Burlington’s city council made an excursion into traffic safety on Tuesday when its members convened a brief, regularly-scheduled meeting mere moments before the polls closed in this year’s general election.
This speedy confab began with a mayoral proclamation that designated November 17 as “a day of remembrance for road traffic victims” in the city of Burlington.
This forthcoming observance is part of a global initiative to recognize the human toll of traffic accidents. Yet, in order to bring this issue home to the council, mayor Jim Butler yielded the floor to Eliud de Jesús, the newly-appointed administrator of the Burlington-Graham Metropolitan Planning Organization – a federally-sponsored agency that weighs in on road construction in the Burlington area.
De Jesús assured Burlington’s leaders that traffic safety has been a priority for his agency and similar outfits in other parts the state – due, in no small part, to the number of traffic-related deaths that occur each year in North Carolina. De Jesús added that in 2023, vehicular accidents claimed 20 lives in his jurisdiction alone – including six pedestrians who died in roadway collisions.
De Jesús went on to note that metropolitan planning organizations across North Carolina are pushing for changes that are intended to significantly lower these roadway fatalities.
“Right now,” he added, “the aspiration is the reduction [of traffic fatalities] by half in 2030 and to zero by 2050.”
This thread was later picked up during the meeting’s designated public comment period, which featured some remarks about various traffic-related concerns from a resident of Shadowbrook Drive.
Dennis Wanless, a 19-year-resident of this increasingly bustling boulevard, assured the council that his own experiences corroborate the need for heightened awareness about traffic safety in Burlington.
“The first thing is that there’s a lot of speeding in west Burlington,” he admonished the city’s municipal leaders. “There’s a lot of reckless driving, impaired driving, and distracted driving, and I see this whenever I walk [through the neighborhood].”
Wanless went on to take the city’s police department to task for what he perceived as a lack of traffic enforcement along thoroughfares like Shadowbrook Drive.
In response to the resident’s harangue, Burlington’s police chief Alan Balog tried to explain what his agency is actually doing to curb traffic violations in the community. Balog noted that the city’s police department has tackled the problem on several fronts since it emerged from a staffing crisis a few years ago.
“This year, there’ve been 2,000 more traffic stops in the city of Burlington,” he said, “and that’s a partial reflection on staffing having gone up…In about two weeks, we’ll add a DWI-specific enforcement team, and we’ll bolster the number of officers who are specifically working on traffic safety.”
