Analysis reveals individuals within the U.S. suppose site visitors deaths are inevitable, however they’re aren’t.
Written by Rachel Fairbank
This article initially appeared in Harvard Public Well being journal. Subscribe to their e-newsletter.
Quanisha Ball’s commute to work concerned catching an worker shuttle just some blocks from her residence in Decatur, Georgia. She mapped out the most secure path to the shuttle, however there was no avoiding Scott Boulevard, with its seven lanes of site visitors and a pace restrict of 45 miles per hour. There, on November 17, 2022, she was hit and killed by a automotive. Police don’t know the way quick the automotive was going, however Ball, who was 31, went airborne, touchdown outdoors the crosswalk, whereas the automotive needed to be towed from the scene.
Ball was a part of a 25 % soar in site visitors fatalities in america previously decade, together with a surge in 2020 and 2021. Transportation consultants attribute the rising variety of deaths to elements akin to elevated pace limits, larger and heavier automobiles, and the distractions of smartphones. However in addition they say these deaths are solely preventable. As an example, Imaginative and prescient Zero, a highway security system broadly adopted in Australia, Canada, and the European Union, has helped cut back each fatalities and extreme accidents. It makes use of bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, and different design components to encourage drivers to decelerate in locations the place they share the roads with cyclists and pedestrians.
Within the U.S., though cities akin to Alexandria, Virginia and Hoboken, New Jersey can level to Imaginative and prescient Zero as serving to them get rid of site visitors deaths, this system has run into roadblocks. The online of federal, state, and native jurisdictions that management selections about—and funding for—roads is partly in charge. However advocates for safer roads argue that reframing site visitors fatalities as a public well being disaster would create public consciousness and enhance help for growing safer infrastructure. They’re searching for better collaboration between transportation engineers and public well being consultants to alter how selections are made about highway design.
“We excuse issues that need to do with automobiles that we don’t with different public well being norms,” akin to well being dangers from second-hand smoke, says Tara Goddard, an affiliate professor within the Division of Panorama Structure and City Planning at Texas A&M College. Goddard’s analysis reveals that an amazing majority—nearly 84 %—of respondents suppose the chance of significant harm is a part of driving (lower than 40 % really feel the identical method about work). On the similar time, two-thirds stated society mustn’t merely settle for the implications of driving.
A public well being strategy may assist transportation engineers promote and execute Imaginative and prescient Zero as a sequence of systemic modifications that tackle highway security challenges. “While you design roads, once you design routes, once you design even the place a bus cease is situated or the place a transit heart is situated, that’s public well being,” says Sophia Peerzada, a public well being professional who focuses on site visitors security however is commenting as a personal citizen. “As a result of [design] straight impacts individuals’s security on the roads, and their means to securely get round.”
Street design shapes driver habits
The vast majority of site visitors fatalities occur in what transportation researchers name high-injury networks. These are usually places the place individuals stroll or bike on or close to roads with pace limits set at 35 to 45 miles per hour, and are the place nearly all of site visitors fatalities happen. “Thirty-five miles per hour is known as a candy spot for killing individuals,” says Patricia Tice, a transportation researcher and founding father of the consulting firm ProFound Insights. Tice observes that bike owner and pedestrian deaths usually happen in what are known as “origin-destination pairs,” the place an individual has to cross a busy avenue to succeed in dwelling, work, or buying.
“Thirty-five miles per hour is known as a candy spot for killing individuals.”
Patricia Tice, transportation researcher and founding father of consulting firm ProFound Insights
Imaginative and prescient Zero insurance policies concentrate on figuring out high-injury networks and making them safer. A serious tenet of the strategy, which is backed by analysis, is that the constructed surroundings influences driver habits. It additionally holds that highway design ought to account for potential human error, so individuals aren’t killed or severely injured if a crash ought to occur.
The strategy minimize site visitors fatalities by 36 % between 2010 and 2020 in European nations the place Imaginative and prescient Zero has been carried out, akin to Sweden and Denmark. Fatalities in Edmonton, Canada, fell 50 % in six years, and severe accidents by greater than one-third, after the town put Imaginative and prescient Zero into apply in 2015. The U.S., in the meantime, has invested extra in public consciousness campaigns in regards to the dangers of dashing or law enforcement officials writing extra tickets, say advocates. “We’re by no means going to coach and implement our method out of this disaster, which is what many of the United States is doing on the metropolis, state, and federal stage,” says Amy Cohen, the co-founder of Households for Secure Streets. Cohen began the group, which advocates for site visitors security laws and gives help to the households affected by what it calls “site visitors violence,” after her son was killed by a automotive in entrance of their New York Metropolis dwelling.
Sure highway options, akin to huge lanes, encourage sooner driving and improve the chance that cyclists and pedestrians will die in a collision. Additional, there may be proof that when drivers could make eye contact with different individuals whereas driving, they have an inclination to decelerate. Decrease pace limits, sidewalks, and crosswalks all encourage eye contact and make streets safer for pedestrians. “If you’re truly laying eyes and interacting with somebody one out of each 4 instances you undergo an area, you deal with that area as a social area, and also you’ll go lower than 25 miles an hour,” Tice says.
However analysis additionally captures a mismatch between what most individuals really feel is protected and what’s truly protected. Narrower lanes make drivers decelerate, however usually make them really feel extra nervous. “A lot of site visitors engineering is counter-intuitive to individuals who don’t examine it,” says Veronica Davis, writer of the guide Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, and the director of cities applications at AtkinsRéalis, a design, mission administration, and engineering firm.
Goddard thinks public well being professionals can assist tackle this disconnect. “We have greater than sufficient analysis to know what design makes individuals safer,” she says. “What we do not know is easy methods to implement it.”
Systemic change is troublesome
Among the U.S. cities which have handed measures to implement Imaginative and prescient Zero embody New York, Chicago, Austin, and Boston, with combined outcomes. As well as, the Nationwide Roadway Security Technique from the U.S. Division of Transportation requires states and localities to have a research-backed strategy to enhancing security to get federal funding for highway initiatives.
“If you don’t have a Imaginative and prescient Zero motion plan, there’s this big pot of cash you don’t get to ask for,” says Jay Blazek Crossley, the manager director of the nonprofit Farm&Metropolis, which is devoted to enhancing transportation and concrete planning in Texas. However cash by itself is just not sufficient.
Joel Meyer, Austin’s transportation officer, factors to a number of challenges in implementing Imaginative and prescient Zero. The largest is needing to revamp metropolis streets. “We’re making progress the place we’re making investments,” Meyer says. “It’s actually simply going to take time and assets to retrofit that surroundings.”
Austin dedicated to Imaginative and prescient Zero in 2016, as a part of a mobility bond that was authorized by voters. But it surely has solely been capable of apply these enhancements to streets underneath its jurisdiction. Fatalities on these streets have remained flat. Nevertheless, Austin doesn’t have jurisdiction over streets which can be managed by the Texas Division of Transportation (TxDOT), and on these streets, fatalities have elevated. TxDOT adopted a Imaginative and prescient Zero plan for the state, Street to Zero, in 2019, with the objective of eliminating site visitors fatalities by 2050. TxDOT stated in an announcement that in November 2024 it labored with the Texas Division of Public Security to share tip playing cards on protected driving throughout site visitors stops, and it launched a security initiative in December. It famous that “there’s not one answer, it’s going to take all of us working collectively to save lots of lives on Texas roads.”
In distinction, the town of Houston, which dedicated to Imaginative and prescient Zero in 2019, has a brand new mayor, John Whitmire, who’s rolling again most of the carried out security measures. For instance, the town eliminated a median that had been put in to decelerate site visitors on a highway that had not too long ago been the location of a bicyclist fatality. Whitmire’s rationale, as reported by Texas Month-to-month, was that the median made it tougher for first responders to get by way of.
Town has additionally reversed a choice to slim the automotive lanes within the deliberate redesign of one other highway, which might have slowed site visitors, whereas including bike lanes. As a substitute, the plan is so as to add the bike lanes whereas protecting the broader automotive lanes. “The dearth of motorcycle lanes is just not what’s harmful, the quick automobiles are what’s harmful,” says Farm&Metropolis’s Blazek Crossley. “They’re protecting the quick automobiles.” He says the rollbacks make Houston an outlier in Texas, as the remainder of the state is shifting within the course of implementing evidence-based protected programs design.
For the reason that rollback began, site visitors fatalities in Houston in 2024 set a file, although fatalities mixed with extreme accidents had been down barely from 2023. On the similar time, Harris County outdoors of Houston, and Texas general, noticed site visitors deaths decline. Imaginative and prescient Zero proponents argue Houston’s outcomes level to the necessity for safer infrastructure. Metropolis officers declined an interview request.
In Decatur, Quanisha Ball’s mom Courtney Thompkins feels her daughter’s loss of life was preventable, and has began volunteering with Households for Secure Streets serving to Cohen advocate for Imaginative and prescient Zero. The Georgia Division of Transportation in early 2024 modified the timing of the site visitors lights on the intersection the place Ball died and, a yr earlier, one other pedestrian was struck. That change is designed to assist make pedestrians extra seen to drivers, and Cohen calls it a “modest” enchancment.
In the meantime, the town of Decatur is growing its personal Imaginative and prescient Zero plan by way of a Secure Streets and Roads for All grant from the U.S. Division of Transportation.
Thompkins, who not too long ago marked the second anniversary of her daughter’s loss of life, sees these modifications as headed in the precise course. Nonetheless, she considers the challenges forward to be important. She hopes her advocacy efforts will make it much less doubtless that different households endure. “Now we have to struggle to guard different lives,” Thompkins says.