The Safe Neighborhood Streets bill is scheduled for a vote on the Texas House floor as soon as Wednesday, May 12th! You can use our letter writing campaign to ask your state representative to help make Texas streets safer for children and families, right now.
You can also call your State Representative and ask them to vote yes on HB 442, the Safe Neighborhood Streets bill
For a Link to find your State House Representative, click here
SUGGESTED PHONE MSG FOR TEXAS HOUSE MEMBERS:
Hi Representative __________,
My name is __________. I live in your district, and I’m calling you to urge you to support passage of House Bill 442. Every kid in Texas deserves safe neighborhood streets to walk, bike, skate, ride their scooter, ride in a car, use a wheelchair, or even just play in the yard.
The Texas Strategic Highway Safety Plan calls for using safe design speed strategies and for thoughtful processes for the Texas transportation engineering community to work through this complex shift in thinking.
The Safe Neighborhood Streets Bill (HB 442) would allowing city traffic engineers to lower the speed limit to 25 mph in residential neighborhoods for the sake of safety.
Let’s make our neighborhood streets safer and support HB 442.
Thank you.
And you can tweet about #HB442, here’s a sample tweet you can use:
Let’s make our neighborhood streets safe for children and families. Please ask your #TxLege Sate Representative to support #HB442 the #SafeNeighborhoodStreets bill to allow for lower, safer speed limits in our neighborhoods.
@TagYourRepHere please support #HB442https://actionnetwork.org/letters/we-deserve-safe-neighborhood-streets-please-support-texas-hb-442
You can also add a link about this bill, or add a short video of yourself explaining why Safe Neighborhood Streets are so important for our children and families.
Every kid in Texas deserves safe neighborhood streets to walk, bike, skate, ride their scooter, ride in a car, use a wheelchair, or even just play in the yard.
Unfortunately, most of our neighborhoods are designed to encourage people to drive at speeds that can kill or seriously injure people walking, biking, or even traveling in cars.
While transportation safety in general must focus on freeways and major arterials where most of our crashes occur, more children are killed or seriously injured while walking and biking in Texas on our 30 mph streets than on any other type of street.
Parents are afraid to let kids play in their own neighborhoods, leading to decreased physical activity, and contributing to our obesity crisis.
City transportation officials know how to design safer streets so we all feel comfortable driving at safe speeds of 25 mph or less, but the Texas transportation code is hindering deployment of modern, safe residential streets.
Nationally, the transportation engineering profession has shifted the way we think about the problem of speed and designing streets for safe target speeds. NACTO has called for slower design speeds for residential streets, and has recently been joined by AASHTO, with the new Green Book calling for using the concepts of target speeds to achieve safe streets.
The Texas Strategic Highway Safety Plan calls for using safe design speed strategies and for thoughtful processes for the Texas transportation engineering community to work through this complex shift in thinking.
HB 442 is scheduled for a vote on the Texas House floor as early as Wednesday, May 12th – please take action TODAY!
What would HB 442 do?
The Safe Neighborhood Streets Bill (HB 442) would allowing city traffic engineers to lower the speed limit to 25 mph in residential neighborhoods for the sake of safety.
Secondarily, Safe Neighborhood Streets should be eligible for increased statewide safety funding. Few transportation investments have as high return on investment as retrofitting neighborhood streets to safe designs.
