Despite stepped-up efforts to reduce fatalities on Houston-area roads, 2019 remained a deadly year for drivers, passengers and other road users.

The number of lives lost on roads and highways appears likely to exceed the number of deaths from 2018 in Greater Houston, made up of Harris and the seven adjacent counties, even as local police, prosecutors and transportation officials have taken new steps to address the causes contributing to the high body count.

Police have aggressively targeted areas prone to crashes. Prosecutors have stepped up enforcement on bars and businesses that overserve customers. State and local government officials have pledged more money to redesign roadways to make them safer for drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists — with the lofty goal of eventually eliminating all roadway deaths.

“No one should die on Houston’s streets, especially in a preventable crash — virtually all crashes are preventable,” said Jonathan Brooks, director of policy and planning for LINK Houston, a transportation advocacy group that urges more equitable investment across local communities.

Local police responded to at least 602 fatalities as of Dec. 20, data compiled by the state showed. That’s equal to the roadway deaths in 2018 with 11 days to go in the year. It’s cold consolation to officials and residents reeling from roadway tragedies, but that is marked improvement from the 722 fatalities logged in 2016.

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The trend continues through most causes of roadway deaths, including impaired driving. Though it is unlikely the region will surpass the 367 fatalities from drunken and drugged driving in 2016, the 222 already logged mean the region could rise above last year’s 286 deaths where impairment was a factor. The total for the year could increase if police have outstanding investigations that delay inputting some of the fatal wrecks into the database maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation, making the final numbers uncertain until the spring.

Deaths from impaired driving remain a problem across the region, even as the Houston area’s largest sheriff’s office said it had seen results from stepped-up efforts to reduce impaired driving.

In response to a Houston Chronicle investigation in 2018 about the dangers of Houston’s roads, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez created a regional task force — including law enforcement agencies, medical groups, advocacy organizations and engineers — to try to find better ways to rein in DWI crashes and fatalities.

“Everybody did their own thing before,” he said. “Now there’s at least a process. People are talking and participating in each others’ initiatives in a much more meaningful way.”

ON A MISSION: New taskforce targets unsafe drivers on Houston roads

Gonzalez said he hoped saturating problem areas would help increase driver awareness, encourage safer driving and deter drunken driving. Since then, that task force has held monthly operations throughout Harris County. Sheriff’s office data show the task force’s members made 371 DWI arrests in the first 11 months of the year — slightly fewer than a quarter of the total number of DWI arrests that the sheriff’s deputies made overall so far this year.

At the same time, Gonzalez made a practice of going to nearly every fatality crash that his deputies handled, and he flooded social media with posts about the incidents, urging drivers to be more careful. Safety experts have long said enforcement, engineering and education are the three pillars of efforts to reduce the carnage on the streets.

In unincorporated Harris County, sheriff’s office data show the region had a notable drop in DWI-related fatalities. As of Dec. 4, deputies had responded to 106 fatality incidents across the county. A total of 113 people have died in those crashes, records show. By comparison, sheriff’s deputies responded to 149 traffic deaths in 2018 and 161 in 2016.

“Our numbers do look much better than in the past,” Gonzalez said. “We’re making a dent.”

Even with additional traffic deaths through the end of the year, the sheriff’s office anticipated a 15 percent reduction, officials said — the lowest number of fatalities the department has handled in nearly a decade.

Gonzalez credited a more targeted approach, investigations into after-hours establishments and more work with advocacy groups to try to increase awareness about the need for safe driving.

“The untold story remains the number of people who drank heavily and made it to their destination at night,” he said, explaining that he hopes to use funds next year to place more deputies at dangerous intersections or dangerous stretches of road so drivers would have a more visible reminder to slow down.

“It’s not just about citing people or putting people in jail, it’s about changing driving behavior,” he said.

The numbers coincide with a significant reduction in the unincorporated county in overall crashes and crashes in which drivers flee the scene, as well as with a significant reduction in overall DWI arrests.

The task force’s effort — in which the Houston Police Department, Harris County Constable precincts 1 and 8, Jersey Village and the Pasadena Police Department participated — comes as individual departments have also doubled down on enforcement measures.

Overall, that has resulted in an increase of total arrests for DWI, records show, with more than 15,000 cases to the district attorney’s so far this year.

At HPD, for example, officers have made more than 7,900 DWI arrests, according to Assistant Chief Henry Gaw, a significant increase from the approximately 4,700 they made over the same time period last year.

Overall, the department has handled 228 fatality crashes this year, Gaw said, close to the 221 crashes officers worked in 2017. The one bright spot he saw was a decrease in fatalities attributed to impaired driving — from 41 to 26 — though that number could well rise by the end of the year, he said.

“With all options out there, with ride-share programs, there’s no excuse endangering other people’s lives by driving impaired,” Gaw said.

But he was sanguine about the realities of driving in Houston.

“The only way we will be able to end the streak (of days with at least one road fatality) is if we can get fewer people on the roadways,” he said. “We’re going to see more — but do our best to mitigate that number as best as possible.”

Local prosecutors have also ramped up efforts to rein in establishments serving alcohol to teens or overserving patrons who then crash in fatality accidents.

“We’re going after everyone up the chain instead of just the individual responsible for killing other people,” said Sean Teare, a senior prosecutor who oversees the task force.

Since April 2018, prosecutors from the task force have won convictions or guilty pleas against more than 20 defendants, Teare said, including four people connected to a drunken driving crash that led to the death of a mom and her infant son, and a man who crashed into and killed a young couple as they were driving home from prom.

“By raising awareness of the potential criminal culpability of those further back in the chain, we hope that we have deterred others from serving minors and overserving others and letting them get on the road,” Teare said.

For pedestrians and bicyclists, meanwhile, 2019 has already surpassed 2018 in roadway deaths. At least 25 bicyclists and 158 pedestrians died in 2019 along Houston-area streets, despite calls for urgent action on safety for so-called vulnerable roadway users and pledges for infrastructure improvements at key intersections.

It’s a sign more is needed to improve not only streets and sidewalks, but behavior of drivers and pedestrians, observers said.

“We must continue pushing for tangible and holistic policies that include public education campaigns, design changes to reduce high-speeds and improve street lighting, as well as deeper investigations and better enforcement,” said Brooks, with LINK Houston.

WALKING DREAD: Campaign urges better driver, pedestrian awareness

State and local governments in the past year pledged to do more to reduce roadway fatalities. In August, Mayor Sylvester Turner issued an executive order to eliminate deaths on Houston streets by 2030. TxDOT also committed $600 million over the next two years on safety efforts across the state.

Though in infancy, advocates are applauding the actions, noting they have already led to changes in the institutional thinking at city and state agencies more known for moving at a glacial pace.

TxDOT officials say they recognize they need to make improvements strictly for safety enhancement — running contrary to the way roads have been designed in the past.

“We are not implying we have not been,” said Michael Chacon, director of TxDOT’s traffic safety division. “We are simply saying we need to go beyond.”

TxDOT plans to focus its funds — $300 million a year — on four categories: areas where drivers are prone to veering off roads; intersections where elements of the design contribute to crashes; pedestrians; and technology. Nearly two-thirds of the money target keeping people on the road, by funding projects such as rumble strips — to warn inattentive drivers when they stray from their lane — and cable median barriers that prevent drivers from steering into oncoming highway traffic.

Still, transportation officials are signaling that if they are going to save lives on the state’s roads, they are going to have to reduce Texans’ needs to drive.

“Like climate change, for example, we need all solutions,” state transportation commissioner Robert Vaughn said. “Part of the solutions being less vehicles on the road. We are swimming upstream here because there are more people moving to Texas, more corporations, more people on the roads, but by encouraging bicycles particularly in our urban areas. … There are a lot of people in these urban areas that would like to commute in a different way than their own vehicle.”

st.john.smith@chron.com

dug.begley@chron.com