Consider This from NPR - Traffic Deaths Are At A 20-Year High. What Makes Roads Safe (Or Not)?

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Traffic fatalities have surged since the early days of the pandemic, reversing a persistent decline since the 1970s. Roads in the U.S. are now more dangerous than they've been in 20 years.Vox's Marin Cogan tells us about the deadliest road in the country, a stretch of US-19 in Pasco County, Fla.And we speak to Ryan Sharp, director of transportation and planning in Hoboken, N.J. That city has managed to bring traffic deaths to zero for the past four years.This episode also features reporting from KCUR's Frank Morris.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org Here's a number that's hard to wrap your mind around. Nearly 46,000 Americans were killed in car crashes last year. That's according to Mark Chung with the National Safety Council. That's like a regional jet crashing every day. Regional jet carrying 125

people crashing every single day of last year. That includes both people riding in cars and people hit by cars. And that means day after day all across the country, there are dozens of stories like this one. A driver hits and kills a cyclist this morning. Kansas City police say that that driver has not yet been found. That cyclist was Charles Crenier, 43 years old, a father of 10. Hundreds turned up for his funeral last week. I invite you to stand and sing with us again. He was a teacher, a coach, a deacon in his church. His brother Eric Crenier spoke

at the service. Police in Kansas City, Missouri, where Crenier was killed, say they're seeing more aggressive driving than before the pandemic. We're stopping people going 120. I mean, that's if they stop. So the new trend is high speeds, not stopping for the police. That's Sergeant Corey Carlisle. And if you're driving a 3,000-pound vehicle at 50 to 100 miles an hour, you're weaponizing that car, and you're the one pulling the trigger. It's the same thing.

Nationwide, traffic deaths last year were up 10% from 2020, the worst jump on record. Car crashes kill more people per capita in the U.S. than any other developed country. Consider this. Cars can be lethal weapons, but they don't have to be. We'll take a look at the deadliest stretch of road in America, and a city that's brought traffic deaths down to zero. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Tuesday, September 6th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. So, before this big spike, traffic death rates had been falling since the 1970s. There were improvements in road design and car safety features, and more people were wearing seatbelts. Then came the pandemic. Our roadways were turned into racetracks, and excessive speed really went up through the roof. And more people were driving while impaired. That's Kathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. It's devastating.

Experts are still studying why the pandemic seemed to change behavior. One theory? When the pandemic put a pause on lots of people's commutes, it also put an end to rush hour traffic. And less congestion was bad for road safety. Congestion is actually one of the best traffic calming measures we have. It's really hard to drive really fast and kill someone if there's a car directly in front of you blocking your path. That's Maren Kogan, who wrote about the increase in pedestrian deaths in particular for Vox. One expert told her that when the pandemic unclogged America's roads, it revealed

how dangerously they're designed. To understand what dangerous design actually looks like, Kogan dug into the research, and she found a study that used 15 years of traffic data to identify the deadliest places in America to be a pedestrian. So they identified 60 different hotspots across the country, and seven of them were on this one stretch of highway in this one county in Florida. So I felt at that point that I had really compelling evidence that this was a very deadly road, but also a road that's symbolic of a larger problem we're experiencing in this country. So Kogan set out to investigate what made a stretch of US-19 in Pasco County the deadliest road in America.

It is multiple lanes going in both directions. So there are three lanes on each side just going straight, and then there are multiple turn lanes on either side. So if you're at an intersection on US-19 in Pasco County, it could be eight or nine lanes that you have to cross to cross the street. The road is very flat, very straight, and very wide. And for that reason, people are encouraged as drivers to go pretty fast. And, you know, it's not very friendly for pedestrians. There are sidewalks, but in many places, you have to walk a mile or more just to safely cross the street. So in a way, you've created this deadly circumstance for pedestrians where they can either walk extra miles to get to a crosswalk safely,

or they can try to make a run for it on a road where drivers are already going really fast. There's also a lot of commercial development on either side, and that encourages a lot of turning off and turning on, and that just creates infinite possibilities for pedestrians to come into dangerous contact with cars. I know you walked around there. What was it like for you? It was so interesting to drive the street and then walk it. If you're a driver, it feels almost, you know, alluringly safe. If you're a pedestrian trying to navigate it, it's much, much worse. All of the conditions are telling you you should not be walking this road.

The unfortunate reality is there are a bunch of people in that community and in so many communities in the U.S. who don't drive. And so they're forced to navigate these spaces on foot that are inherently unsafe for them. As I was reading your reporting, one detail that really stuck out to me is how you described the number of roadside memorials. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so I didn't notice them right away. They're sort of hard to notice at first. But as I got there, and I was driving more and more, I started to notice that there are these signs put in that say drive safely in memory of and they have the name of the person who was killed there. So on my last day there, I started pulling over to look at some of the signs. And after a certain point, you know,

it was kind of unsafe for me to keep pulling over because again, you know, you're on this high speed multi-lane road. So I just drove across the county and tried to count whatever I could see, just scanning the periphery. And I think over 15 miles, I came across 12 more memorials for the dead. It's actually really haunting when you consider how many people have died and been killed along these roads. And, you know, most of us just drive through them every day. And sometimes I think we don't even think about it because we're so used to it. Yeah. You know, you wrote that when accidents like these happen, you often hear people think when accidents happen, we do tend to focus on individual behaviors and we try to find who is the last person at fault, who is the person to

blame. And this is a natural human instinct, I think, but it also is replicated in the ways that we see the media talk about these cases, the way we see law enforcement talk about these incidents, and the way we see, you we see governmental institutions talk about it. There's this real focus on individual behavior and individual responsibility. And we miss the larger picture, which is that we have some very serious design flaws in the way our roads are designed, in the way our vehicles are designed. And if we fix that, we could reduce a huge number of these unnecessary roadside deaths. Take us back, if you can, to US-19. Are

there any changes that you're looking for, anything that might be happening to change the experience that people have there who are trying to get from place to place? Certainly. So Florida's Department of Transportation, I know, understands that it's an issue. And they have done a number of things to improve safety to the roads. You know, they're adding curb buildouts, they're adding crosswalks, they're adding lights, they're trying to talk to a number of the pedestrians who rely on the road about traveling with lights at night. And critics of that approach would say, you know, you're essentially putting band-aids on this road that has been totally Frankensteined into essentially a freeway that a bunch of people

need to walk on. So I did ask FDOT officials if they had ever considered removing lanes. And I was told, you know, to the knowledge of the people that I was speaking to, that removing lanes had not been considered that it's, you know, it's too big of a road that people depend on, you know, to really remove lanes. But I think that we need to start thinking in those terms with these really deadly roads. Adding these sort of Band-Aid fixes does not fix an inherently deadly design. Maren Kogan, senior correspondent for Vox. If U.S. 19 is a story of what not to do, Hoboken, New Jersey could be a blueprint for how to make

streets safer. It's a city of 60,000 or so residents just across the river from New York, and in the last four years, nobody there has died in a car crash. No drivers, no cyclists, no pedestrians. My colleague Ari Shapiro talked with Hoboken's Director of Transportation and Parking, Ryan Sharp, about how the city bucked the national trend. While numbers all over the country were going up, how did Hoboken get the number to zero? That's a great question. Hoboken has been playing a long game when it comes to traffic safety for a number of years, dating back before COVID, and playing the long game through incremental changes and improvements over a series of years. So you talk about incremental changes and improvements. Like if you and I were going for a walk through downtown Hoboken, what are some of the specific things we would see that

have made a difference? Well, a lot of the things that Hoboken has what are some of the specific things we would see that have made a difference? Well, a lot of the things that Hoboken has been doing to improve traffic safety are low cost, they're quick implementation, but they're also a high impact. So we know through our crash data that about 88% of crashes happen at intersections. So we have focused on trying to reduce conflicts at our intersections, especially on our high crash corridors. So things like trying to improve sight lines at corners by doing what we call daylighting. So that can be installing something as simple as what we call a vertical delineator post or a flexible bollard. These posts get installed within 25 feet of crosswalks,

and they physically restrict cars from parking right up against a crosswalk. So it's not a blind corner. If you're going to take a turn, somebody's going to see you. If you're going to cross the street, you can spot the cars that are coming. That's correct. It's a very simple, cost-effective thing you can do, but it has a big impact. One thing that you won't see is something called a leading pedestrian interval. And basically what that means is we've programmed our traffic signals to give pedestrians a few second head start when they get into the crosswalk during their pedestrian phase without having to worry about turning vehicles. Oh yeah, I've seen that

here in DC too. The walk light turns on before the green light goes. Your plan seems to de-emphasize car ownership and create space for pedestrians and cyclists. How often do you hear from drivers who feel like you're squeezing them out and what do you tell them? Well, the goal of the Vision Zero program is to focus on safety for all modes of transportation.

What we know though, through our crash data, is that pedestrians and cyclists in particular are the most vulnerable users of the streets in Hoboken. And that's pretty much the same for every city in the country. And so culturally, people elevate pedestrian safety in Hoboken at the top of the hierarchy. So even if you commute to work by car, at some point you're going to be a pedestrian in Hoboken. So we try to not pit any one mode against each other as much as possible. There are a lot of cities that have implemented Vision Zero programs to reduce traffic fatalities, but in places like Washington, D.C., deaths have actually increased since that

goal was announced. What makes Hoboken different? Well, it's hard to speculate what's working well or not working well in other cities. But in Hoboken, an incremental approach over several years that includes more than just engineering, but also education and a focus on changing the culture. The simple improvements like daylighting or leading pedestrian intervals or adding curb extensions, these things are still in place and they've been having a positive impact and people have gotten used to seeing these things in town and they ask for more. So it's continuing to build off its own success and, you know, frankly we've been fortunate so far not to have a setback, but that can happen at any time, right? We're well aware of that. It's happened in other cities. So we're continuing to push ahead with new initiatives again and again to try to continue to keep that progress in place. Hoboken, New Jersey's Director of Transportation and Parking, talking with my colleague Ari Shapiro.

And at the top of this episode, you heard reporting from KCUR's Frank Morris in Kansas City. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.