With thousands of vehicles on the road each and every day, the efforts of any one person to make those roads safer are to be commended, but it is our officials that need to realize that there is much more work to be done.

The efforts of people like Bonnie and Scott Thompson show what can happen when an issue strikes close to home and people take the initiative. But just as Scott told the Herald Monday afternoon, in eastern Kentucky, where the roads wind sharply through valleys and sit atop steep drop-offs, more attention should be paid to our secondary roads in an attempt to make them safer.

Countless accidents have occurred where people have dropped their tires off the pavement and lost control, ending up over an embankment or in the creek. The simple construction of a guardrail along these roads can play an important role in reducing the number of fatalities or injuries our people are faced with every year in Kentucky.

The General Assembly obviously had the safety of drivers and their passengers on their minds in the past, because a few years ago our legislature passed a bill that requires anyone riding in a motor vehicle to wear a seat belt. In 2006 that bill was strengthened with a primary seat belt law. So, it is obvious that our elected officials in Frankfort are concerned with our safety, so it stands to reason that they are willing to do more.

Driving along eastern Kentucky’s secondary roadways, it’s obvious that many of them do not contain adequate safety measures, and much of this can be seen on our state roads where the presence of guardrails in many areas are nonexistent.

The biggest problem when facing issues such as these is that we fail to act or recognize the dangers until a tragedy occurs. In the case of the guardrails recently added in Dwarf, it took two tragedies and the continuous work of one family to get a resolution.

We implore our state officials to begin to take a look at our roadways, and evaluate how they can be made safer, even if it’s the simple addition of a guardrail along the shoulders that could prevent a car from careening down a steep embankment. If we can take a step and begin to force people to wear a seat belt or face breaking the law, our leaders should be able to take another step forward and put aside some more funding from each budget to make the roads of Kentucky a bit safer.