Last week, the Governors Highway Safety Association released its annual preliminary report on pedestrian safety in the United States for 2022. It predicted pedestrian fatalities would rise for the 12th straight year, nearly doubling from 4,302 in 2010 to an estimated 8,126 — the highest . The figure is more than 40 years old. Last April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its preliminary report on motor vehicle fatalities in 2022, finding a slight decrease from the previous year but still a 32 percent increase compared to 2011.
Also last week, ProPublica and FRONTLINE reported that in 2017, the Department of Transportation began writing a report addressing potential regulations for side guards on commercial trucks, which would help prevent pedestrians and cyclists from getting trapped and crushed underneath. This prompted an angry response from the trucking lobby, which was allowed to provide extensive comments on the draft report before its publication. The final product certainly did not include any recommendations for new regulations.
This is what I call car supremacy in this country. Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians are being maimed and slaughtered at rates that would be considered a severe emergency in any other wealthy country. But instead of doing anything about it, the government, half paralyzed by bureaucratic inertia and half playfully entangled with various auto industries, is twiddling its thumbs.
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As Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano wrote in the New York Times, in the mid-1990s, France and America were in the middle of the pack when it came to road deaths when it came to road deaths, each with a fatality rate of about 150 deaths per million inhabitants. . Since then, France has reduced its traffic fatality rate by more than two-thirds, while the rate in America has fallen by only about a tenth. During that period, middle-income countries that were previously more lethal, such as Latvia and Lithuania, overtook us.
It’s not hard to figure out why American roads are so deadly, especially for pedestrians. There are too many very long, heavy cars and trucks, traveling too fast on too wide streets, with too many conflict points. A typical pedestrian death involves an SUV or truck running over someone on “the road,” the classic hybrid of suburban streets and highways with multiple lanes, high speed limits, regular stop signs, and drivers constantly weaving and turning. (This is also the most dangerous type of road for drivers, especially motorcyclists.)
By contrast, the European Union has been pushing road safety policies for decades, which have reduced road deaths by 22% since 2012. Best practices include narrowing roads, using traffic calming devices such as speed humps, lowering speed limits, And impose excessive taxes on cars. Vehicle weight, seat belt compliance efforts, bike lanes and protected sidewalks, automakers’ pedestrian safety regulations, “daylighting” intersections (which involve removing parking spaces near intersections to improve visibility), and the timing of traffic signals to give pedestrians a head start at a crosswalk, and so on.
A truly hardworking country can achieve a lot through these strategies. Norway – still largely dependent on cars by European standards – has reduced road deaths to the lowest level in the world: just 21 per million people, or nearly 85 percent less than America. Its capital, Oslo, has gone for years without the death of any pedestrian or cyclist.
Even in America, some cities have been able to reduce the number of traffic deaths by applying only some European practices. For example, Hoboken, New Jersey, has about 60,000 residents, which translates to an average of seven or eight traffic deaths per year. Instead, thanks to extensive efforts to protect pedestrian safety on crosswalks, there have been none at all for four straight years from 2019 through 2022.
Now, it will be difficult for most American cities to exactly follow Hoboken’s example. It is one of the densest cities in the country, its narrow streets built long before America’s addiction to suburban sprawl. But a lot can still be done. Road diets, traffic calming, lowering speed limits, etc. can still work in the suburbs. They are likely to achieve much more there than in an older suburb like Hoboken, where the streets are already narrow and slow. Most cities don’t do anything, and in the ones that do, like my own city of Philadelphia, efforts are generally halfhearted at best. (But when it comes to rebuilding a damaged highway, things are different.)
A lot can be done at the federal level as well. For example, one reason American trucks are bloated is government regulations on fuel economy, which — thanks to the U.S.’s compulsive regulatory habit of adding countless exceptions and exceptions — give automakers a break in the fuel efficiency of SUVs and trucks. The largest. they. This has helped fuel an endless arms race for larger, heavier, more dangerous vehicles. But instead of changing that, the Department of Transportation is allowing interested parties to rewrite its report on the mere possibility of putting new regulations on commercial trucks that would make them safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. It’s hard to imagine the idea of imposing tough European-style penalties on automakers that design trucks with a field of view worse than an M1 Abrams tank, with the express intention of intimidating passers-by.
Even the promising development of electric vehicles is exacerbating the risk, as smaller electric vehicles are phased out in favor of larger, heavier cars. The battery pack in the preposterous GMC Hummer EV weighs 2,900 pounds, the same as the entire Honda Civic.
However, all is not lost. It is no coincidence that America deviated from the European Community in the 1980s and 1990s, when neoliberalism became the dominant ideology in both parties. Democrats and Republicans came to believe that government was a largely useless impediment to private enterprise. They tried to make it as difficult as possible for America to govern itself, and they succeeded greatly.
But before that time, the US government was functioning reasonably well. This is not a tradition lost in the mists of time, but one that exists within living memory – and, moreover, there is always the European example if we need inspiration. The first step is to stop consulting lobbyists about the safety of their industries.
