Safety at What Price?

Because I'm a long-time follower of Strong Towns, I already knew a lot of what's presented in this short video presentation by Chuck Marohn. It's about the way highway engineers designed roadways over time to be more forgiving of driver error and the effect that has had (both good and bad).

There's one fact he recites that I didn't know, though: by 1935, the death rate in the U.S. from driving had grown so high that if you extrapolated it to our current population and amount of driving (which is called vehicle miles traveled), instead of our huge annual death toll of 42,000, we would be having more than 500,000 deaths per year on U.S. roads.

So you can see why engineers inserted themselves into that relative level of carnage back in the early 20th century. They saw a problem and they set about fixing it.

The problem is, as Marohn shows, that the technical solutions to make a road safer for people inside cars also make it much less safe for anyone else who is outside the cars, in or near the road. And, as a byproduct, the solutions create a barren, treeless wasteland around the road. He doesn't even mention the ugliness of the concrete or metal barriers needed to separate traffic directions, the huge signs needed to make things visible to people whizzing by at high speeds, or the towering light poles that must be suspended above it all. The wider lanes and lack of trees or any other "impediments" to traffic also encourage the drivers to go even faster.

Marohn allows that these safety principles were good in that they caused fewer drivers to die on highways, but not so good when they were applied in towns and cities. I agree with that, of course, since lives were saved, but I also think there's a downside overall because driving on these wider, "safer" highways becomes the standard for driving everywhere. It poisons drivers' expectations of what driving should be all the time, increasing their impatience with waiting (for traffic lights, stop signs, pedestrians, slower traffic). And when highways are in populated areas, as they often are, all of that fast traffic is loud, polluting, dirty, and disruptive.

What if instead of making the roads "safer," engineers had instead made the cars safer by governing their speeds? We know now that would have been a better choice for our country and our world in many ways:

• U.S. development patterns wouldn't have become the ugly, unsustainable sprawl we all know and have to live with.
• The interstate system wouldn't have been built, undermining the passenger rail system and burgeoning mass transit systems in cities.
• Interstates wouldn't have been carved through cities, destroying and separating Black neighborhoods everywhere and undermining downtowns.
• We would be in a much better place to deal with the climate crisis (or possibly it wouldn't even be the crisis it is) because we would have denser land-use patterns that work with mass transit.
  

As Dave Roberts said on Twitter recently,

Honestly, is there a human being on the planet who would defend this kind of landscape on the merits?