Sheriff Ed Gonzalez
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez [last] Tuesday called on local law enforcement agencies to devote more resources to improving road safety and to create a new region-wide task force dedicated to reducing the Houston area’s alarming number of road fatalities.
Gonzalez said past efforts have been too isolated, allowing problems to go unchecked despite individual efforts from local departments. The proposed task force would meet monthly.
“Everybody is doing something, but we lacked a coordinated effort to tackle this in a sustainable way,” Gonzalez said at a summit on road safety that brought together law enforcement officials, engineers, medical professionals and other traffic-safety advocates.
The formation of the task force follows a 2018 Houston Chronicle investigation, “Out of Control,” which found that the Houston region has the nation’s most dangerous roads. Harris County leads the nation in impaired driving, and the region has more than 600 fatal crashes a year, the Chronicle found.
Gonzalez asked local departments to try to assign three employees to targeted traffic-enforcement initiatives every month for a year — focusing on areas with a high frequency of speeding or crashes; issuing more warnings to motorists driving dangerously; and trying to deter impaired driving.
The impact of those efforts would be re-evaluated after a year, Gonzalez said.
“This is just kind of a starting point, to get stakeholders in the room,” Gonzalez said, noting after the meeting that similar collaborations usually only occur on high-traffic weekends. “We want to make sure we’re visible, and not just performing spot enforcement — and make it more sustainable.”
See here for some background. We really need to think of road safety as a public health issue. If you live in Houston for any length of time, you’ve either been involved in a serious collision or you know someone who has. We can only do so much about traffic, but we can definitely do more about the insane levels of speeding on the highways, and I say that as someone who usually takes highway speed limit signs as suggestions. Let’s check back in a year and see how this effort has gone.