Oof. Remember last week’s update on the safer street demonstration in the Pettaway neighborhood?
The demonstration was taken down, the neighborhood asked for a permanent fix to the street and are waiting to get a response from the city, and… then a car crashed into a telephone pole. On Sunday, March 24, Entergy’s outage alert shared that 153 customers were impacted by this incident. And we should consider ourselves lucky it was an inanimate object. This type of thing is not just happening in Pettaway neighborhood. In fact, it’s happening across the country and throughout our city.
So let’s do something about it here locally. Here are two places we can start:
- We can apply proven strategies from Vision Zero, a safe systems approach that recognizes that humans will make mistakes and let’s design to mitigate the worse from happening when they do. There are free communication tools you can use to elevate this issue in your workplace, with your networks, and to key decisionmakers.
- We can organize a Crash Analysis Studio. Strong Towns offers a free course on how to do this with your own network. Our Little Rock is in the early stages of learning how to host one ourselves. Send us a message at hello@ourlittlerock.org if you’d like to participate.
Are you already doing something in your neighborhood around street safety? We’d love to hear about it!
