Mean StreetsMarch/April 2020 143
12 feet wide—reduce what tra¾c planners call “friction,” a healthy
interaction among drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, and others that in-
duces safer behavior. Inevitably, roads designed for speed are deadlier.
Psychology plays a role—oversize lanes encourage drivers to drive at
dangerous speeds and to view everyone
else on the street as obstacles—but so
does physics. A pedestrian struck by a
car moving at 25 miles per hour has a
90 percent chance o surviving. I that
car is moving at 40 miles per hour, the
odds drop to 50 percent.
Compare the tra¾c death statistics
for four sprawling cities—Charlotte,
Dallas, Jacksonville, and Phoenix—to those for New York City. Al-
though New York City’s tra¾c-choked streets might not seem safe,
its pedestrian death rate in 2017 was no more than a third o that in
each o those cities, and the overall tra¾c death rate was a mere
¥fth. That’s not because the residents o those cities are worse driv-
ers but because those cities’ roads were built for fast driving and
without safeguards for pedestrians.
In the United States, federal and state street-design guidelines
explicitly promote wider lanes, even though they are known to be
deadlier. In other words, far from being “accidents”—and indeed,
the World Health Organization and other tra¾c-safety proponents
have shunned that term—tra¾c deaths are caused by roads that are
operating exactly as designed.
Tra¾c segregation is another principle that dominated twentieth-
century road design, to the detriment o safety. The idea is that pedes-
trians (and everyone else) should be kept safely out o drivers’ ways. In
London and Tokyo, pedestrian fences force the walking public onto the
sidewalk. Meanwhile, Hong Kong posts bright blue signs: “Beware o
Tra¾c.” But segregation isn’t always possible. Streets throughout Af-
rica, the Americas, and Asia have poor or no sidewalks. Many cities in
the developing world have seen pedestrian spaces taken over by parked
cars, motorcycles, and vendors, forcing people to walk into the street.
Even though the root o the problem is the way the streets were
designed, the trend has been to blame the victim. In many places, news
reports o crashes tend to repeat claims (often dubious) that injured
pedestrians or cyclists were distracted, delinquent, or insu¾ciently
Widening roads to solve
congestion is like loosening
one’s belt to solve obesity—
it eases constraints but does
not solve the problem.