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Carnage

The Weekly Carnage

10:05 AM EDT on August 25, 2006

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This week, New York State authorities launched a probe into the gap between Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North trains and platforms. After that, the National Transportation Safety Board launched its own probe, which like the state's follows the tragic death of a Minnesota teenager who fell through such a gap boarding an L.I.R.R. train on Aug. 5. These probes are a good idea, but why the obsession with making the safest mode of transportation even safer when someone dies in a tri-state traffic crash every three and a half hours? This week we learned that U.S. traffic deaths rose to 43,443 in 2005, the highest level in 15 years and 16 times the number of U.S. casualties in the Iraq war to date. Imagine what those figures might be if public authorities were as focused on eliminating fatalities on our roads as they are on our rails. Here are news articles about some of the regional traffic deaths and injuries that occured this week.

Aaron Donovan
Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

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