Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP
There are too many cars and trucks that are too heavy and tall, driving too fast on streets that are too wide, with too many points of conflict.
Last week, the Governors Highway Safety Association released its annual preliminary report on pedestrian safety in the United States for 2022. It projected that pedestrian deaths will have increased for the 12th consecutive year, nearly doubling from 4,302 in 2010 to an estimated 8,126—the highest number in more than 40 years. Back in April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its preliminary report on motor vehicle fatalities in 2022, finding a slight decrease from the prior year but still a 32 percent increase compared to 2011.
Also last week, ProPublica and FRONTLINE reported that in 2017, the Department of Transportation started writing a report considering possible regulations for side guards on commercial trucks, which would help prevent pedestrians and cyclists from being trapped and crushed underneath. This prompted a furious backlash from the trucking lobby, which was allowed to provide extensive comments on a draft of the report before its publication. Sure enough, the final product contained no recommendations for new regulations.
That’s what I call car supremacy in this country. Drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians are maimed and slaughtered at rates that would count as a hair-on-fire emergency in any other rich country. Yet instead of doing anything about that, the government, half paralyzed by bureaucratic inertia and half comically in bed with the various vehicle industries, twiddles its thumbs.
As Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano write at The New York Times, back in the mid-1990s, France and America were squarely in the middle of the pack of OECD countries when it came to road fatalities, with both at about 150 deaths per million inhabitants. Since then, France has cut its traffic death rate by over two-thirds, while America’s has only declined by about a tenth. During that time, we have been surpassed by middle-income nations that were formerly much deadlier, like Latvia and Lithuania.
It’s not hard to discover why American roads are so deadly, particularly for pedestrians. There are too many cars and trucks that are too heavy and tall, driving too fast on streets that are too wide, with too many points of conflict. The typical pedestrian death is an SUV or truck running someone down on a “stroad,” the classic suburban arterial street-highway hybrid with many lanes, high speed limits, regular stoplights, and drivers constantly turning on and off. (This is also the most dangerous type of road for drivers, particularly on motorcycles.)
The European Union, by contrast, has been pushing road safety policies for decades now that have cut down on road deaths by 22 percent since 2012. Best practices include road narrowing, traffic-calming devices like speed bumps, lowering speed limits, taxes on excessive vehicle weight, seat belt compliance efforts, protected bike lanes and sidewalks, pedestrian safety regulations on automakers, “daylighting” intersections (which involves removing parking spots close to intersections to improve visibility), timing traffic lights to give pedestrians a head start in the crosswalk, and so forth.
A really diligent country can achieve a lot with these strategies. Norway—which is still quite car-dependent by European standards—has cut its road fatalities down to the lowest level in the world: just 21 per million persons, or something like 85 percent lower than America. Its capital Oslo has gone whole years without a single pedestrian or cyclist death.
Even in America, certain cities have managed to slash their road fatalities by employing only some of the European practices. For instance, Hoboken, New Jersey, has about 60,000 residents, which would mean seven or eight traffic deaths per year at the average rate. Instead, thanks mainly to an extensive effort to protect pedestrian safety in crosswalks, there were none at all over four consecutive years from 2019 through 2022.
Now, it would be difficult for most American cities to follow Hoboken’s example exactly. It’s one of the densest cities in the country, with narrow streets built long before America’s addiction to suburban sprawl. But much could still be done. Road diets, traffic calming, speed limit reductions, and so on can still work in the suburbs. They would likely accomplish a lot more there than in a legacy suburb like Hoboken, where the streets are already narrow and slow. Most cities just don’t do anything, and in the ones that do, like my home city of Philadelphia, the efforts are generally half-hearted at best. (When it comes to rebuilding a damaged freeway, however, it’s a different story.)
Much could be done at the federal level as well. For instance, one of the reasons for American truck bloat is government fuel economy regulations, which—thanks to the compulsive U.S. regulator habit of adding endless ill-judged carve-outs and exceptions—grants automakers a fuel efficiency break on SUVs and trucks the larger they are. That helped fuel the endless arms race for bigger, heavier, and more dangerous vehicles. Yet instead of changing that, the Department of Transportation lets interested parties all but rewrite its report on the mere possibility of new regulations on commercial trucks that would make them marginally safer for pedestrians and cyclists. The idea of actual stiff European-style penalties on automakers who design trucks with a worse field of view than an M1 Abrams tank, and the explicit intention of intimidating pedestrians, is hard to imagine indeed.
Even the promising development of electric vehicles is exacerbating the danger, as the smaller EVs are being phased out in favor of larger and heavier cars. The battery pack on the preposterous GMC Hummer EV is 2,900 pounds, the same weight as an entire Honda Civic.
That said, all is not lost. It’s not a coincidence that America diverged from the European pack in the 1980s and ’90s, when neoliberalism became the hegemonic ideology in both parties. Democrats and Republicans came to believe that government was a largely pointless hindrance to private enterprise. They set out to make it as difficult as possible for America to govern itself, and succeeded wildly.
But prior to that time, American government actually functioned reasonably well. This isn’t some lost tradition in the hazy mists of time, it’s well within living memory—and besides, there’s always the European example should we need inspiration. Step one is to stop consulting lobbyists about the safety of their industries.
