it's our representatives who serve in the Delaware General Assembly who make the laws and policies that ultimately govern how DelDOT operates and invests. Not every Delaware Senate and House district has a competitive race in 2024 but Bike Delaware sent a short (just 4 questions) survey to all the candidates in races where there is more than one filed candidate. And most of those candidates took the trouble to respond! Candidate Questions #1, #2 and #4 All 4 questions that Bike Delaware asked candidates running for election to the Delaware General Assembly are about traffic safety. While traffic safety is not the biggest issue in this election (according to surveys of voters), it's at the center of Bike Delaware's mission. And crashes are the 2nd leading cause of death (after guns) of kids in Delaware. The first question asked about their level of support for setting an aggressive goal of reducing traffic fatalities by 50% by 2035. The second question asked about their level of support for recently passed anti-stroad legislation. The 4th question asked about multimodal roundabouts. Candidate question #3: Making safer roads and streets by prioritizing, and then designing for, their main function The 3rd question question in our candidate survey is important because it involves the fundamental issue of function. What is a particular street for? What is that road for? In some cases, it's not complicated. If we're talking about the street where we live, the main purpose of that street is to get in and out of our house or apartment, safely. Anything that interferes with that main function is bad. If suddenly there are dozens of 18 wheeler trucks traveling up and down the street where we live every day, obviously that is going to make our streets less safe. Similarly, imagine somebody who says they want to build a school with direct access to (i.e. a driveway onto) I-95 and then somebody else who says they want to open an ice cream store directly across I-95 (and also with a driveway). You don't need to be any kind of traffic safety professional to immediately grasp that neither of these are good ideas (and that the two ideas when put together are even worse). The problem we have in Delaware (and in the U.S. more generally), however, is in-between those two extremes everyone's intuition about traffic safety tends to break down because the function has become hopelessly confused. But it's all those in-between situations where almost every traffic fatality in Delaware happens each year. So that's why the 3rd question we asked candidates was about establishing clear public policy requiring that all public right-of-way be assigned to a specific "functional category" with clear design requirements to either facilitate safe and smooth traffic flow OR safe direct access to properties (but not both). We understand that it's asking quite a bit of our elected officials to grapple with such an abstract concept. But if Delaware is going to have any chance of meeting its ambitious traffic safety goals, we're going to need to make big changes to how our public right-of-way is designed in all those in-between situations. And that, in turn, is likely to require smart leadership from our elected officials. So check out how they answered question #3.
The Delaware General Assembly
We're not going to lie: elections to the Delaware General Assembly (our state legislature in Delaware) are not the top coverage priority for news organizations. Their top priority is the presidential election (with sometimes a little bit of coverage left over for federal senate races). We will all go into the voting booth for this election with a lot of information about presidential candidates but most of us will have very little information about the people running for state senator and state representative. Indeed, many of us will go into the voting booth and be seeing the names of candidates for those two offices for the very first time. That's too bad because who we choose to be our two representatives in our state legislature is an important decision. In fact, for a number of issues, it's actually more important than who we vote for for president. For example, the ability of the next president - no matter who that is - to reduce fatal crashes in Delaware is very low. On the other hand, nearly all the roads where fatal crashes occur in Delaware are owned and managed by DelDOT and it's our representatives who serve in the Delaware General Assembly who make the laws and policies that ultimately govern how DelDOT operates and invests. Not every Delaware Senate and House district has a competitive race in 2024 but Bike Delaware sent a short (just 4 questions) survey to all the candidates in races where there is more than one filed candidate. And most of those candidates took the trouble to respond!
Candidate Questions #1, #2 and #4 All 4 questions that Bike Delaware asked candidates running for election to the Delaware General Assembly are about traffic safety. While traffic safety is not the biggest issue in this election (according to surveys of voters), it's at the center of Bike Delaware's mission. And crashes are the 2nd leading cause of death (after guns) of kids in Delaware. The first question asked about their level of support for setting an aggressive goal of reducing traffic fatalities by 50% by 2035. The second question asked about their level of support for recently passed anti-stroad legislation. The 4th question asked about multimodal roundabouts.
Candidate question #3: Making safer roads and streets by prioritizing, and then designing for, their main function The 3rd question question in our candidate survey is important because it involves the fundamental issue of function. What is a particular street for? What is that road for? In some cases, it's not complicated. If we're talking about the street where we live, the main purpose of that street is to get in and out of our house or apartment, safely. Anything that interferes with that main function is bad. If suddenly there are dozens of 18 wheeler trucks traveling up and down the street where we live every day, obviously that is going to make our streets less safe. Similarly, imagine somebody who says they want to build a school with direct access to (i.e. a driveway onto) I-95 and then somebody else who says they want to open an ice cream store directly across I-95 (and also with a driveway). You don't need to be any kind of traffic safety professional to immediately grasp that neither of these are good ideas (and that the two ideas when put together are even worse). The problem we have in Delaware (and in the U.S. more generally), however, is in-between those two extremes everyone's intuition about traffic safety tends to break down because the function has become hopelessly confused. But it's all those in-between situations where almost every traffic fatality in Delaware happens each year. So that's why the 3rd question we asked candidates was about establishing clear public policy requiring that all public right-of-way be assigned to a specific "functional category" with clear design requirements to either facilitate safe and smooth traffic flow OR safe direct access to properties (but not both). We understand that it's asking quite a bit of our elected officials to grapple with such an abstract concept. But if Delaware is going to have any chance of meeting its ambitious traffic safety goals, we're going to need to make big changes to how our public right-of-way is designed in all those in-between situations. And that, in turn, is likely to require smart leadership from our elected officials. So check out how they answered question #3.
