Traffic crashes kill more than one million people worldwide each year and are the leading cause of death for children and young adults. In the US, roughly 100 people die this way every day, often on rural and local streets rather than highways. "Traffic deaths are a leading cause of preventable death, yet we treat it like it's inevitable," says Leah Shahum, founder and director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit focused on making streets less deadly.
The causes of crashes are often tangled. Drivers speed or get distracted, but road design also plays a role, from roads built for speed rather than safety to intersections where pedestrians and cyclists are hard to see. Cheap, proven traffic-calming measures exist, such as using planters to narrow intersections or lowering speed limits, but government red tape can slow them down. "There's so many moving parts," says Laura Sandt of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center. "On the flip side, it shows that we have so many opportunities for injury prevention."
Progress is uneven. The US traffic death rate has fallen from a peak of 30.8 deaths per 100,000 people in the 1930s, but deadly pedestrian incidents have risen over the past decade. Hoboken, New Jersey, is one success story, with no traffic fatality since 2017. Its approach combined investment in public transit, wider curbs for walkability, and cameras to identify crash-prone intersections. Even there, removing parking spaces to widen curbs can be hard to justify without proof of danger. "You're kind of selling insurance through these improvements, and that's not always easy," says Greg Francese, the city's acting director of transportation and parking.
There is no single solution that works everywhere. Hoboken has fewer than 60,000 residents and sits across the river from New York City, so its results may not carry over to places like Memphis or Dallas. Still, change is possible. Edmonton, Alberta, a sprawling, car-centric city of around one million people, cut traffic fatalities by 63% between 2015 and 2020 by adjusting speed limits and improving crosswalk signals. As the article concludes, the know-how already exists; funding and political will are the biggest obstacles.
Source: MIT Technology Review · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing