Crossing the Street

I just watched Crossing the Street Shouldn't Be Deadly (But It Is). It's a half-hour video by Not Just Bikes, posted on Strong Towns, about how U.S. and Canadian street infrastructure leads to our greater pedestrian (and bicyclist) death rate compared to European cities. 

The first 25 minutes give examples, and near the end these stats are given:

The U.S. and Canada refuse to properly implement...solutions because the research says that motor vehicle speeds need to be lower sometimes. And that's a step too far for most American cities.

In 2020, there were 41 people on the street who were killed by cars in the Netherlands. But the Province of Ontario, which has a similar but smaller population, had 114 people killed by cars in the same year. 

That is a massive difference.

But it's even worse when you consider that a lot fewer people walk in Ontario because most Ontario cities look like this:



It's miserable to walk there.

An even worse example is Phoenix, Arizona, which is probably the most dangerous city for people walking in the entire developed world. They had 69 people killed while walking in 2020, and 97 people killed in 2021. 

Despite having a population of only 1.6 million people — less than 1/10 that of the Netherlands. And an even lower percentage of people walk in Phoenix because it is basically the textbook definition of a car-infested wasteland.

So these numbers are way worse than they look. This is not a trivial difference. The streets and roads in the Netherlands are orders of magnitude safer for people walking.

Those are some startling numbers.

He closes by explaining how the Netherlands' streets feel safer, too, and how that adds to quality of life.

Which reminds me of the Volts podcast on the same topic, The many psychological benefits of low-car cities, with Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, authors of Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives.