Traffic deaths plague poor and rural areas of the US. How do we fix that?
The Excerpt
USA TODAY
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Safe Streets and Roads for All is a new federal program that’s supposed to help communities fix dangerous streets and reduce traffic deaths. But USA TODAY Investigative Data Reporter Austin Fast found most of the money has been awarded in more affluent counties with lower fatality rates. Plus, hundreds of millions of dollars have gone unawarded, simply because the program has not gotten enough applications. Despite that, the U.S. Department of Transportation hadn’t directly encouraged hard-hit communities to apply until the past couple months, when USA TODAY began asking questions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wunderry Plus subscribers can listen to USA Today's the excerpt ad free right now. |
| 0:05.0 | Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery app. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello, I'm investigative data reporter Austin Fast with a special edition of the excerpt. |
| 0:20.0 | Traffic deaths are way up. |
| 0:22.0 | A decade ago, about 90 years. traffic deaths are way up. |
| 0:23.0 | A decade ago, about 90 Americans died in crashes every day. |
| 0:28.0 | Now, we lose almost 120. In New Mexico, big trucks, freight trains, distracted drivers and |
| 0:39.6 | alcohol mean more pedestrians die per capita here than in any other state. |
| 0:45.0 | People like Yvonne Jacobs, a Navy veteran and single mom. |
| 0:50.0 | She was walking home from a bar late one night in 2019. |
| 0:55.0 | Her sister says Yvonne never made it. |
| 0:58.0 | I've never felt the word hate in my life until I lost my sister. |
| 1:05.0 | Cora Owens took in her nephew after a drunken driver killed her sister in Gallup, New Mexico, |
| 1:12.0 | a remote town surrounded by Navajo lands. |
| 1:15.0 | They moved away not long after. |
| 1:17.0 | It was just a small community and I would see him around. |
| 1:22.0 | The drunken driver, she means means and it was just disgusting |
| 1:26.2 | I couldn't know more I couldn't. Dozens of trains race through Gallup's downtown every day, regularly killing people out walking. |
| 1:37.0 | It's exactly the type of place the Biden administration promised |
| 1:45.0 | would get federal money to make streets safer, |
| 1:48.0 | the county's poor, and home to tribal governments |
| 1:51.0 | that have historically missed out. This time though was |
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