Every year, traffic crashes kill more than one million people, and they’re the leading cause of death for children and young adults. In the US, 100 people a day lose their lives this way, in many cases not on highways but on rural and local streets. The causes of a crash can be muddy.
Drivers make mistakes like speeding or getting distracted, but infrastructure fails them too: Perhaps they were on a road built for speed and not safety, in a screen-filled vehicle, or at an intersection where pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars aren’t visible. Cheap and proven traffic-calming opportunities abound—from using planters to tighten intersections to lowering speed limits—but government logjams and red tape can be speed bumps. And though the US rate has dipped from a peak of 30.8 deaths per 100,000 people in the 1930s, the past decade has seen a concerning jump in deadly pedestrian incidents.
At the same time, communities are waking up to the essential role of traffic safety policy, Shahum says. One success story is Hoboken, New Jersey, which hasn’t had a traffic fatality since 2017. This is due to a combination of efforts like boosting investment in public transit, promoting walkability by extending curbs, and using cameras to identify crash-prone intersections in need of a redesign.
But even there, obstacles remain. If an intersection hasn’t been proved to be deadly, for example, it can be an uphill battle to argue for removing parking spaces to widen curbs. There’s also no silver bullet that will work everywhere.
Situated directly across the river from New York City, Hoboken is a highly transit-oriented city of less than 60,000 people. Success there might not translate to traffic-death hot spots like Memphis or Dallas. Take Edmonton, Alberta, a sprawling, car-centric Canadian city of around one million people: Between 2015 and 2020, it cut traffic fatalities by 63% and serious injuries by 40% by adjusting speed limits and improving signals at crosswalks.
We know how to tweak intersections and adjust traffic signals. Getting the funding and will to roll out those changes is the big red light. A pastor and his wife created a cryptocurrency and hawked it in Christian communities.
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