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.
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.