Every year, traffic crashes kill more than one million people, and they’re the leading cause of death for children and young adults. In the US, 100 people a day lose their lives this way, in many cases not on highways but on rural and local streets. “Traffic deaths are a leading cause of preventable death, yet we treat it like it’s inevitable,” says Leah Shahum, founder and director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit focused on making streets less deadly.
The causes of a crash can be muddy. Drivers make mistakes like speeding or getting distracted, but infrastructure fails them too: Perhaps they were on a road built for speed and not safety, in a screen-filled vehicle, or at an intersection where pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars aren’t visible.
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 total number of traffic deaths has increased over the last century. 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.
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