Yes, european roads are not as wide, since they make place for proper sidewalks and bike lanes. Another advantage is that narrower roads make drivers drive more carefully and slowly, reducing accidents even further.
In Japan many neighborhood roads (even in cities) are narrow and have no sidewalk to speak of. But I feel safe walking down them because drivers expect to go slow and look out for pedestrians and cyclists.
If you want to blow through an area fast, there are other roads for that with lighted crossings and sidewalks, and often slower mixed-use parallel roads for pulling in and out of businesses.
I've no doubt it varies, but they're all doing something differently that seems to work versus the US.
> Other countries haven’t seen this increase in pedestrian deaths: in every other high-income country, rates are flat or declining. Whatever’s causing the problem seems to be limited to the US.
Then we shouldn't really be talking about the US, which has similar size and population stats, but instead individual cities and states. Denying that US states are correlated and European city construction are correlated is to ignore the history of how they were made.
Not in my experience. The road widths were set hundreds of years ago and the buildings have not changed. Walking around European and UK towns I find myself much closer to cars than walking around in the US. This is a factor in keeping car speed low, which likely affects how often and severe pedestrian collisions are.
I do agree that European roads are safer, but not because they have made large segregated sidewalks (which is what I disagree with as reality and the root cause).
On small village roads with little traffic you don't even need pavements (not to mention bike paths) as long as the road is narrow and winding with good visibility. Cars drive slowly and rarely, it's perfectly fine to walk there.
Yeah. Halving the width halves the time to cross and also causes drivers to slow down in proportion even if the speed limit is significantly higher. Narrowing and placing “obstacles” is the only effective way of showing traffic permanently.
There are lots of narrow roads in America, like the one I currently live on, which is about 1.75 lanes wide. If I come up against a large truck, one of us has to pull to the side.
Most people prefer not to drive on roads like that.
people drive slower on narrower roads — some traffic calming efforts in the US include making right turns at lights narrower so people slow down while potentially turning into a crosswalk
