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It has been legal for 50 years in most places to make a right-hand turn at a red light. But safety experts say right-on-red laws make intersections dangerous and some places are rolling them back. Stateline reports:
Studies that are emerging are beginning to show that limiting the practice can reduce crashes and close calls, and that drivers accommodate to the prohibition.
In San Francisco in 2021, the city posted signs prohibiting right turns on red at more than 50 intersections in the Tenderloin neighborhood. A city study found that 92% of vehicles comply with the turn restriction. It also showed that vehicles were much less likely to block or encroach on crosswalks.
A study by the District Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C., found that when the city banned right on red at 100 intersections in 2018, most drivers complied and there were fewer conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles. New signage proved to be a “low-cost safety tool” that will help reduce pedestrian deaths, the study concluded.
Traffic safety experts claim that right-on-red laws contribute to the number of deaths of people killed by cars. Meanwhile, walking rose an estimated 18% between 2019 and 2022. Slowly, Stateline says, cities and states are reconsidering their right-on-red laws:
Washington, D.C., will end most right-on-red turns by 2025. Already, the state of Hawaii has prohibited them on a tourist-dense stretch of road in Honolulu. The city of Berkeley in California is considering banning right on red at all intersections. Near the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the city last fall banned right turns at 50 signalized intersections in its downtown core.
And Washington State this year considered but ultimately never held a vote on a bill that would have banned right turns on red near schools, day care centers, parks and other zones with heavy foot traffic — or where older adults, children and people with disabilities are likely to need more time to cross streets safely.
The practice is such a habit for most drivers that they don’t even stop or look to the right as they approach signaled intersections, McGinn said. Pedestrians face particular risk at intersections where drivers creep into the crosswalk.
In 1995, the U.S. Department of Transportation studied this issue and found that right-on-red laws had little to do with traffic injuries. That DOT study examined data from four states (Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Missouri) and said:
- Right-Turn-On-Red crashes represent a very small proportion of the total number of traffic crashes in the four states (0.05 percent).
- RTOR injury and fatal crashes represent a fraction of 1 percent of all fatal and injury crashes (0.06 percent).
- RTOR crashes represent a very small proportion of signalized intersection crashes (0.4 percent).
- When a RTOR crash occurs, a pedestrian or bicyclist is frequently involved. For all four states for all years studied, the proportion of RTOR pedestrian or bicyclist crashes to all RTOR crashes was 22 percent.
- RTOR pedestrian and bicyclist crashes usually involve injury. Ninety-three percent of RTOR pedestrian or bicyclist crashes resulted in injury.
- Only 1 percent of RTOR pedestrian and bicyclist crashes resulted in fatal injury. However, less than one percent (0.2 percent) of all fatal pedestrian and bicyclist crashes result from a RTOR vehicle maneuver.
- Most RTOR crashes occur between 6 am and 6 pm.
Right-on-red laws have roots in the 1950s but were not widely adopted until the oil crisis of the 1970s. The motivator was to cut down the amount of fuel that people were using by reducing the amount of time spent idling while waiting for a light to turn green.
The horrifying rise in antisemitic attacks
The Anti-Defamation League has tracked antisemitic attacks in the United States since 1979. Never in that time has it recorded as many attacks as it did last year. There have been record numbers of attacks in three of the last five years, so any reasonable person would call this a trend. The ADL’s newly released audit finds:
In 2022, ADL tabulated 3,697 antisemitic incidents throughout the United States. This is a 36% increase from the 2,717 incidents tabulated in 2021 and the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979. This is the third time in the past five years that the year-end total has been the highest number ever recorded.
Incidents increased in each of the major Audit categories: antisemitic harassment increased 29% to 2,298; antisemitic vandalism increased 51% to 1,288 and antisemitic assaults increased 26% to 111. The vast majority of antisemitic assaults (107 out of 111) were perpetrated without the use of a deadly weapon. There was one fatality. Notably, visibly Orthodox Jews were targeted in 53% of the assault incidents nationally. This year, no assaults perpetrated against the Jewish community resulted in mass causalities.
(Anti-Defamation League)
(Anti-Defamation League)
(Anti-Defamation League)
Click on the image to interact with the data (Anti-Defamation League)
In 2022:
- There were 589 incidents logged at Jewish institutions such as synagogues, Jewish community centers and Jewish schools, an increase of 12% from 2021. The vast majority of those incidents took the form of harassment, but there were 86 incidents of vandalism and nine assaults.
- Bomb threats towards Jewish institutions were unusually high, with a total of 91. This is the highest number of bomb threats since 2017.
- In 2022, 494 incidents took place at non-Jewish K-12 schools, an increase of 49% from 2021.
- Incidents on college campuses also increased, by 41%, with 219 incidents.
43,000 dead in Somali drought
In Somalia, 43,000 people have died in a drought. It is a stunning number, and it is probably a low estimate from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Even more shocking, more than 20,000 of the dead are children under age 5. The drought has killed millions of livestock and left half of Somalia’s population without adequate food.
The country, which has experienced five straight years of below-normal rainfall, is on the edge of famine. The research found:
Regions in the Horn of Africa including southeast Ethiopia, northern Kenya and Somalia are currently experiencing a severe drought.
In Somalia, this latest crisis, which began in 2021, is one of an unprecedentedly frequent series of droughts that have affected the country since 2008. It also comes against the backdrop of ongoing food insecurity, rising global prices and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, the United States sent $1.3 billion in aid to Somalia. But it is not just Somalia suffering extreme drought. Kenya and Ethiopia also have regions in dire condition. This map from USAID shows the current conditions and the forecast through the next 60 days or so. In short, it is bad and growing worse.
(USAID)
More details from The World Health Organization.
DeSantis drops pounds: How important is weight to a political candidate?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been dropping pounds just as some news articles were making fun of his legendary propensity to eat a lot.
It is not at all unusual for candidates to shed weight before they launch presidential runs. Weight can haunt candidates and presidents. Just ask William Howard Taft, who suffered the torment of political cartoonists. Taft was 6-foot-2-inches tall but sometimes tipped the scales at 350 pounds.
Other candidates have openly talked about their weight and lifelong struggles to control it. A 2009 Newsweek headline asked, “Is Chris Christie Too Fat to Be the Next Governor of New Jersey?” A study published by the American Psychological Association suggests that voters judged female candidates’ weight even more harshly than male candidates’ weight.
Russell Riley, presidential scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center of Public Affairs, said voters sometimes presume that a portly politician is “personally extravagant or lazy.” In 2014, Mark Roehling, professor of human resources at Michigan State University, said, “We found weight had a significant effect on voting behavior. … The greater size disparity between candidates, the greater the vote share of the more slender candidate.”
