Mm-hmm.

That's right.

A- and, you know, one of my other great frustrations is the point we are trying to make is as compared to our coun- uh, our peer countries, uh, we are seeing a problem in increasing fatalities while other countries are seeing their fatalities generally come down.

Those who are, have seen a bump up are usually starting from a very low level.

They've already conquered much of this problem, but we haven't.

And where we differ from other countries is not in distraction.

Everyone has a cellphone.

What, what makes someone who designs a, a stroad or a collector road or an arterial not care in the same way that someone who designs, say, the car deeply cares about like what someone, if you experience an accident, or someone who designs a high chair worries about if the kid's gonna fall out, or someone who designs like whatever actually worries about human safety? What, what makes the engineer different in this case?

Yeah.

And it, it actually came out of, uh, of the environmental movement, the notion that the way we were sprawling was taking away, you know, uh, precious land, farmland, productive farmland, uh, habitat, great outdoors spaces, uh, and in doing so was polluting the air and water, and that was very much the focus.

If you see our early stuff, you'll see a lot of collaboration with Farmland Trust and, and groups like that.

And what happens is as you move forward, it becomes so clear how many issues play into what makes a community wonderful or terrible, and so you start to do this.

But here's the thing.

If you're about everything, you're about nothing.

So I think over the years what we've done is focus things back down a little bit.

[laughs]

Um, long-term, we hope to lean in the advocacy space to come alongside our community partners and elected officials to try and, um, address educational inequity, uh, and, and think about ways that we can help support changing those systems, um, so that more people have access and an easier, um, uh, pathway to education.

Yeah.

And building on that, um, so when we're really thinking about these ways to disrupt cycles, I think something that's unique about how we think about our partners, like United Way of King County, that are doing the work, is that we think about, okay, what are those access points, like tuition, but also what are the barriers within the programs that can cause someone to have to drop out or derail them from their ultimate goals? And so United Way of King County is doing that with the emergency programming that Bridge to Finish provides.

Um, so we're really thinking about partners that want to help these students get to completion.

Um, since we started in twenty twenty-one, we have worked with nonprofits like United Way of King County to provide over a hundred direct scholarships, but also with the partners who are doing this work in this wraparound way, three thousand eight hundred additional students are also getting supports with things like transportation and childcare and getting a chance to complete.

So I'm really proud of the work that all these partners are doing, and United Way of King County, um, certainly is doing amazing work in this area as well.

Mm-hmm

...

As a professional driver, I feel like I've seen many, many incidents where the pedestrian was at fault due to not paying attention to their surroundings because they were on their phones." And Robert asks, "To what extent does the increase of auto deaths depend on auto or road factors versus pedestrian behavior and choices?" Beth?

Sure.

I, one thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is how we rate as a country, uh, in terms of our roadway safety versus other countries.

Um, a- and we're talking about pedestrians, but our roadways are incredibly unsafe for everybody.

Uh, if you look at countries that have safer roadways than us, it includes, uh, Iran, India, um, I mean, most third-world countries are safer than ours.

There are no first-world developed countries anywhere near as unsafe as ours across the board.

We don't think about safety in how we develop our roads, and what differentiates us is not in fact the existence of smartphones.

Beth, who generally funds the kind of product- projects that could improve traffic and pedestrian safety?