Eliminating traffic deaths | MIT Technology Review

Cheap and proven traffic-calming opportunities abound—from using planters to tighten intersections to lowering speed limits—but government logjams and red tape can be speed bumps. “There’s so many moving parts,” says Laura Sandt of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center. “On the flip side, it shows that we have so many opportunities for injury prevention.”

The progress

The total number of traffic deaths has increased over the last century. And though the US rate has dipped from a peak of 30.8 deaths per 100,000 people in the 1930s, the past decade has seen a concerning jump in deadly pedestrian incidents. At the same time, communities are waking up to the essential role of traffic safety policy, Shahum says.

One success story is Hoboken, New Jersey, which hasn’t had a traffic fatality since 2017. This is due to a combination of efforts like boosting investment in public transit, promoting walkability by extending curbs, and using cameras to identify crash-prone intersections in need of a redesign. But even there, obstacles remain. If an intersection hasn’t been proved to be deadly, for example, it can be an uphill battle to argue for removing parking spaces to widen curbs. “You’re kind of selling insurance through these improvements, and that’s not always easy,” says Greg Francese, the city’s acting director of transportation and parking.

There’s also no silver bullet that will work everywhere. Situated directly across the river from New York City, Hoboken is a highly transit-oriented city of less than 60,000 people. Success there might not translate to traffic-death hot spots like Memphis or Dallas. But it’s not impossible. Take Edmonton, Alberta, a sprawling, car-centric Canadian city of around one million people: Between 2015 and 2020, it cut traffic fatalities by 63% and serious injuries by 40% by adjusting speed limits and improving signals at crosswalks.