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Why America’s roads are so much more dangerous than Europe's

By Norman Garrick, Carol Atkinson-Palombo, and Hamed Ahangari

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Even before that spike upward, per capital traffic fatalities in the US were already the highest in the industrialized world. No other developed country tolerates the level of carnage on their roads that we do. This national failure has been overlooked for far too long. Studying short-term variations in our safety record is important, but it can also distract us from investigating the forces contributing to our horrendous safety record compared to our peers.
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http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/30/13784520/roads-deaths-increase-safety-traffic-us
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Historicist: Pedestrian-blaming, 1930s style

BY DAVID WENCER, Torontoist


The Christmas of 1936 was a black one for Toronto. On December 26, newspapers reported on the holiday slaughter: three people killed, at least six people injured by hit-and-run drivers, and more than one hundred separate traffic collisions. In the years that followed, politicians, police officials, and concerned citizens promoted annual December public safety campaigns in the hopes of making Toronto’s streets safer over the holidays.

Books dedicated to the history of the automobile in Canada often describe Canadians’ “love affair” with the automobile in the early 20th century. Toronto newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, however, reveal that the new vehicles were not universally embraced. Articles express widespread public anxiety about the growing number of traffic collisions on city streets and highways; many Toronto newspapers featured regular photo arrays of smashed vehicles in and around the city.


In his 2008 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D. Norton notes that American cities were similarly preoccupied with traffic deaths at this time. “Even in the United States there is little evidence in cities in the 1920s of a ‘love affair’ with the automobile,” Norton writes. “With the sudden arrival of the automobile came a new kind of mass death. Most of the dead were city people. Most the car’s urban victims were pedestrians, and most of the pedestrian victims were children and youths. Early observers rarely blamed the pedestrians who strolled into the roadway wherever they chose, or the parents who let their children play in the street. Instead, most city people blamed the automobile.”
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http://torontoist.com/2016/12/historicist-pedestrian-blaming-1930s-style/
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Why The Rules Of The Road Aren’t Enough To Prevent People From Dying

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester, FiveThirtyEight

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How speed limits are set

In 2013, 32,719 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States, and 2.3 million were injured, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Those numbers were down from the previous year, but motor vehicle crashes remain a leading cause of death, and speed is a leading cause of accidents. The NHTSA estimates a $277 billion annual price tag1 for those accidents, with an additional $594 billion for “harm from the loss of life and the pain and decreased quality of life due to injuries.”

Given the social and economic toll of speeding, one might assume that we set speed limits with careful calculations aimed at maximizing safety. But that’s not exactly how it works, and a history of questionable applications of data is partly to blame.
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-rules-of-the-road-arent-enough-to-prevent-people-from-dying/
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9 Components of a Strong Vision Zero Commitmentr

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We know that achieving the goal of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries can’t be achieved with a “business as usual” mindset. While Vision Zero is indeed a set of strategies, it’s also fundamentally a new approach, a different framework, that starts from an acknowledgement that severe traffic crashes are preventable.
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http://visionzeronetwork.org/project/9-components-of-a-strong-vision-zero-commitment/

[B' Spokes: While there are some good points in here I personally think our biggest obstacle will be getting rid of the mind set that I dubbed "Since cars like to go fast, we should do everything we can so they can go faster. Slower modes, since they are so much slower will not mind going even slower." From this we get the victim blaming from police and our safety office like it is the slower modes duty not only to stay out of the way of cars but slowing them down, even for a few seconds is a crime against nature. With never a mention that it is cars duty not to hit things with their cars
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Ottawa opted for 'less safe' O'Connor Street bikeway design to make way for cars

By Joanne Chianello, CBC News

The City of Ottawa bypassed the advice of international consultants when designing the O'Connor Street bikeway in order to make more room for cars, choosing an option the firm described as "less safe" for cyclists.

In the first three weeks since its opening, there were three reported collisions between bicycles and vehicles in the section of the bike lane stretching from Laurier Avenue to the Queensway.

The city insists the lane is safe. But it doesn't deny it chose an option that was somewhat less safe for cyclists, and did so because the optimal choice would have been untenable for drivers — and may have killed the project altogether.
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In its report submitted in July 2015, Mobycon concluded that Option 1 — protected bike lanes on both sides of O'Connor — was "the safest and most direct for bicyclists."

The firm acknowledged that its first choice could result in less room for cars and "slightly less optimal flow in the downtown area." But from a Dutch cycling perspective, inconveniencing motorists is "considered an acceptable trade-off."
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/city-of-ottawa-chooses-less-safe-option-for-o-connor-bikeway-to-make-room-for-cars-1.3855100
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The Road Ahead: Transportation

by: Tony Dutzik, Frontier Group

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For a decade, the United States seemed to be creeping away from our extreme dependence on fossil fuel-burning cars and trucks. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of miles driven by the average American fell by about 7%. Vehicle fuel economy increased and transportation carbon pollution declined. Traffic deaths fell. Congestion stagnated. Cycling and transit use surged. Meanwhile, new technologies and services emerged that promised a potential break from the nation’s dominant model of mobility based on personal car ownership.

Then, everything changed. Gasoline prices collapsed to the lowest level since 2003. Vehicle travel and the congestion that comes with it increased. Traffic deaths rose alarmingly for reasons ranging from rising travel to distracted driving to a surge in the number of bad drivers on the roads. Americans launched into a debt-fueled SUV-buying bonanza that has stalled improvements in fuel economy. Congress put $300 billion more behind the failed transportation infrastructure investment policies of the past via the FAST Act in late 2015. And the future of new models of mobility such as carsharing, Lyft and Uber remained in question.

And then came November 8. Voters gave virtually unchecked federal power to a Republican party that has frequently proven hostile to transit while embracing an “asphalt socialist” approach to highway construction. The transportation priorities of our incoming president are as yet unclear, but the tentative steps toward a cleaner and more efficient transportation system that the Obama administration took over the last eight years would seem to be in jeopardy.
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http://www.frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/road-ahead-transportation
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The True Costs of Driving

By JOE CORTRIGHT, The Atlantic

A report published earlier this year confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation that’s widely disbelieved: Drivers don’t come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Group and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “Who Pays for Roads?” exposes the myth that drivers are covering what they’re using.

The report documents that the amount that road users pay through gas taxes now accounts for less than half of what’s spent to maintain and expand the road system. The resulting shortfall is made up from other sources of tax revenue at the state and local levels, generated by drivers and non-drivers alike. This subsidizing of car ownership costs the typical household about $1,100 per year—over and above the costs of gas taxes, tolls, and other user fees.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/

[B' Spokes: Or how I like to explain it, motoring taxes and fees basically pays for for the Interstates. You know, roads where bike and pedestrians are not allowed, roads with an "I" and some numbers. All other roads we all pay for, they are no more for "only cars" than your local park, school or library. Any way a good read and makes you wonder why we throw so much money after something that has so little benefit per cost.]
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Do We Really Want Funding For Bicycle Projects?

by Walker Angell, Streets mn

We hear frequent calls for more funding for bicycling — for painted bike lanes, door zone bike lanes, sharrows, protected bikeways, bicycle parking, giant motor traffic intersections for Trader Joe’s, programs to encourage people to ride and any number of things.

We don’t need all of that special funding. We may specifically not want that special funding.

Asking for funding for bicycle facilities is backwards. It’s inefficient, can result in poor or over-priced outcomes, and sometimes the funding can be sidetracked for projects that have little or nothing to do with making walking and bicycling better and safer.
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We need to think about it differently. Not as bicycle projects or pedestrian projects or people with disabilities projects or guardrail projects, but as one comprehensive transportation and space project. Mitigating the negative impacts imposed by motorists must be a core element of traffic engineering and of every roadway, not an optional add-on.
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When engineers design a bridge, they don’t use a painted line to keep cars from driving off and plunging to their death. NO! They design it from the outset to be safe. Can you imagine if bridges didn’t have guardrails and we had to fight for funding for them?
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Our response is that we’re going to spend 99% of our money making roads smoother and faster for drivers and 1% to improve safety for those endangered by the fast drivers. We protect people from falling icicles and from plunging off of high bridges but not from errant drivers? That’s messed up.
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Rather than start with funding, we should begin with what we should do — build safe roads — and then let the funding follow. If there is only enough funding available to reconstruct 22 miles of roadway to the new safer standards rather than the planned 25 miles of fast, smooth, and unsafe road, then that’s life. If a road cannot be built safe for all of those impacted then it should not be built or reconstructed or repaved.

[B' Spokes: Or how I look at it, we can build those extra 3 miles next year. Over 90% of our projects have the sole purpose of solving so called problems 10 years down the road using inflated numbers and arguably incorrect cost benefits so really those 3 miles of car-centric roads can wait a year.]
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https://streets.mn/2016/12/07/do-we-really-want-funding-for-bicycle-projects/
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A glimpse into what America might be like if it continues to be car centric

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2052657/opening-beijings-1000km-seventh-ring-road-more-closely

[B' Spokes: The rate that China has embrased America's love of cars along with all the down sides is scary. This article is about a road that is 12 times the size of Baltimore's 82.8 km beltway. More cars and more roads is not the answer.]
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