About a thousand people gathered on a bright morning on the National Mall on the Saturday before Thanksgiving for what has become an American tradition: mourning a road death. With the Capitol Building in the background and the tune of an ice cream truck circling nearby, the crowd gathered to remember Sarah Diebbink Langenkamp, who was riding her bike home from her sons’ elementary school when she was crushed by a semi-truck.
Ms. Langenkamp was, improbably, the third State Department foreign service employee to die while walking or biking in the Washington area this year. She was killed in August on the outskirts of Bethesda, Maryland. Another died in July while biking in Foggy Bottom. The third, a retired Foreign Service employee working under contract, was walking near the agency’s headquarters in August. Dan Langenkamp, Ms. Langenkamp’s husband and himself a Foreign Service worker, points out that this means more Foreign Service personnel have been killed by their cars at home than abroad this year.
“It’s infuriating to me as an American diplomat, to be someone who goes around the world bragging about our record, trying to get people to think like us — to know that we’re such a failure,” he said at the rally in her honor. on this issue.”
This assessment has become increasingly true. Over the past decade, the United States has lagged behind other developed countries in that traffic deaths have declined. This American exceptionalism has become more evident during the pandemic. In 2020, as car travel declined around the world, traffic deaths also declined widely. But in the United States the opposite happened. Travel declined, and deaths continued to rise. Preliminary federal data suggests the number of road deaths will rise again in 2021.
Safety advocates and government officials lament that America’s many deaths are often tolerated as an inevitable cost of mass commuting. But every now and then, the illogical logic of these losses becomes clearer: Americans are dying in increasing numbers even as they drive fewer. They are dying in increasing numbers even as roads around the world become safer. US Foreign Service personnel leave war zones, only to die on the roads surrounding the nation’s capital.
In 2021, nearly 43,000 people died on American roads, according to government estimates. The recent rise in deaths has been particularly pronounced among those the government classifies as most at risk – cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians.
Much of the familiar explanation for America’s road safety record lies in a transportation system designed primarily to move cars quickly, not to move people safely.
“Cars come first, highways come first, and everything else comes later,” said Jennifer Homendy, head of the National Transportation Safety Board.
This culture is embedded in state transportation departments that trace their roots to the era of interstate highway construction (through which most federal transportation dollars flow). This is especially evident in Sun Belt metros like Tampa and Orlando that have boomed after widespread car adoption — the roads there are among the most dangerous in the country for cyclists and pedestrians.
However, mortality trends over the past 25 years cannot be explained simply by America’s history of highway development or automobile dependence. In the 1990s, per capita road deaths in developed countries were much higher than they are today. These rates were higher in South Korea, New Zealand, and Belgium than in the United States. Then the revolution in car safety brought greater use of seat belts, standard-issue airbags and safer tires, said Yona Freimark, a researcher at the Urban Institute.
As a result, deaths have decreased in the United States and internationally. But as cars have become safer for the people inside them, the United States has not been as advanced as other countries in prioritizing the safety of the people outside.
“Other countries began taking pedestrian and cyclist injuries seriously in the 2000s — and began making that a priority in both vehicle design and street design — in a way that had never been done before in the United States,” Mr. Freemark said.
Other developed countries have lowered speed limits and built more protected bike lanes. They have moved faster in making standard in-car technology such as automatic braking systems that detect pedestrians, and vehicle wraps less lethal to them. They designed roundabouts that reduce the danger at intersections, where deaths disproportionately occur.
By contrast, over the past two decades vehicles in the United States have become significantly larger, and thus more deadly to the people they hit. Many states limit the ability of local governments to set lower speed limits. The five-star federal safety rating that consumers can look for when purchasing a car today does not take into account what that car might do to pedestrians.
This disparate history means that while per capita death rates in the United States and France were similar in the 1990s, Americans today are three times more likely to die in traffic accidents, according to Freemark’s research.
During this time, the number of people traveling by motorcycle and bicycle in the United States increased. Bike-sharing systems have spread across the country, and new modes such as electric bicycles and scooters have followed suit, increasing the need to adapt roads – and those of users of all types. Share it – for a world not just dominated by cars.
Cycling advocates said they expect safety in numbers as more people ride bikes and as drivers become accustomed to sharing the road, reducing deaths. Instead, the opposite happened.
Likewise, the pandemic has skewed expectations. As countries adopt lockdowns and social distancing rules, streets around the world are empty. Polly Terttenberg, then New York City’s transportation commissioner, recalled a notable lull early in the pandemic when there were no pedestrian deaths in the city. She knew it couldn’t continue.
“I hate to say it, but I was worried things would come back in a bad way,” said Ms. Trottenberg, who is now deputy secretary of transportation at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
On the pandemic’s empty roads, it was easy to see exactly the kind of transportation infrastructure the United States had built: wide roads, even in city centers, that seemed to invite excessive speed. By the end of 2020 in New York, traffic deaths on those roads had risen compared to pre-pandemic times.
“We have a system that allows these astonishing violations, if the conditions are right,” Fremark said.
This is exactly what conditions were like during the pandemic. There was little congestion hindering reckless drivers. Many cities have also scaled back enforcement, closing DMV offices and offering waivers for drivers with unpaid tickets, expired driver’s licenses and out-of-state tags.
The pandemic has made clear how much American infrastructure contributes to dangerous conditions, in ways that cannot be easily explained by other factors.
“We’re not the only country struggling with alcohol,” said Beth Osborne, director of the group Transportation for America. “We are not the only country with smartphones and distractions. We were not the only country affected by the global pandemic.”
Instead, she said, other countries have designed transportation systems where human emotions and errors are less likely to lead to fatal outcomes on the roads.
Advocates say what the United States can do to change this is clear: like equipping trucks with side barriers to keep people from rolling down, or narrowing the roads that cars share with bikes so drivers feel they should drive slower.
“We know what the problem is, and we know what the solution is,” said Caron Whitaker, deputy executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. “We don’t have the political will to do this.”
The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year takes modest steps toward changing that. There is more federal money for pedestrian and biking infrastructure. Countries will now be required to analyze deaths and serious injuries among “vulnerable road users” – people outside cars – to identify the most dangerous traffic corridors and potential routes to fix them.
States where vulnerable road users account for at least 15 percent of fatalities must spend at least 15 percent of their federal safety funds on improvements that prioritize these vulnerable users. Today, 32 states, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, face this mandate.
The bigger question is whether Americans are willing to stop being exceptional in the world in this way.
“We need to change the culture that accepts this level of deaths and infections,” Ms. Tertenberg said. “We are horrified when State Department employees lose their lives abroad. We need to create the same sense of urgency when it comes to road deaths.
