Reckless Road Design is Killing Us, Not Reckless Drivers

When we think about one of our neighbors or family members being killed by an automobile, it’s tempting and sometimes too easy to point a finger at a distracted, texting driver or maybe someone who is drunk behind the wheel or even at cops who don’t enforce speed limits.

Someone broke the rules and it made someone else dead. Who wouldn’t be outrageously angry at such human carelessness?

But what if the root cause of the roadway death is not a careless action of a random rule breaker? What if the reason our neighbor or family member is dead is that someone DID follow the rules?

Dangerous by Design, 2021

Road design in most of North America, as we’ve written about on our pages, is deadly. It’s deadly because our engineers follow the rules laid out by the profession and its support of policy choices which determine over and over again to prioritize speed and volume over safety and cost. Our roads, in the words of our friends at Smart Growth America, are Dangerous By Design. 

For many of us, roadway deaths are harder to swallow when we can’t point a finger and say the death was caused by random carelessness or lawlessness. Random explanations somehow absolve us of responsibility. Most deaths on our roadways are caused by the way we design them and that means we can fix it. And that means making hard choices instead of pointing easy fingers.  

For those willing to look at these choices with eyes wide open and to contemplate changing the rules, Strong Towns has many guides. More details and much more background on how we continue to kill each other on our roadways by following the rules can be found in the pages of Strong Towns President Charles Marohn’s book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. 

Smart Growth America, Dangerous By Design 2021

Smart Growth America will be publishing its 2022 Dangerous By Design report in coming months. These annual reports contain scrollable, zoomable maps of every walker death in America. Some video footage created in producing the 2021 report was compiled and produced with voiceover narration by Steve Davis, a program administrator at Smart Growth America. The result was recently released as an excellent and accessible YouTube video just under 9 minutes long called, “Why Safety and Vehicle Speed are Incompatible Goals for Street Design.” 

This video asks and answers the questions, “How would our streets look different if we truly prioritized safety ahead of speed? and Why must transportation agencies choose only one top priority on their streets: Speed, or safety?” 

The answers are not complicated, but they are hard to look at because they require us to stop pointing fingers at random, careless car violence and start taking responsibility to rewrite the rules. Those rules are designed to kill more than 6,000 walkers every year - and to bankrupt our cities with the costs of maintaining our auto-centric infrastructure. But that’s another story. 

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