Just a few hours ago...
Senator Tom Carper
met with President Biden in the White House (below) to discuss federal transportation infrastructure legislation. This bill - which remains to be written - will "reauthorize" how the federal government will spend something like a quarter TRILLION (that's "trillion" with a "t") dollars over the next 6 years to maintain, rebuild and expand America's "surface transportation" infrastructure. As one of the two leading voices in Congress (the other is an ex-bicycle mechanic from Oregon) on transportation policy, Senator Carper has a remarkable, and incredibly rare, opportunity to make significant reforms in the rules that govern how that astonishing sum of federal money will be spent by the 50 states. For decades almost every transportation stakeholder has claimed that SAFETY is their #1 priority. But the grim statistics underline how empty that safety rhetoric has been: fatal traffic crashes occur in the U.S. at a (per capita) rate that is ~300% higher compared to other advanced countries; vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death of children and adolescents; and over 6,000 pedestrians die on U.S. roads each year (the highest that number has been in three decades). Senator Carper will have his work cut out for him over the next couple of months to persuade Congress to make safety the #1 priority for that quarter trillion dollars in taxpayer dollars...not just in *rhetoric* but in *reality* by linking federal funding *directly* to fewer people dying on our roads each year. Americans, and Delawareans, need his leadership...so we can all get home safely.
