Okay, You Know How To Fix a Deadly Stroad. Now Do It 1,000 Times.

(Source: Pexels/Viviana Ivette BC.)

Traffic deaths are not only preventable: a very high percentage of them are preventable specifically through street design. A handful of cities, from Jersey City, New Jersey, to Oslo, Norway, have actually proven this by effectively eliminating such tragedies.

So why is the traffic engineering profession in most places so loath to admit this, let alone act on it with urgency? Why do we still get cases like the city engineer in Springfield, Massachusetts, insisting that we must “stay away from [...] emotion” about the minor matter of, you know, three people killed by motorists at the same crossing, in front of the library, in less than a decade?

One reason that I suspect does not get enough discussion is that the problem is too frighteningly big, too glaring to stare directly at it. As the engineer responsible for a city’s streets, if you admit in any case that there is a moral and ethical imperative to fix a deadly street before it claims another life, then surely you have to admit it in every case. But as soon as you do, the problem reaches staggering proportions.

The Crash Analysis Studio program at Strong Towns was born out of the recognition that there is a profound gap between the gravity with which we treat accidental death in many domains of modern life, and the shrug with which we treat it when it happens on our roadways. The program itself is modeled on the morbidity and mortality conferences common to the medical profession. In these, held after an adverse outcome in a hospital, everyone involved in the patient’s care is brought together for a discussion of what factors led to that outcome and what could have been done differently. The point is not to apportion blame, the way an insurer might want to, but to improve the standard of care for future patients.

Or consider the all-hands-on-deck response to aviation mishaps, as in what happens to be the top U.S. news story in the week that I’m writing this. After a panel blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 over Portland, Oregon, leaving a gaping hole in the fuselage and forcing an emergency landing, multiple airlines immediately grounded hundreds of such planes, federal investigators stepped in, and extensive investigation quickly turned up cases of loose bolts in other such aircraft.

This kind of immediate, overwhelming response is possible because plane crashes—or near-crashes, in this case—are exceedingly rare. There have in fact been only two fatalities on U.S. commercial air carriers since 2010, and no crashes.

Car crashes are, unfortunately, not rare. And the street design practices that we know are a powerful contributor to them are decisively, overwhelmingly, criminally Not Rare. My city has hundreds, not dozens, of spots that are tragedies waiting to happen. So, likely, does yours. Places where vehicles might collide at deadly speed even without any negligence or recklessness on the driver’s part. Places where a person making a rational decision to cross the street—say, to reach a bus that comes once every 30 or 60 minutes—might pay dearly for making that decision at the wrong moment.

A few years ago, I used Google Street View images to profile this perfectly ordinary, perfectly horrifying intersection in front of a high school in Orlando. Every competent engineer would know how to go out and make this environment safer for those kids. That’s not the problem. The problem is that there are, at a conservative estimate, thousands of intersections with the same design flaws (such as narrow sidewalks with no protection from speeding cars, many curb cuts, and long crossing distances across multiple lanes of turning traffic) near high schools all across North America.

Public works departments know how to fix a dangerous stroad. We put it in a five-year capital improvement budget. We do a big study of the conditions. We mock up several design alternatives, and we hold public workshops where we ask constituents for their feedback and preferences. We send out (typically useless) surveys. A design is selected by the city council, and over the next couple years, it’s built.

The end result of this approach is typically very pretty. There are curb bulb-outs planted with flowers. There are flashing beacons and refuge islands at newly painted crosswalks. The street is calmer, it’s safer, and it actually feels better to drive on, as well as walk along. It’s hailed as a big step forward, a boon to the neighborhood’s quality of life. Everybody is happy. This example from South Minneapolis, of a nasty stroad rebuilt after a deadly crash and public outcry, is typical of my experience.

Okay. So, we know how to do that. Now do it 1,000 times.

The “1,000 times” problem may actually be the primary reason why we can expect local governments to be resistant to adopting an approach like the Crash Analysis Studio as policy. If you truly acknowledge that a deadly crash is not a fact of life, but an anomaly that shouldn’t have happened, and a condition that should be corrected, then you suddenly have a to-do list a thousand miles long.

Nobody is going to say out loud, “We can’t come close to fixing all of them, so it doesn’t make sense to acknowledge that there’s an urgent imperative to fix any of them.” But I’ll bet a lot of traffic engineers have thought it.

It’s not even about legal liability. It’s more mundane than that. People like to come in to work and know what their job will entail, and that they can do it well. They like to know that their workplace is going to operate in an orderly, predictable way, and that the money will flow to the things it predictably flows to. Asking whole municipal governments to adopt a different set of priorities on their streets—safety above traffic flow and speed—is asking them to reorganize what they do and how they do it in a way that will be uncomfortable.

Most notably, that reorganization means we need to become comfortable with rapid, ad-hoc responses. The kind of shiny, full redesign with bulb-outs and beacons and landscaping described earlier is not something we can do 1,000 times in a few years, or even in 10 years. What we can do is go out in the wake of a crash and put out cones. Set up plastic bollards and barriers. Paint new lines.

None of this is the intended end state, of course. It’s a first draft, and cities can watch how it performs to gather data and feedback. But doing it right away sends a powerful message: “We recognize that the tragedy that occurred here should not have happened.”

This project in Livermore, California, while still not implemented quickly enough, is the kind of thing a city could do in a weekend, with the right team in place and the right authorization.

Cities will need to establish rapid-response street design teams. (Here’s a recording of a Strong Towns Local-Motive session with national experts on how to do it.) They will need to avoid turning every street safety issue that earns some publicity or notoriety into a call to do a lengthy study and hire an expensive consultant. Build the capacity in house to actually take action on demonstrable safety hazards, and to do it without delay. Cincinnati’s pedestrian safety team is another good example to watch and emulate here.

I suspect much of the American public, not just engineers, would be very uncomfortable with this approach actually scaled up to match the problem. We’re talking about a dramatic increase in the visible presence of things like bollards, traffic diverters, and planter boxes in our public roadways. To some drivers, that’s going to make the city feel like a construction zone. (Note that drivers, consistently, drive much more cautiously and safely in work zones, so this isn’t a strictly negative thing!) Some will find it ugly. Some will no doubt use it to amp up rhetoric about a “war on cars.”

There will, perhaps less intuitively, be pushback from a subset of safe-streets advocates who are unhappy with an incrementalist approach. Painted bike lanes, for example, are controversial among bike safety activists, who recognize (correctly) that the protection they offer from speeding drivers is insufficient. This is even true of plastic bollards, which can bend and snap without breaking a car’s momentum. And yet, if we’re going to take seriously the reality that most cities have thousands of unsafe streets, not dozens, we must also accept that sometimes the first incremental step will be paint or plastic, not concrete. The trade-off is that we can do it in 10 times more places, 10 times as quickly, and it should never preclude a more permanent and elegant solution later.

That’s “should never,” but the fear I hear at times is that in practice, it will preclude better solutions. That we have only so much political capital that can be put toward the cause of safe, humane streets, and that it will be wasted on cheap plastic bollards and cones, instead of building streets that are so nice that even the skeptics come around to admitting how nice they look and function.

I suspect this is true as long as safe streets are something that requires sustained advocacy and political capital. In other words, as long as the default approach to street design is one that prioritizes traffic flow and speed above all else, and to deviate from that approach requires determined champions every time.

But I also suspect that, in a place that is willing to change its default and embed a sense of urgency about street safety into its institutions, we’ll see the political winds shift. Drivers will discover over time that driving feels safer and less stressful. That they have less urge to stomp the gas pedal on urban streets. People walking and biking will feel the safety benefits of streets that have been adjusted to calm traffic, and will become a vocal constituency for more of the same.

There are already millions of Americans out there who have lost someone they love to a crash, who are fed up with fearing for their lives, or fearing that they could accidentally take someone else’s. My advice to city leaders who want to lead on this issue: speak directly to those fears, and don’t apologize for it.

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