Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow
142 «¬® ̄°±² ³««³°® ́
7,140—the highest since 1990, according to the National Highway
Tra¾c Safety Administration, and a 41 percent increase since 2008.
Globally, the absolute number o tra¾c deaths has crept upward as
ever-greater numbers o people make more trips. Low-income coun-
tries, with lax safety standards and poorly designed roads, fare the
worst: they boast just one percent o the world’s motor vehicles but
suer 13 percent o total tra¾c deaths. Ethiopia, for instance, had
26.7 tra¾c deaths per 100,000 residents in 2016, almost ten times the
rate in Sweden and double that in the United States.
To the extent that policymakers have reacted to this crisis, they have
tended to do so through incremental measures: passing universal seat-
belt laws, mandating air bags and antilock brakes, lowering speed limits,
and raising penalties for drunk driving. These are valuable steps, but
they are nowhere near enough. That’s because the root cause o tra¾c
danger isn’t defective cars or unruly drivers. It’s the roads themselves.DANGEROUS BY DESIGN
At the turn o the twentieth century, city streets were largely shared
spaces, where people on foot mixed in the street with vendors, street-
cars, cyclists, and carriages. The arrival o the motor vehicle was ini-
tially viewed with horror, as U.S. tra¾c deaths climbed from just 26 in
1899 to 29,592 in 1929. To increase speed and safety, streets were wid-
ened and cleared o obstacles. Engineers and public o¾cials jammed
multilane roads, highways, and bridges into previously quiet neighbor-
hoods in order to move as many cars as quickly as possible through
cities. Many cities didn’t even bother to build new sidewalks since
destinations were so far away from one another that it was not feasible
to walk. When the widened roads became just as congested and dan-
gerous as the ones they replaced, engineers responded with still more
construction, turning streets into automotive monocultures, where the
mere idea o walking, biking, or taking public transit was viewed as
foolish. But the multilane roads did not solve tra¾c congestion; they
only enabled more and more drivers to take to the streets. In 1955, the
urbanist Lewis Mumford noted that widening roads to solve tra¾c
congestion was like loosening one’s belt to solve obesity—it temporar-
ily eased constraints but did not solve the underlying problem.
The result o a century o car-focused design is that on every con-
tinent, roads and lanes tend to be wider than is necessary or safe.
Although this keeps cars farther apart, bigger lanes—usually around