Analysis exhibits individuals within the U.S. suppose 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 only a few blocks from her condo 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 visitors and a velocity restrict of 45 miles per hour. There, on November 17, 2022, she was hit and killed by a automobile. Police don’t understand how quick the automobile was going, however Ball, who was 31, went airborne, touchdown exterior the crosswalk, whereas the automobile needed to be towed from the scene.
Ball was a part of a 25 p.c leap in visitors fatalities in america prior to now decade, together with a surge in 2020 and 2021. Transportation consultants attribute the rising variety of deaths to components corresponding to elevated velocity limits, greater and heavier autos, and the distractions of smartphones. However in addition they say these deaths are fully preventable. As an illustration, 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 parts to encourage drivers to decelerate in locations the place they share the roads with cyclists and pedestrians.
Within the U.S., though cities corresponding to Alexandria, Virginia and Hoboken, New Jersey can level to Imaginative and prescient Zero as serving to them eradicate visitors deaths, this system has run into roadblocks. The net of federal, state, and native jurisdictions that management choices about—and funding for—roads is partly responsible. However advocates for safer roads argue that reframing visitors fatalities as a public well being disaster would create public consciousness and increase help for creating safer infrastructure. They’re searching for better collaboration between transportation engineers and public well being consultants to alter how choices are made about highway design.
“We excuse issues that should do with automobiles that we don’t with different public well being norms,” corresponding 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 exhibits that an awesome majority—virtually 84 p.c—of respondents suppose the chance of great damage is a part of driving (lower than 40 p.c really feel the identical means about work). On the similar time, two-thirds mentioned society shouldn’t merely settle for the implications of driving.
A public well being method may assist transportation engineers promote and execute Imaginative and prescient Zero as a collection of systemic modifications that deal with highway security challenges. “If you design roads, once you design routes, once you design even the place a bus cease is positioned or the place a transit heart is positioned, that’s public well being,” says Sophia Peerzada, a public well being knowledgeable who focuses on visitors security however is commenting as a non-public citizen. “As a result of [design] straight impacts individuals’s security on the roads, and their capability to securely get round.”
Street design shapes driver conduct
The vast majority of visitors fatalities occur in what transportation researchers name high-injury networks. These are sometimes areas the place individuals stroll or bike on or close to roads with velocity limits set at 35 to 45 miles per hour, and are the place nearly all of 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 bicycle owner and pedestrian deaths usually happen in what are referred to as “origin-destination pairs,” the place an individual has to cross a busy avenue to succeed in residence, work, or procuring.
“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 deal with figuring out high-injury networks and making them safer. A significant tenet of the method, which is backed by analysis, is that the constructed atmosphere influences driver conduct. 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 method minimize visitors fatalities by 36 p.c between 2010 and 2020 in European international locations the place Imaginative and prescient Zero has been applied, corresponding to Sweden and Denmark. Fatalities in Edmonton, Canada, fell 50 p.c 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 concerning the dangers of rushing or cops writing extra tickets, say advocates. “We’re by no means going to teach and implement our means 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 visitors security laws and affords help to the households affected by what it calls “visitors violence,” after her son was killed by a automobile in entrance of their New York Metropolis residence.
Sure highway options, corresponding to vast lanes, encourage quicker driving and enhance 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 velocity 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 occasions 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 secure and what’s truly secure. Narrower lanes make drivers decelerate, however usually make them really feel extra nervous. “A lot of visitors engineering is counter-intuitive to individuals who don’t research it,” says Veronica Davis, writer of the e-book Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, and the director of cities applications at AtkinsRéalis, a design, challenge administration, and engineering firm.
Goddard thinks public well being professionals might help deal with 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 tough
A number of the U.S. cities which have handed measures to implement Imaginative and prescient Zero embrace 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 method to bettering 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 chief director of the nonprofit Farm&Metropolis, which is devoted to bettering transportation and concrete planning in Texas. However cash by itself shouldn’t be sufficient.
Joel Meyer, Austin’s transportation officer, factors to a number of challenges in implementing Imaginative and prescient Zero. The most important 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 atmosphere.”
Austin dedicated to Imaginative and prescient Zero in 2016, as a part of a mobility bond that was accepted by voters. Nevertheless it has solely been capable of apply these enhancements to streets below its jurisdiction. Fatalities on these streets have remained flat. Nevertheless, Austin doesn’t have jurisdiction over streets which are 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 visitors fatalities by 2050. TxDOT mentioned in a press release that in November 2024 it labored with the Texas Division of Public Security to share tip playing cards on secure driving throughout visitors stops, and it launched a security initiative in December. It famous that “there’s not one resolution, it would take all of us working collectively to avoid wasting 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 applied security measures. For instance, the town eliminated a median that had been put in to decelerate visitors on a highway that had lately been the positioning of a bicyclist fatality. Whitmire’s rationale, as reported by Texas Month-to-month, was that the median made it more durable for first responders to get by.
Town has additionally reversed a choice to slim the automobile lanes within the deliberate redesign of one other highway, which might have slowed visitors, whereas including bike lanes. As an alternative, the plan is so as to add the bike lanes whereas conserving the broader automobile lanes. “The dearth of motorcycle lanes shouldn’t be what’s harmful, the quick automobiles are what’s harmful,” says Farm&Metropolis’s Blazek Crossley. “They’re conserving the quick automobiles.” He says the rollbacks make Houston an outlier in Texas, as the remainder of the state is shifting within the route of implementing evidence-based secure techniques design.
Because the rollback began, visitors fatalities in Houston in 2024 set a document, although fatalities mixed with extreme accidents had been down barely from 2023. On the similar time, Harris County exterior of Houston, and Texas general, noticed 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 dying 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 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 creating its personal Imaginative and prescient Zero plan by a Secure Streets and Roads for All grant from the U.S. Division of Transportation.
Thompkins, who lately marked the second anniversary of her daughter’s dying, sees these modifications as headed in the best route. Nonetheless, she considers the challenges forward to be vital. She hopes her advocacy efforts will make it much less seemingly that different households undergo. “We now have to battle to guard different lives,” Thompkins says.