Names add faces, but it’s the details that put the true horror to the reality on Texas’ roads. One day it’s two or three people, killed in a head-on crash on Interstate 45 in Buffalo and a city street in Sugar Land.
The following Friday it is 15, mostly drunken-driving solo crashes. A couple in Houston and Dallas on freeways and others outside Luling and Midland on rod-straight farm-to-market roads.
Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into years and it keeps going, until two decades go by and more than 70,000 people are dead.
Saturday marked 20 years of at least one death a day on Texas roads, a bleak milestone in a long-simmering safety crisis lawmakers and local agencies have pledged to stop but have barely slowed in the past two years.
“The numbers don’t reflect it yet, to be frank,” state Transportation Commissioner Laura Ryan said of efforts to eliminate roadway deaths by 2050.
dug begley 