Looks like where I live, deaths are more closely associated with big, wide, fast roads.
It's ironic that drivers get frustrated by smaller, narrower streets as not feeling very safe, but that uncomfortable feeling 1) slows people down and 2) keeps them on their toes in terms of looking out for hazards rather than feeling ok with driving fast and not paying as much attention.
Traffic calming measures like lane narrowing have successfully been used in Europe for safety.
Drivers don't follow traffic rules. They follow the rules that appear to make sense for the scenario they're in.
No matter how many 15 mph speedlight signs you put up on a wide street, the driver will subconsciously speed through a wide street because the brain is stupid like that.
Want drivers to stop before the footpath, raise it up. It'll make them feel like they're off-the-road and they'll slow down.
Everything about cars is associated with perceptions.
Families buy heavy cars for the perception of safety, but instead have a vehicle that is harder to turn and is more likely to end up in a ditch. They buy taller vehicles to feel safe but have instead purchased a massive blindspot notorious for trampling over your own children. Unprotected bike lanes look like shoulder lanes you can serve into, and that's how drivers treat them.
You're absolutely correct about the feeling of discomfort when driving through narrow lanes.
The biggest lie we tell is that cars are safe. No, you're wielding the most lethal murder weapon in the country, with almost zero training and 1 mistake is all it takes to get a prison sentence.
Outstanding comment, you're absolutely correct about everything. Except this:
> 1 mistake is all it takes to get a prison sentence
On the contrary, on top of everything you've pointed out, if you do kill someone (or multiple someones) at the wheel of a car you're unlikely to get more than a few months in prison AT MOST.
GP is describing traffic calming road design. Where planners make roads purposefully feel less safe in certain neighborhoods because that statistically makes them safer per mile driven. A common example here in SF is to add unnecessary bends to an otherwise straight alley. This stops people from speeding right through a residential area because it's straight and empty.
An example you may have seen in more rural areas is a straight road with an unnecessary curve before a stop sign or before entering a town. This forces you to slow down in a way that a speed limit doesn't.
It's also separating things out. We need larger, faster roads to get from city to city - that's kind of inevitable. But the way you design those is to completely separate out bikes and pedestrians from them, and also limit access to them. Think of something like an interstate freeway.
Slow, local streets are relatively safe because of the slow speeds and the priority on building places that cater to people and businesses rather than moving automobiles as quickly as possible.
The 'in between' things, "stroads" are what tend to be the worst of both worlds. They do often include some token bike/pedestrian infrastructure that is not very safe, and they include lots of places where other cars exit/enter the road and turn lanes and just a lot of potential for bad interactions in unexpected ways.
The Strong Towns folks do a pretty good job of outlining this, and in terms of fixing it, I've seen some interesting stuff related to street design in the Netherlands.
The trouble is why the "stroads" came to be to begin with.
Motorists will generally prefer whatever route gets them to their destination faster, but shops want to be where the traffic is, because they want motorists to stop and patronize them. So the shops want to set up right next to the high volume traffic path. But then pedestrians patronizing the same shops will be adjacent to that high speed high volume vehicle traffic.
In theory there are designs that can address this, i.e. you interleave roads so that each block is bounded by a high speed road for vehicle traffic on one side and a low speed road for pedestrians and cyclists on the other, keeping them separate but still allowing businesses to be accessible to both. But now you run into politics: The motorists may now have to walk up to a city block to get where they're going and the anti-car people are going to object to there being high speed roads and parking lots in the city whatsoever. Meanwhile making the change requires a budget allocation to do the work, so in the absence of consensus the status quo prevails.
But that's a complete failure of the people doing traffic management: Other countries manage to make car accessible shops by minimizing the number of ingress and egress points in the road that is supposed to be fast, and moving the stores to a side street that has all those points, but is slower, narrower, and possibly usable by a pedestrian.
The sin of the stroad is to give us a 6 lane road that is ultimately risky and slow-ish due to those ingress points, instead of separating the fast traffic and the slow one. Most of the time we'd not even need a larger right of way: Just treating major roads as places where every intersection is a serious hazard to minimize.
> Other countries manage to make car accessible shops by minimizing the number of ingress and egress points in the road that is supposed to be fast, and moving the stores to a side street that has all those points, but is slower, narrower, and possibly usable by a pedestrian.
The main issue here is really that other countries allow mixed-use zoning, causing a higher proportion of patrons to be pedestrians instead of the majority of the population living isolated in the suburbs and arriving by car. But you can't fix that by changing the roads, first you have to change the zoning -- and then wait several years for its effects to be realized.
And in the meantime the shops will want to be on the high traffic road because that's how most of their customers arrive.
> shops want to be where the traffic is, because they want motorists to stop and patronize them.
Citation needed? Motorists (as opposed to pedestrians) rarely stop at a shop because they passed in front of it (except on very long routes). Reason being, it is pretty hard to register what shops you're passing when driving
I don't think having a lot of motor traffic in front of it helps a shop
It's not just coffee. If you're coming home from work and want to pick up dinner or grab something at a convenience store, are you going to stop at the place on the road you're already taking or do you want to add more time sitting in rush hour traffic to go somewhere else?
But adding a detour is easy in a car (even during rush hour - congestion is mainly on big axes). Restaurant doesn't need to be right where the traffic is.
Congestion is mainly anywhere near the big axes, which is exactly the problem. Even if the place is "only" three blocks away, that's three stinking red lights in each direction. Meanwhile you may not have any strong preference between two similar burger joints, so if one is directly on the main road and the other isn't, where are you stopping?
Stroads never make sense, even with zero pedestrian traffic. They have way too many ingress and egress points, so they are wide, attempting to be fast, yet ultimately a significant crash risk, because there's a way in, or out, or something, ever quarter mile at the most. Tiny strip mall with 4 stores! A funeral parlor! A bank! a subdivision hidden somewhere? Sometimes, even straight out houses. All at 90 degree angles, where some traffic is doing 40, and there's no traffic lights in most of said interscetions.
Even banning pedestrians, we'd be far better off with fewer ingress points to fast roads that now need fewer lanes, and then the few intersections/roundabouts give access to side roads that are rated far, far slower, and have access to those store parking lots. The traffic that is going far is then detached from the one that is going close, the road gets faster, and the street is safer from fender benders. The diminished places where people stop fast and go will also lower stress on the physical road itself, leading to less places needing repairs very often, as the typical stroad turning lane does.
I'd argue that most American local streets are unsafe anyway: I've seen Spanish highways with fewer lanes than suburbian streets with no commercial. But the distances to connect 500 bedrooms, placed in 1/3rd of an acre lots, are so large that ultimately roads are overbuilt to fit anything. Suburban streets with traffic under 1 car a minute in the daytime, with 3 or 4 lanes, set to a 30mph max, where you'd do 60 except for the fact that it's full of driveways coming in and out. Why do we even allow a lone house connect to a road like that via a driveway, where the neighbor will go into the street in reverse? It's madness, and is all over the midwest. So we don't even have to get into the stroads.
Let's just barricade up the streets. No traffic = no traffic accidents. This is what's been happening in Chicago with all the island, speed humps, etc. Reducing traffic to a safe crawl.
The problem with those devices is that they slow down traffic even when there are no pedestrians around and the streets could be used to reduce congestion on the roads.
I wonder what effect slowing traffic down to a crawl has on overall emissions. I'm guessing not good. I bet speeders are overall more efficient than crawlers.
> Let's just barricade up the streets. No traffic = no traffic accidents.
That’s what my home city did – Ljubljana. Over the past few decades the downtown area has become an almost square mile sized pedestrian zone. It has been wonderful. The area is completely revitalized, shops are booming, tourism is booming, entertainment industry is booming, everything is booming.
All because they kicked out the cars.
Here’s a video and a photo from my recent trip back. It made me realize how dead San Francisco feels in comparison even with 3x the population because everything is just roads with nowhere for people to hang.
For everything else, have you ever thought about the effects of higher speed traffic on residents? I'm guessing you haven't cause "screw those people".
I grew up in a neighborhood that had no outlets. Very, very safe place to play as a kid. We’d be in the street all day long, riding, walking, playing.
I returned recently, and the atmosphere is completely different, because now the streets have been extended. Through traffic completely changed the dynamics.
To me the comment spoke to our criminal lack of intelligent road design. It’s well known through multiple studies that road design impacts how fast people drive far more than posted speed limit signs. If we actually cared about road safety, we would design roads to be more safe and not just design a road that is comfortable to drive 60mph on and put up a 25mph speed limit. When you want slower speeds you need to make lanes more narrow. Add obstacles along the side of the road so it doesn’t feel so open. Add medians as areas where pedestrians have a refuge when daring to cross a place designed for vehicles. Add chicanes and bollards to force speed compliance in especially dangerous areas. There seems to be almost none of this happening in most places in the US that I have visited.
We also could largely solve this problem with technological enforcement but people really hate that. If we made both the financial penalties for speeding and the probability of being caught sufficiently high, we could practically eliminate it overnight.
1) build a society that requires a car to get around
2) exclusively sell cars with ludicrous acceleration and top speed
3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles
4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.
I’m strongly anti-car - I think we fucked up a whole lot designing society the way we did, but at this point, actual strict enforcement of speed limits with financial penalties is just robbery. If you want fewer people to die in car accidents, build a world that doesn’t obligate everyone to drive, or build a world where the vehicles for sale aren’t all SUVs with 0-60 times that would embarrass a Ferrari from 40 years ago, but don’t just start fining people when they use the vehicle you made them buy to do the thing it was made to do.
> 3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles
> 4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.
Most consumer cars are going to have a hard time at 120mph, if their tires are even rated for it.
So then you're claiming that most speed limits are 20mph.
Which they're not.
And then, I'm not sure? Should it be legal to drive suburban streets at triple digit speeds?
I am not sure what you're trying to get at, beyond "we should be able to use our cars to the limit of their capability, even if it exceeds our own as a driver".
Please be realistic about what interventions are available given the current US system. Redesign our entire road system? Sounds great, but how are we going do it?
Think about the policy changes and thousands or more of political wranglings across every populous jurisdiction in the United States.
Even if we get it done over the next 20 to 120 years, what are we going do in the meanwhile?
Like a lot of things, start with reviewing what works elsewhere, start some pilots, and what works do bigger and bigger rollouts.
Like, use data. If marketers and TikTok can trick us so easily using these techniques we can do the same in socio-technical settings too.
Like most things, “architectural” systems solutions will work better than point behavioural interventions, but it’s always going to be a mix.
Bike safety in The Netherlands was a multigenerational effort ranging from creating standards around roads intersections, bike paths and pavements and slowly remediating old ones while building new ones.
That’s only a tiny part of a society-wide effort to improve quality- and length-of-life measures, but like the US Interstate highway system, has had measurable results in terms of economic and social outcomes.
Some actions taken today will have individual results tomorrow. Some in 30 years. Better get started, right?
The reason this isn't solved is because traffic deaths are considered to be a "cost of doing business". Most pedestrian traffic in the US is in cities and due to the way funding formulas and political representation works in the US, suburban and rural areas have more political power than urban areas which care more about traffic throughput than pedestrian safety, so the issue never gets fixed. The only places in the US making headway have large urbanized areas and even they are struggling.
Rural areas don’t have much political power either. A lot of rural America is actually unincorporated which means they don’t have a municipal level government, and instead are ruled by the county[^†].
In my experience the outsized political power is across gegraphic areas and instead is divided between classes, with the rich having almost all political power. A rich neighborhood in San Francisco hold much more political power than an improvised suburb in Fresno.
Instead the reason I believe for pedestrian traffic being considered the "cost of doing business" among the political classes, is the good old hatred of the poor. Pedastrian casualties are extremely rare among the rich, as the rich usually drive almost everywhere, and if they walk, they do so in an area which they have lobbied to make safe for pedestrians. The rich don’t care if the poor die.
†: As an immigrant, this feels like a major democratic oversight, one of many USA should fix if it wants to consider it self a democracy by 21st century standards.
Other states may be different, but at least in California there’s a pretty straightforward path to incorporation if a community desires it. The large number of unincorporated areas are because the residents don’t think the tradeoffs are worth it.
Counties are also generally all too happy to delegate decision making to communities which will take it on even if they don’t incorporate.
It still feels like a democratic oversight. The most favorable interpretation is a failure of policy.
It is simply not acceptable to leave any part of your population without municipality level representation. Delegating this to a community council is not democratic and is extremely ripe for misuse. If a community wishes to remain unincorporated you have to look at why that is, and offer accommodations or change the incorporation strategy accordingly.
For example both Skyway and White Center (unincorporated King County, WA) voters have refuse to be incorporated with Renton and Burien respectively, but it was the Seattle city council (not voters) that rejected incorporating White Center, and voters have never been asked if they want their own independence. At the same time Vashon hasn’t even been asked.
If America was serious about democracy they would establish a policy in which every populated area outside of reservations will have local level representation in like 30 years (ideally they should have started that policy 30 years ago). And if there is no agreement on how a single community (say White Center) hasn’t incorporated by that time, have a plurality wins—or better yet, ranked choice—vote on e.g. 3 options, Seattle, Burien, or independent.
Skyway and White Center aren’t rural. They want to be unincorporated to pay less taxes and follow less rules. I agree that suburban unincorporated shouldn’t be allowed. I would add that small, below 50-100k, suburban cities shouldn’t be allowed. But that isn’t for smaller subdivisions but larger ones,
But that has nothing to do with rural areas. My brother lives in Iowa near medium town. Everything else is small towns, less than 1000. Should those incorporate and spend money on city services? What about the farmers who are spread out? What municipality do they belong to? The county is the best option.
Let me understand this. Are you suggesting adding yet another inefficient layer of government in sparsely populated areas?
BTW, in at least some states there are intermediate subdivisions of government, e.g. townships and districts, which take care of the roads even in rural areas.
Yes. This is what most—all?—other democracies do. More realistically though, municipality level governments include surrounding rural areas. In areas with small towns and large areas of rural farmlands, the farmers and town residents have equal representation, but the farmers obviously have a bigger political influence (hopefully the municipality governments have enough representatives though that the townfolks have at least a couple of representatives).
In reality unincorporated America also includes heavily urbanized areas (more often than not poorer than the surrounding areas). Here in Seattle this includes Skyway and White Center. But even if aside from those it is pretty unacceptable that all local planning for the community of e.g. Fairwood, or even Hobart don’t have any say in their municipality level organization, instead relying on the same county council as Seattle for their local affairs (a council with only 9 representatives for a total of 2.2 million constituents).
Indeed, just because a problem could theoretically be addressed (I think solved is a reach) by technology, doesn't mean it's a sensible choice.
Much like how putting a sign that says "pull" on a door that's designed to be pushed is analogous to what most places in NA do, which is to threaten people who use the road in the way it's designed.
This type of whining about slippery slope hypotheticals is ubiquitous in these discussions, but it's not very compelling up against the current reality of 40,000 unimaginably violent early deaths every single year in the US alone
Idk. Technological enforcement seems like it really should be the last resort here. Why should we not focus on stopping the construction of stroads and building safer streets and roads first and foremost before we reach for a tech solution that will undoubtedly come with privacy and abuse related tradeoffs while also likely being less effective.
Think probabilities here. Given human nature, what are the most probable solutions?
I’ve seen a number of cities find the authority or political will to increase the number of automated speed cameras. This suggests (while not a complete complete solution) a real step in the right direction
Given the entire urban planning political environment has shifted towards gradual but substantial infrastructure changes, at this point the main barrier to change is just making it happen. And to achieve that all you need to do is push for new road standards and guidance at a city, county, or state level.
Once that's done the changes can roll out whenever there's maintenance or road widening going on. This is for example what Florida is doing to push for a comprehensive passenger rail system and it's what other countries have done to make their roads and streets safer and more efficient as well. So it'd stand to reason the same principle would work at state and local levels in the US for this as well.
The only real argument against it I could see is that it'll take too long but 30-50 years really is nothing for widespread infrastructure improvements.
> it's not very compelling up against the current reality of 40,000 unimaginably violent early deaths every single year in the US alone
I disagree. The economy depends on the rivers of money that flow through the roads. Roads dispense communication, goods, labor, et al, over the vast area that is the USA. 40k deaths, distributed across the US, is a good deal.
On the other hand, I had great expectations for companies that wanted to provide a solution that's safer for a profit (robocars). A handful of people died during the development, and it's rejected outright by large portions of the population. So here we are.
Not only is this accounting callous, it seems to presuppose that there is societal benefit in reckless, antisocial driving behavior. I don't believe that this is true. Imagine a world in which median vehicle speeds remained the same and traffic fatalities went to zero. I'd take that 10 times out of 10 compared to the status quo.
Of course I was being mildly hyperbolic when saying we could solve speeding with technological enforcement, but I genuinely believe it could make a massive difference and lead to a significant quality of life improvement for most people. For those with the need for speed, build more tracks. But we should stop normalizing reckless behavior on our shared roadways. There should be an expectation of safety and we should maximize traffic flux while minimizing traffic injuries and fatalities.
> Not only is this accounting callous, it seems to presuppose that there is societal benefit in reckless, antisocial driving behavior
You cannot eliminate risk, stop people from taking risks or stop people from dying. You say callous and I say practical. We all make tradeoffs every day, which has elevated society from subsistence existence. eg Every person doing physical labor, every doctor pushing diseases to be more resilient.
Before we tackle the hard problem outlined above, let's solve the easy problem of pedestrians (bikers, scooters, skateboarders, etc.) traveling on highways and crossing traffic in undesignated places. I can't tell you how many times I've had pedestrians impatiently run across the roadway in front of my car.
I'm not sure one problem is easier to fix than the other. They both seem to come from people acting irresponsibly to arrive earlier at their destination, probably combined with an infrastructure to nudge towards that behaviour.
Changing behaviour with a penalty isn't terribly effective unless enforced in such a way that it is incredibly privacy-invasive, more effective is changing the layout of the streets. But I wouldn't be sure that that is easier to fix on the pedestrian side than on the vehicle side.
Most of those are avoidable plus the rate of long term disabilities is about 10x the death rate (so 400 000) and of minor injuries is 10x that (so 4 million) plus... we can do both. There is plenty of money for safer road infra, DRIVERS JUST DON'T WANT IT because killing a stranger matters less than 5 fewer minutes spent commuting per day.
Agreed, especially when the opposition is formed out of several major industries in the country (car manufacturers, adjacent companies, road developers, big box stores, etc.).
I'm not sure it rises to 'opposition' per-se. For instance, I don't think anyone is sitting there cackling about how they're killing anyone due to them being obese fat asses, and figuring out how to make it worse.
It's really macro-economic and social inertia. Those sedentary folks have also convinced themselves they LIKE IT, and there is room (and real economic incentives) in the US trending in those directions. Like low property prices in the 'burbs, cheap gas (by global and economic standards), etc.
He's saying that if a stretch of highway has traffic volume of 10 million trips taken on it in a year and an average of 2 deaths per year, that is still much safer than a neighborhood street which sees 10,000 trips per year and averages 1 death per year.
(numbers made up to emphasize a point, a neighborhood street with 1 death per year is pretty obviously unsafe)
Are there suddenly no pedestrians and cyclists on the roads with the cars? A cyclist hitting a pedestrian at 30km/h (fucking fast for a normal cyclist btw) is a rounding error both in terms of how much it happens and how deadly it is compared to a car hitting a pedestrian at 30km/h
We have what are called “stroads” in North America, which are very much what you’re describing.
I remember when I was a kid, they took Pershing Road on the Stickney-Berwyn (Illinois) border and changed the commercial parking from diagonal to parallel and increased the traffic flow from two lanes to four. I have no firm data, but I’m pretty sure that this increased accidents on the street as well as effectively killed the Stickney CBD on Pershing Road (I would guess at least a third of the storefronts are currently vacant and that’s ignoring buildings that were demolished and never replaced). And I’m not entirely sure what traffic benefit came out of increasing the flow along the street as it’s not really a good connector of anything in that stretch.
I don't particularly like the word myself, partially because I use 'street' and 'road' interchangeably and so I'm never clear what it's supposed to be a hybrid of, but the word was coined by Charles Marohn, founder of the nonprofit Strong Towns [0]. I don't know about any YouTube channel associated with him, but I have heard of the nonprofit and I'm not exactly a passionate follower of that niche.
A road where traffic moves at 30mph can be poorly designed and lead to lots of accidents, but so long as those accidents are not a vehicle hitting a pedestrian they're unlikely to be fatal.
A road where traffic moves at 70mph is another story.
USA has 12.9 traffic deaths per 100 000 people yearly with 330 million people.
Europe as a whole has 7.4 with 746.4 million people, and developed EU countries are around or under 5. Surface area is actually quite similar 9.3 million vs 10 million km2.
There are countries with population densities higher and lower than US in there, and ALL BUT ONE OF THEM have less traffic deaths than US. It's Bosnia and Herzegovina by the way. And it's at 13.5.
USA is crazy unsafe for a developed country, and it barely matters if you compare with sparsely populated Canada (5.2) or Sweden (2.0), or densely populated Germany (3.7) or Japan (2.1).
It's not about population nor population density. It's not about wealth. It's not about population distribution.
12.9 still seems very low to me. What makes the lower number better? I wouldn’t want the difference between 12.9 and 7.4 if it means I need to give up on driving cars and take slow inconvenient public transit or be limited to where public transit takes me. Cars are freedom.
I would also argue the US is more successful than literally every other country in part because of fast road infrastructure. So maybe they’re all just making the wrong tradeoff.
One of the big ironies of all this is car insurance.
If you keep getting your car dinged on narrow roads, your insurance payouts will be larger than if you run over someone. Dings add up to a lot, but hitting a pedestrian maxes out the payout before the guy makes it out of the emergency room.
This is why Massachusetts drivers have a bad rep. Lots and lots of minor accidents in dense traffic. But MA itself it one of the safest places in the US
Speed kills, but slowness eats lives in another way.
Which is worse, having a 1% chance of dying in a car accident, or spending an extra hour/day stuck in traffic? I think I might take the first option; it delivers a higher expected number of hours of life not stuck in traffic.
It's not even a realistic representation of the commute choice. In the US, with a heavily car centric culture and ~stupid housing policy, we still have an average daily commute of about 55 minutes. Aren't gonna save an hour on that.
…by increasing the time to a destination and reducing access? By forcing people to live mandated lives in a 15 minute radius? By making everyone crowd into unsafe and dirty public transit? All of these and any other options you might name will hurt people’s lives as well. I can’t imagine an alternative that doesn’t confirm GP’s point.
Also some more people would bike to their destinations. Some people would take take public transit.
And guess what, that means that in the end, fewer people drive so there's less traffic, and on empty streets going 30kmph on average, you get where you want faster than in stop and go or constantly merging traffic that has posted speed limits of 50 kmph. As people say, driving in the Netherlands is world class, and that's <<because>> the Netherlands has tons of cyclists, not <<despite>> them.
2. You know or should know that it's not about you dying in your car. These days cars are incredibly safe tanks for those inside. You're more likely to kill someone <<outside>> your car.
3. Other people have pointed out the logical fallacy, already.
The Netherlands was as car-supremacist a country as any other until the 70s. They fixed their stuff and now their bike infrastructure is excellent: people move to their destinations faster and safer and cheaper and cleaner than in everyone had to travel in an automobile.
Bikes cannot be faster than cars because cars can literally accelerate faster and have higher top speed. When car infrastructure is sufficient there is no theoretical way bikes can move people faster as you claim. As for safer - cars are very safe already and it is irrational to care about minor risks.
Cars are big, and during rush hour have an average of roughly one person in them. Cities are confined spaces with lots of people living in them. As such, you are condemned to have traffic jams when cars are the main form of transport.
To make car infrastructure "sufficient" you are required to make roads wider, which reduces the quality of life of those living in the city, and perversely increases the demand for car transport eventually leading to more traffic jams. Bikes, even in high traffic situations, move faster than cars that are stationary.
And yes, cars are very safe — but only for those inside of them. As they get bigger, heavier and with taller bumpers they get more and more deadly for pedestrians and cyclists.
It hasn't always been like that. There was a public campaign in the 1970s to try to prevent all the child deaths from car drivers - Stop de Kindermoord. There's not really any excuse for continuing to design purely for car drivers apart from that's what people have been led to believe.
How selfish of you. Don't you care that you're more likely to kill somebody's kids as you fly down the road in your SUV, just to save some time on your commute?
My, if only there were other worlds possible than "stuck in traffic for 2h" and "flying down a 14-lane road on a 4-ton child-killing machine"... But sadly it's impossible :'(
Speed and convenience also matters. I like big, fast, and wide roads because they let me and many others get to where we want to go quickly. It’s a trade off. We shouldn’t let “think of the children” safetyism decide what the balance is, since that line of thinking is extremist and does not consider what is at stake on the other side of the argument. Efforts to eliminate every last death on streets are a waste of time since we’ll never achieve perfection and roads are very safe already. The road diets made under that unrealistic goal are simply making everyone’s lives worse by causing us to spend more time on the roads in traffic.
Think about all the injuries too. All the environmental damage. All the people that don't hang on the street because of the fumes and noise and danger. All the road rage and cortisol that boils within otherwise sane people the moment you put them behind a wheel and into some traffic. All the sedentarism and obesity from people opting to drive 2 minutes rather than walk 10. All the forgone housing for parking stadiums.
I am all for convenience, but the costs are noticeable in more ways than one.
I don't disagree but I would add this adjacent perspective.
It's a bit like we've installed public-funded, unremovable alcohol spigots in everyone's home. People using them within their designed limits lead to awful outcomes. We're reasonably upset about that and respond with thousands of marginally and unequally enforced restrictions. Unhappy with their ineffectiveness, we just keep piling on more punitive restrictions.
Giving up booze infrastructure isn't on the table tho. We're too dependent on it.
Environmental damage is the argument against traffic calming measures. Vehicles are most efficient traveling at a consistent, relatively high speed. The reason the national speed limit was historically set at 55MPH was that was the approximate speed at which aerodynamic losses overcome mechanical losses from low gearing at low speeds, i.e. it was the speed that vehicles of the time were most fuel efficient. Modern vehicles have even better aerodynamics. Moreover, fuel efficiency for electric vehicles is essentially moot, because they have built-in storage that can be charged from intermittent renewable sources during times of oversupply when the power is "free".
Conversely, traffic calming generally results in vehicle speed changes as motorists slow down and then speed back up again in response to obstructions or areas with intentionally low visibility, which not only wastes fuel by operating vehicles below their optimal speed, it results in braking and acceleration that increases brake dust and tire wear.
Environmentally, the optimal road is flat and straight with no traffic control devices or other reasons for vehicles to change speed, i.e. a highway.
Environmentally, the optimal road is the road with no cars on it. Ideally, traffic calming is paired with cities where things are put closer together and where walking, biking, and transit are the most viable options for most trips. Traffic calming a road in a suburb a mile from the nearest store might help with safety, but people will still use cars to get everywhere.
> Environmentally, the optimal road is the road with no cars on it.
But then why is there even a road there? How to reduce the amount of travel required and how to most efficiently get from A to B are two different issues. Doing the former is good, but it requires things like new higher density housing construction, which takes a long time and is not going to cause most of the existing homes in the suburbs to cease to exist under any plausible expectation.
One of the reasons for this is that high density doesn't require much land; if you build 20 units to a lot then you could double the existing suburban housing stock as high density units, but you'd have only bulldozed 5% of them to do it, so the other 95% would still exist. This would reduce housing costs but you'd still have someone living in most of those existing homes, which are in places it's not viable to walk or use mass transit.
And then you might want to ask a question like "how do we make transportation more efficient in the short term, i.e. on a 5-10 year timescale"? To which the answer is things like "make new cars electric" and "optimize high-traffic roads to maximize the efficiency of existing vehicles".
This assumes that cars are the only way to get around.
A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.
In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well. Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.
> This assumes that cars are the only way to get around.
Which is true in many cases, and would take decades of construction to do anything about, e.g. because people would have to move out of the suburbs or else at least one end of the trip will require a car, which would require massive long-term new housing construction in urban areas and has no short-term solution.
> A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.
A city bus will get around 5MPG. The most efficient cars get more than 50MPG, so a city bus isn't even as fuel efficient as the cars until it's carrying more than 10 passengers. In theory they can carry 30-40 passengers, but generally in practice they don't, and in theory that 50+MPG car can carry five or more passengers too.
> In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well.
"In areas where the time efficiency of car traffic is purposely degraded, car traffic has lower time efficiency" is kind of tautological, but that's a silly argument for doing it, especially when the proposed alternative isn't available, e.g. because one of the endpoints is in the suburbs and the bus doesn't go there.
> Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.
It's kind of odd that the same people who talk about wasted space from parking want to allocate entire bus lanes worth of space for a vehicle that only uses them 0.2% of the time. Also, what are you proposing here? 50+MPH buses traveling next to bike lanes and pedestrians? It would have to be even higher than that, because the bus is constantly starting and stopping to pick up passengers (and is then stationary for several seconds), so to achieve an average speed of e.g. 30MPH, its cruising speed would have to be above 60MPH, which is not only dangerous if adjacent to pedestrians, it's extremely inefficient as you're repeatedly accelerating a huge bus to highway speeds and then back again.
When the alternative is a car traveling a constant 60MPH on a highway, the bus compares unfavorably in terms of both time and fuel efficiency.
I will say that I lived in Vancouver. A city where I have never seen fewer than 10 people on a bus, where driving is frequently slower than transit, where you are rarely more than a 10 minute walk from a bus, where during rush hour, they convert parking lanes to bus lanes. It does take time to change, but it will take longer if we wait.
All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.
> A city where I have never seen fewer than 10 people on a bus
Presumably during rush hour, which is kind of the issue. You can get more people on the bus during peak hours, but then it's off-peak and you're in a place where you don't have a car. Now you're either waiting an hour for a bus so it can be full (which is slower than a car) or you're maintaining frequent service by running mostly-empty buses (which is less efficient than a car).
Vancouver is also a coastal city the size of Boston with a fairly high population density. Things will work there that won't work in smaller inland cities surrounded by suburban and rural areas.
> where driving is frequently slower than transit
But because driving there is slower than it is in most US cities, right? That's not really an attractive way to get the result. The goal is to make the new thing better, not to make the existing thing worse.
> All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.
The real problem is that people propose these things in places where they don't work. If you have an urban city with dense urban housing, obviously people will be able to use mass transit. But you can't just add a bus lane to a city where most of the population commutes in from the suburbs and expect it to have the same effect. Everyone still has to drive and all you've done is remove a travel lane and make the traffic worse.
Allowing the construction of mixed-use medium density buildings reduces the distance of the average trip, which allows more people to choose walking and cycling.
At the end of the day, the more you design a neighborhood to facilitate driving, the more car traffic it will suffer. And the more convenient you make it to any other form of transportation, the less car traffic there will be.
Allowing the construction of mixed-use medium density buildings reduces the distance of the average trip several decades from now, after the new zoning has filtered out into the already-constructed installed base of existing buildings. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it -- in fact we should do it immediately for precisely this reason -- but you can't expect it to have an instantaneous effect.
Meanwhile people keep proposing things like bus lanes as something we should do in the present day, in places where they can't work until after that construction has already happened. Also, bus lanes are never a good idea because the density required to justify a bus lane (which is very high because it consumes a significant amount of surface land in an area with high land scarcity) is higher than the density required to justify a subway line (which doesn't).
Unless we push for better transportation infrastructure today it won't be there thirty years from now. Nobody is suggesting to put a bus lane in a boring cul-de-sac, either.
For several decades, North American suburbanites have been living comfortably in their quiet bubble of car-dependent neighborhoods, completely disregarding the noise, danger and other externalities that their traffic imposes onto the people who choose sustainable transportation options in more densely-populated urban areas. It's time that we design our urban neighborhoods around the daily needs of the people actually living there rather than the speed and convenience of visitors.
> Unless we push for better transportation infrastructure today it won't be there thirty years from now.
It takes 30 years to completely reshape the housing market because there just aren't enough construction companies, and existing homes don't go on the market, to do it faster than that. It doesn't take 30 years to build a subway line, or if it does then your government is dysfunctional and you should focus on fixing that.
Meanwhile if you try to build the transit infrastructure before there is any demand for it, nobody uses it and you lose public support for even maintaining it because it turns into a money pit with high costs and low usage. And you get punished by the voters because the thing you put in place can't be used while the housing situation is still what it is, whereas the thing they have to use is now worse because the bus lane carrying empty buses nobody can practically use is consuming a travel lane that used to carry more cars.
> Nobody is suggesting to put a bus lane in a boring cul-de-sac, either.
The problem is that nobody is suggesting to put a bus in a boring cul-de-sac, because that would be highly inefficient and not have enough ridership to justify it. But then the people who live there can't take the bus because there isn't one, so they also can't use a bus lane when they get to the main road, and become angry with you when the disused bus lane makes the traffic worse.
> It's time that we design our urban neighborhoods around the daily needs of the people actually living there rather than the speed and convenience of visitors.
It's generally worth considering how those "visitors" will respond to that in terms of where they set up shop and how they vote.
LOL, ever heard of particulates from road wear and tire wear? Guess how the production of those scales with higher speeds?
> Vehicles are most efficient traveling at a consistent, relatively high speed.
Guess what, that's changing with EVs. Hybrid or not.
> Environmentally, the optimal road is flat and straight with no traffic control devices or other reasons for vehicles to change speed, i.e. a highway.
> But EVs can charge from renewable sources and then they don't have any fuel-related emissions.
That was my point. Maybe the paragraph order was confusing.
> Roads are used for going from where people live to where they want to go.
They (or stroads, or highways) shouldn't be used in place of streets. A city should have the minimal set of roads to get the job done, everything else should be traffic calmed streets.
1. I do know, higher speeds, higher particulate production from road and break wear.
2. Yes, it is changing, LOL. And this is not about breaks. I was talking about power consumption. EV power consumption, unlike ICEs, is linear. So EV are obviously more power efficient at lower speeds. Besides the particulate generation aspect outlined before.
Traffic deaths are quite literally one of the two leading causes of death of children in the United States, so in this case, yeah, actually thinking of the children makes some sense.
To me that sounds like a safetyist argument. Even if the number of deaths are high in total count, it may not matter when you consider the trade offs. For example if everyone spends an hour more in traffic each day - which is what the effect of “calming” has been in my experience - you’re causing an impact that is worse than the small number of deaths in my city. That delay and damage to our life quality matters, and needs to be weighed against the rare deaths.
Cars are very safe today and are getting much safer. Even basic cars come with many features to avoid accidents now. We will probably see deaths per mile driven go down on its own, without the need for malicious road design.
People with long commutes spend most of that time on highways, which are not affected by traffic calming measures. A surface street going from 35mph to 25mph is not going to add an hour of driving time unless you are driving 100 miles a day on non-highway surface streets, which literally nobody does. You are exaggerating the impact of traffic calming measures.
Cars are getting less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not more safe. Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it? Easy to pretend the benefits of speeding outweigh the costs when the benefits accrue to you and the costs accrue to other people.
> A surface street going from 35mph to 25mph is not going to add an hour of driving time unless you are driving 100 miles a day on non-highway surface streets, which literally nobody does.
I’ve seen streets go from 45mph to 25mph, lose driving lanes to bike or bus lanes, lose parking, etc. It makes things far worse than you think. What used to be a 20 minute drive will now be 35 minutes. Now consider the drive in both directions, time to find parking, and other trips you might make that day. It forces people to stay confined and not make as many trips because it simply isn’t possible to fit them in anymore. That is a loss of life quality.
> Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it?
They don’t have to and by and large they don’t bear any cost for it. You’re exaggerating things - the probability of a pedestrian dying is incredibly low. I walk as well and am not in fear of cars just like I’m not in fear of other unlikely events.
The quality of life improves for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders when parking and car lanes are converted to bike and bus lanes. Drivers are not the only stakeholders who deserve consideration.
Many of the people who insist that there is no safety impact from high speed local roads nevertheless choose to raise their kids in suburban cul-de-sacs with minimal traffic and curvy roads with low speed limits. They want the right to subject other communities to speeding cars for their own convenience while protecting their own families from them.
Cars now have sensors all over and automatic braking to prevent collisions. The article acknowledges the benefits of front facing sensors in luxury vehicles from the time it was written, which are very common today even in basic vehicles. So are the 360 cameras it mentions.
Also - this article is focused on data from 2016 to 2020 for front collisions. It mentions 744 deaths of children in front collisions on non public roads (where the blind spots it talks about matter more) in that 5 year period, which is frankly a small number. This is a country with a few hundred million people after all. Some number of deaths are inevitable and it isn’t a crisis.
> Cars now have sensors all over and automatic braking to prevent collisions.
Yet pedestrian deaths in the US have kept climbing over the past ten years or so.
I can tell you that as a lifelong pedestrian I do not feel remotely safe walking in North America compared to Western Europe, where I used to live, or Japan, which I've visited a few times.
If you really feel unsafe about incredibly low risk possibilities, your only choice is to stay indoors permanently. Most people feel safe walking because the chance of something happening is so unlikely.
Pedestrian deaths may have climbed in recent years because of increased smartphone use or changing behaviors. I see many more jaywalkers for example, especially by homeless drug addicts in west coast cities, many of whom just blindly step into traffic.
There is no rigorous way to attribute your claimed increase in pedestrian deaths to cars.
There are cell phones everywhere, but pedestrian deaths have only increased in the USA, so it is not that.
Walking in my neighborhood is objectively more dangerous than it needs to be. In the past decade there have been several instances where motorists have mowed down and killed pedestrians, sometimes when they were minding their own business walking on the sidewalk.
I'm sick of motorists only valuing their own convenience and using demeaning language to describe the pedestrians that they victimize.
By that same logic, distance insidiously shaves away at your lifespan and we should build mixed-use walkable neighborhoods so that we can quickly reach our everyday destinations rather than causing traffic every time we want to get anywhere.
Note the way to do this is to follow engineering rules.
Take the 85th percentile rule.
If you take a neighborhood road and change it from 40mph to 25mph in an attempt to "save the children", you can easily make it more dangerous.
The 85th percentile rule figures how fast people go on a road, and sets an appropriate speed limit that people naturally follow. Attempting to set a speed limit too low or too high leads to a wide speed variance, which makes the road more dangerous.
But you're saying the speed limit (being too high or low) makes the road dangerous. Aren't the people driving their cars too fast making the road dangerous?
A great many people when they see a open straight road with little obstacles or pedestrians will go 45-50 MPH. A great many people when they see a 15 MPH sign will go 20 MPH. Pair that low speed limit with a "fast" road and you will end with many people going 45 MPH and many people going 20 MPH. This variance in speed, with some people going much slower than others can be more dangerous than if most went the same speed - e.g. if the limit were 45 MPH.
You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow. Generally, from a safety point of view, you want the slowest speed at which almost everyone will actually drive at, as large variance in speed between drivers is dangerous. I think this is what the parent post was getting at: a speed limit too fast OR too slow will increase the number of accidents, keeping in mind that there will always be at least some drivers speeding.
> You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow.
It's accurate to say that people driving too fast are extra dangerous when there are slower vehicles in the road. The danger is still caused by the people driving too fast, not by those driving slowly, though. Speed kills.
I don't think I've ever heard someone argue that the 85th percentile rule is actually a good invention - it's a disaster that codifies the behaviour of speeding drivers.
I agree that merely lowering speeds without changing the design speed is a bad move, though.
The problem is that people are naturally very bad drivers and are especially bad at judging what safe speed is.
We already know it's hopeless to teach them so what is left are traffic calming measures, heavy handed enforcement and technology (automatic speed limiters in cars).
Setting speed limits to speed people choose is a terrible idea.
People naturally choose speeds according to how safe they feel not how safe it is for everyone else.
If you have a residential area road which is straight and wide enough to go fast people will choose higher speed than on a narrow road.
This proves it doesn't work unless you only care about safety of people in cars (which Salomon curve seems to based on meaning it's meaningless for road design with the exception of highways).
I live in BC, where speed cameras are banned by law. Right next door is Alberta.
Last time I was in Edmonton, known for extremely car centric design, wide roads, ample highways, etc. I was shocked by how much slower people drove, and as a result, how much safer driving was in general.
You only have to get slapped with a fine a few times before you start learning to control your speed.
I'd go further and say automated average speed cameras are the most effective I've seen. Point speed cameras just get marked on a map and cause sudden braking and acceleration to dodge them - this can be effective at particular danger spots, but I always feel the average speed cameras in the UK are far more effective at changing driver habits in general.
Yeah, but those probably cost more and don't make for a nice environment outside of cars. Traffic calming can be super cheap and it makes for a super pleasant environment for everyone.
Traffic calming is usually more expensive than speed cameras. A speed bump isn't expensive but people are usually talking about stuff like bump outs and raised intersections and protected bicycle lanes and wide sidewalks when they are talking about traffic calming. Those are six figures per intersection. Cameras are low five figures.
"Fast" and wide roads don't actually help much with moving traffic around as there's such a phenomenon as induced demand. When more lanes are added to a road, more people are encouraged to drive and then the fast and wide roads get congested, especially where they join with smaller roads.
There's also the geometry problem. As more roads are built and more people travel by car, the various amenities get spread further apart (e.g. more parking required) which then makes them more difficult for people to walk/cycle to. This then gets more people to make a car journey when they previously might have walked which increases the amount of traffic. As more traffic builds up, more and wider roads are built which pushes everything further apart. This then encourages more and longer car journeys which results in more congestion - the solution to which would appear to be adding just one more lane to the roads.
The trick to solving congestion issues is to encourage as many people as possible to make short, non-car based journeys. Unfortunately, prioritising car journeys is almost always at the expense of other traffic.
I'm not sure I buy the concept of induced demand. If you widen a road and it results in more traffic, that sounds like there was already more demand than supply.
Induced demand should really be called "insurmountable demand." If there's a million more people who would take a traffic-clogged freeway if it were moving at 6mph, then it will always be clogged with traffic.
There's a non-trivial chance that the only reason you're around to complain about child safety is that we spent so long eliminating unnecessary dangers. The issue is speeding, not that you want to get somewhere faster than the speed limit.
It's ironic that drivers get frustrated by smaller, narrower streets as not feeling very safe, but that uncomfortable feeling 1) slows people down and 2) keeps them on their toes in terms of looking out for hazards rather than feeling ok with driving fast and not paying as much attention.