Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice

Summary

You are as likely to die driving on an American road as you are driving in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan. The American traffic-related death rate ranks 87th in the world. At 12.8 deaths per 100,000 people, it is double that of Greece, triple that of Austria, and six times more than Japan. In 2022, more than 42,000 people died on American roads, and more than two million — 1 in every 170 — required emergency medical care from automobile-related accidents. The total economic cost, in medical expenses and loss of life, amounted to an estimated $470 billion. This is not an inevitability. It is a policy decision that the federal and state governments continue to affirm. Indeed, if the United States had matched the rate of improvement in road safety since the 1970s seen in, for example, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Spain, it would have prevented 2 out of every 3 road deaths, saving 25,000 lives last year alone. It’s tempting to argue — and some do — that such drastic reductions are easier to accomplish in small, dense, European countries. But even relatively car-centric countries like Britain, Canada, and Australia cut road deaths by nearly half between 1979 and 2002. In the United States, they decreased by just 16% over the same time. What did Sweden, Spain, and other countries do that the US did not? Each of the countries that reduced their road deaths used the same method: they implemented a set of urban planning decisions — and a philosophy which informs them — now called the Safe System approach. Safe System origins At its core, the Safe System approach acknowledges that human error while driving is inevitable. Thus, road designers and urban planners should engineer environments to guide safer behaviors. Smart design ensures that when human error happens, it does not lead to severe crashes by, for example, physically separating pedestrians from high speed car traffic, and by designing roads that don’t facilitate high speeds. The philosophy traces its origins to road safety...