Traffic safety in the US

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Leah Shahum:

....I've noted in previous policy briefs that much of the increase in fatalities since 2014 was among pedestrians, and most of the increase in pedestrian fatalities took place at night and involved pedestrians engaging in unsafe behavior such as jaywalking.

Some say this is blaming the victim, but it is important to understand the problem before trying to fix it. Most of the remedies offered by urban planners—such as traffic calming, complete streets, and Vision Zero—don’t address the problem of unsafe pedestrian behavior.

....the recent estimate indicates that the biggest increases in fatalities took place in western states such as California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. These are the states that have most aggressively applied traffic calming and other anti-automobile programs, and the data suggest that those programs have failed to make traffic safer.

An article by journalist Erin Sagen claimed that Americans were in “collective denial about....how lethal our car dependency already is,” accepting “the carnage as an unavoidable fact of life.”

But that’s not true at all: thanks to great efforts by both highway designers and motor vehicle manufacturers, both highways and automobiles today are far safer than they were a few decades ago.

Even if 2021 sees more than 40,000 fatalities, that will still be fewer than in every year from 1963 to 2007. The worst was in 1969, when American drove only about a third as many miles as they do today, yet more than 55,000 people were killed in traffic accidents.

The improvement from 450 fatalities per billion miles in 1909 to 52 in 1969 to less than 11 in 2019 didn’t come about because people became safer drivers. It happened because both highways and motor vehicles were made safer. Recent motor vehicle improvements include curtain airbags, antilock brakes, and vehicle stability control....

One of the greatest improvements in safety came with the construction of the Interstate Highway System. Urban interstates and other urban freeways are the safest roads to drive on, seeing 4.6 or fewer fatalities per billion vehicle miles in 2019. 

Unfortunately, such improvements have been stalled by the anti-highway movement. Urban areas whose transportation planners have made a conscious decision not to expand their freeway systems, such as Portland and Seattle, are allowing more people to die in a futile effort to discourage auto driving.

While programs such as complete streets call for greater mixing of bicycles, pedestrians, and motor vehicles, safety can be better improved by separating uses. 

Putting bicycles on bicycle boulevards, safeguarding pedestrians in clearly defined sidewalks and crosswalks, and even separating cars from heavy trucks in some places would do more to reduce fatalities than mixing them together by putting bike lanes on busy streets or allowing pedestrians free use of streets, as some planners advocate.

Complete streets and traffic calming also are aimed mainly at collector and local streets, while in most places the most dangerous streets are non-freeway arterials. This is another artifact of approaching traffic safety from a generalized anti-automobile mentality rather than addressing specific safety problems.

Sagen betrays an anti-auto bias when she uses such terms as “carnage” and “auto dependency.” Americans are not dependent on autos: they are liberated by them, enjoying far greater mobility than anyone else, anywhere else, in the entire history of humanity. That mobility has made us wealthy and given us access to, among other things, better health care. 

While every traffic fatality is a tragedy, and we should try to use evidence-based systems to reduce such tragedies, one reason why Americans seem to Sagen to be “nonchalant” about traffic safety is because we get so much from automobiles and highways.

Vision Zero is a slogan, not a safety policy

Randal O'Toole

Letter to the editor in the NY Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Pedestrian Deaths Hit Highs as Reckless Driving Surges” (news article, Feb. 15):

While pandemic-induced “social disengagement” may contribute to the soaring death rate on America’s roadways in the past two years, the reality is that long before Covid-19 government and industry leaders disengaged from their moral responsibilities to ensure safety on our roads, sidewalks and bikeways.

The U.S. ranks 46th worst of 52 high-income nations in traffic deaths, according to the World Health Organization. This is not because drivers in America are inherently worse drivers. Rather, we design roads that prioritize speed over safety, supersize cars and set speed limits at dangerous levels. We are experiencing the deadly results we designed for.

Some leaders recognize that we can make change. More than 40 U.S. cities have committed to Vision Zero: safe mobility for all. 

A few weeks ago, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg set the national goal of zero roadway deaths, declaring, “We cannot and must not accept that these fatalities are somehow an inevitable part of life in America.”

We created today’s deadly transportation system. We can change it, too. We need leaders across the nation to re-engage and prioritize safety.

Leah Shahum

Oakland, California

The writer is the founder and director of the Vision Zero Network.

Rob's comment:

You exaggerate how "deadly" the US transportation system is. The graph above tells a different story. Vision Zero is a slogan, not a safety policy. Some fatalities are in fact inevitable in a big country with a lot of traffic.