The Excerpt podcast: Despite available federal grant money, traffic deaths are soaring
On Sunday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Safe Streets and Roads for All is a new federal program that’s supposed to help communities fix dangerous streets and reduce traffic deaths. But USA TODAY Investigative Data Reporter Austin Fast found most of the money has been awarded in more affluent counties with lower fatality rates. Plus, hundreds of millions of dollars have gone unawarded, simply because the program has not gotten enough applications. Despite that, the U.S. Department of Transportation hadn’t directly encouraged hard-hit communities to apply until the past couple months, when USA TODAY began asking questions.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Austin Fast:
Hello. I'm investigative data reporter Austin Fast, with a special edition of The Excerpt.
Traffic deaths are way up. A decade ago, about 90 Americans died in crashes every day. Now, we lose almost 120.
In New Mexico, big trucks, freight trains, distracted drivers and alcohol mean more pedestrians die per capita here than in any other state. People like Yvonne Jacobs, a Navy veteran and single mom. She was walking home from a bar late one night in 2019. Her sister says Yvonne never made it.
Cora Owens:
I've never felt the word hate in my life until I lost my sister.
Austin Fast:
Cora Owens took in her nephew after a drunken driver killed her sister in Gallup, New Mexico, a remote town surrounded by Navajo lands. They moved away not long after.
Cora Owens:
It was just a small community, and I would see him around.
Austin Fast:
The drunken driver, she means.
Cora Owens:
And it was just disgusting. I couldn't, no more. I couldn't.
Austin Fast:
Dozens of trains race through Gallup's downtown every day, regularly killing people out walking.
It's exactly the type of place the Biden administration promised would get federal money to make streets safer. The county's poor and home to tribal governments that have historically missed out. This time though was supposed to be different. That's what transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said last year, talking about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Pete Buttigieg:
We are combining unprecedented levels of investment with a focus on making sure that those investments reach the very communities that have been left in the past.
Austin Fast:
Part of that huge investment is a new program called Safe Streets and Roads for All. It's a competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation that's giving away $5 billion. But USA TODAY found most of the money so far has gone to more affluent counties with lower death rates. New Mexico, with its high death rate, has gotten very little. One county north of Gallup in the small city of Farmington, Peter Koeppel leads transportation planning. He says it all comes down to local capacity.
Peter Koeppel:
A lot of the need is in the places that have the least resources to apply for them.
Austin Fast:
Gallup and most towns around New Mexico can't afford to keep a grant writer on staff, someone who can sift through the thousands of grants available to find good options. So, they miss a lot of opportunities like the Safe Streets program. Big cities with higher capacity often do have grant writers. Detroit, for example, with over a dozen people on its grant staff, it's won about $50 million to slow down drivers and protect pedestrians and cyclists. On the other hand, Gallup and hundreds of other low capacity counties nationwide haven't won even a penny. Meanwhile, the Transportation Department has awarded a fraction of the money Congress gave it for Safer Streets. Here's Cheryl Walker of the Federal Highway Administration.
Cheryl Walker:
We only gave out $200 million approximately of the $400 million, simply because we did not receive enough applications.
Austin Fast:
The Transportation Department has collected records on fatal crashes for 50 years. It knows the hotspots. Mariia Zimmerman leads technical assistance efforts for the department. So, we asked her, "Did you say to places struggling with high death rates, 'Hey, you might want to apply.'"
Mariia Zimmerman:
So, if I called your mayor and I didn't call another mayor, is that being unfair of calling one versus another?
Austin Fast:
She says reaching out directly oversteps what the Feds can do. But then, we talked with Safe Street's program manager, Paul Teicher. He says now, they've started that kind of direct contact. He lists Mobile, Alabama and Hartsville, South Carolina as two examples.
Paul Teicher:
So, these are conversations we had in the past few weeks, so we'll see if they apply.
Austin Fast:
Can you provide a number of how many other places you've reached out to in similar ways recently?
Paul Teicher:
I would have to get back to you. And I think maybe the other context is that, well, we... So the Safe Streets, there's a team of folks, but that's just one cohort of folks.
Austin Fast:
Here, the Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy, Christopher Coes, takes over.
Christopher Coes:
And also, note that safety is our North Star. So it is the responsibility of the entire department, whether you're the Safe Streets for All team, if you're the Tribal team, if you are the ROUTES team, which coordinates a lot of our rural work.
Austin Fast:
After our interview, they provided a list of 18 places with serious safety concerns that Teicher and his team have contacted. It's a start, but USA TODAY found hundreds of low-capacity counties with above-average death rates that haven't won any money. Coes says they began this targeted outreach in the past couple months after their annual review of how the program's going. That's also after USA TODAY first asked how they encourage hard hit places to apply.
Christopher Coes:
Look, we're only halfway through this program, right? And we're recognizing that we're going to have to marshal all of our resources. And so, for us is hopefully our data can help us fill the gaps to understand where we need to target our limited resources.
Austin Fast:
And Coes says other teams within the department help. They travel to rural and underserved places to generally promote all the available grants. A lot of the department's outreach involves partnering with outside organizations, hosting webinars, and writing newsletters. Traditionally, places go through the middleman of their state to get federal road money, but Safe Streets is different.
Christopher Coes:
This was designed specifically for localities to get access to that.
Austin Fast:
Coes says hundreds of the new Safe Streets recipients had never gotten a grant from the department. They even simplified the paperwork to make it easier to apply, but without direct outreach to hard hit places, they still couldn't convince enough communities to apply to use up all the money. Gallup's Chief Financial officer Patty Holland says Washington's message about Safe Streets never made it to her desk. Gallup has plenty of safety projects on its to-do list, but they can't keep a grant writer on staff.
Patty Holland:
We just don't have the time to reach out and look for these. And even if they put us on the email list, we're really not going to recognize a lot of it because there is just too much in our email.
Austin Fast:
And it's not just New Mexico. USA TODAY found crash hotspots all across the country missing out on this money, especially across the south. Florida is one of several states the Transportation Department says it's now targeting. On a rural road outside Tallahassee last fall, 25-year-old cycling champion, Jake Boykin was on a final training ride before a big race. A drunken driver hit him and drove off with Jake's bike stuck to the front of his pickup. Back in New Mexico, Jake's parents, Kim and Ken Boykin got a knock on the door at 1:00 AM.
Kim Boykin:
They called us back and said there was nothing that they could do, that he wouldn't make it through the second surgery.
Ken Boykin:
So, we asked to have the phone put by Jake's ear and...
Kim Boykin:
His sister had put her phone next to our phone, and we all got to pray with him and tell him how much we loved him. They let us talk for as long as we wanted, and then they called back later to let us know that he'd gone home.
Austin Fast:
Kim and Ken say most people never worry about this kind of thing until it happens to them. They draw some comfort from all the stories from people who've reached out, sharing what Jake meant to them, from a stranger in Tallahassee whose tire he changed along the highway, to his college friends in Texas.
Kim Boykin:
Three years ago at Texas Tech. He has this big whiteboard that he kept, and he put, "Don't skim your story." And so, that's the phrase that... That's just kind of Jake, live life to its absolute fullest. That's exactly who he is.
Austin Fast:
Ken has tattooed Jake's motto "Don't skim your story" on his arm to honor his son. And now, they want others to realize the dangers of drunken and distracted driving.
Kim Boykin:
These deaths are so senseless and so preventable. In New Mexico, I feel like there are a lot of roads that don't have bike lanes, that don't have sidewalks, and I think infrastructure would be huge, especially in Cruces.
Austin Fast:
That's Las Cruces, New Mexico, Jake's hometown. It's hours south of Gallup, and they've won nearly a million dollars to study ways to make the county's roads safer.
Barbara Toth:
Good morning, sir. Could I take a moment to tell you about our petition? It's for safe driving here in our community.
Unidentified Man:
Oh, OK.
Austin Fast:
Barbara Toth's husband Jim almost died when a teen driver in a pickup truck sent him flying off his bike a few years back. Toth and her team of volunteers are making the rounds through the Las Cruces Farmer's Market, collecting signatures to demand change. She doesn't have patience for local leaders who say they can't afford to make streets safer.
Barbara Toth:
You don't have a leg to stand on if you say you can't fund this or you can't do this or whatever. There's millions of dollars out there, specifically for this.
Austin Fast:
And Toth's not the only one campaigning for road safety in Las Cruces. There is a cycling organization and a Safe Routes to School program. Gallup and other low capacity places often don't have these advocates. Few people showed up last year for Gallup's meetings on transportation issues. Experts say this makes outreach from federal agencies, like the Transportation Department, even more important for getting money where it's needed most. Experts like Matthew Hanson, he wrote grants for years for Arizona. Last summer, he testified to Congress that webinars are not enough.
Matthew Hanson:
And it starts with grants training. It starts with meaningful, not one-hour webinars, here's what a program is about. But really digging deep, how do you build internal controls? How do you put together a capital stack?
Austin Fast:
Most federal grants set aside a small part to cover costs so agencies can administer the programs. For Safe Streets, it's $100 million. Coes says the majority of that isn't going to potential applicants, it's going towards supporting places that won the grants.
Christopher Coes:
Because unfortunately, the reality is, they do not have the infrastructure themselves to deliver the project.
Austin Fast:
In the congressional hearing, Hanson suggests instead, putting more of this money toward training that digs deep, teaching inexperienced local governments what federal grants are looking for.
Matthew Hanson:
So, we really need to take a step back and invest in fundamental training and grants management development to make sure that our underserved communities, our under-resourced communities, both rural and urban, are not left behind with all the funding that's out there right now.
Austin Fast:
And there's still time. The Transportation Department has another $3 billion to award over the next few years. This year's application window just opened last week. Jake Boykin's parents, Kim and Ken, hope more places take advantage of these grants so other families don't have to suffer like they have.
Ken Boykin:
We all kind of live in our own little worlds and we don't think about it until it hits home.
Kim Boykin:
It's just so unnecessary. This death is unnecessary and it's just so preventable.
Austin Fast:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. You can find a link to our full investigation into the Safe Streets program in today's show notes. Thanks for listening. I'm Austin Fast. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Excerpt podcast: Traffic deaths are soaring in parts of the US
