TTI By TOM STONE & JACK ROPER November 16, 2023
There are 326 Indian reservations across the USA, federally recognized as the homelands of tribal peoples. While this affords protected land and identity, it doesn’t guarantee road safety. Now with lives being lost at alarming rate on a stretch of US-97 on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington State, tribal leaders are taking action… deploying new technology from a local startup and capturing the vital data necessary to take advantage of the new era of infrastructure funding in the USA, as Tom Stone and Jack Roper discover East of the Cascade Mountains, US-97 snakes 669 miles from Weed, California to the Canadian border. Where it bisects the Yakama Indian Reservation, 97 claims the lives of both Yakama Nation tribe members and employees of a $1.9 billion agricultural industry with dismal regularity. “Last July, a drunk driver killed my sister,” says Yakama Nation traffic safety officer, Hollyanna Littlebull. “My husband was on duty with the Tribal Police. He called and said: ‘This is one of those calls.’ I knew what he meant. We had a horrific case where farm workers from Honduras were killed – a father and daughter. These are people, not just dots on a map.” The US-97 corridor across Yakama territory has seen 24 fatalities and 430 serious injuries since 2021. A grid of lateral roads join US-97 at uncontrolled crossroad intersections where drivers must wait for a gap, accelerate hard and hope they make it. Fog can diminish visibility to 200ft and crops growing up to junctions can obscure lines of sight.
View the full article: TrafficTechnologyToday.com
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