Shamita Basu

One state senator whose daughter has Down syndrome pulled his support after Trump used an offensive slur.

Nationwide, redistricting debates rumble on.

Lawmakers in Missouri and North Carolina have targeted Democratic seats with new maps.

And in California, where a hearing on the legality of a new voter-approved map that could result in five more Democratic seats will take place next week.

The U.S.

is something of a global outlier when it comes to traffic deaths.

In most developed countries, fatalities have dropped and the roads have gotten safer.

But here, the trend has been going in the opposite direction.

The Washington Post has been looking at one idea, Vision Zero, that some cities were pinning their hopes on to reverse the trend.

Rachel Weiner and her colleagues have the story.

Transportation officials and engineering experts told The Washington Post that the policies behind Vision Zero definitely work.

Things like adding more crosswalks and narrowing multi-lane roads in busy areas.

The problem is the opposition it faces.

The concept is based on a Swedish model that posits that the government can reduce the risk of fatal driving mistakes through a combination of engineering, vehicle standards and law enforcement.

In 2014, New York City was considered the first to adopt the policy, and it still has a task force complete with a powerful ad campaign.

But The Washington Post found that in more than two dozen American cities that instituted Vision Zero, the pedestrian death rate is the same or higher than it was before the cities made pledges to change policy.

Nationally, the Post reports annual pedestrian deaths surged 70 percent from 2010 to 2023.

Even in Los Angeles, an early adopter of Vision Zero, an independent audit of L.A.

's efforts found that there was a lack of total buy-in and disagreements over how to run the program, among other issues.

The Post tells the story of Cecilia Milbourne.