(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 587: Dangerous by Design

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, Steve Davis of Smart Growth America joins the show to talk about their most recent edition of Dangerous by Design. We chat about where we stand on pedestrian traffic deaths in the United States, the data collected to tell the story, and creating consequences for not improving safety.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA.

Find all the episodes including this one in our archive.

Below is a full transcript of this episode:

TalkingHeadways_SD_07222026

I’ve been at this work for a little while now. It kinda snuck up on me for a couple decades. Uh, my-

I was just really relentlessly curious, and connected with some folks here a long, long time ago, and I’ve somehow been here for 20 years, um, this year, actually.

We’ve known each other a long time.

I grew up in Atlanta and read his work in the Atlanta paper, and had reached out to him at some point after he had come to Smart Growth America, and we had kinda formed a friendship a little bit, and that was the door I came in through.

and your, I mean, you know, little things maybe, but also big things.

And, you know, there was this renewed vigor for cities and walkable places, and it was like this, the stuff that we believe is really desired by people and really wonderful for all these reasons all of a sudden was becoming really popular. And it was like there was no downside to that. And, you know, fast-forward 20 years and seeing the sort of inequitable growth and the ways that that didn’t benefit everyone and some of the, I think some of the equity things that were going on that we didn’t realize at the time, I think is one of the biggest changes.

I still think it’s wonderful that people wanna live in great, connected, walkable places. I think about that in a slightly more nuanced way now maybe than I did when I was, you know, 25. I feel like that’s definitely one of the big differences. So many things have changed though, and especially as sort of a former communications person, you know, who worked on this, like, it’s a incredibly different landscape that you have to work in now.

Just thinking about, you know, we, we still write a lot of blog posts, which, um, maybe I don’t think about as much being kinda strange ’cause I’m 47 years old and- … you know, that was the time, that was the, that was the coin of the realm.

Like, “People read this stuff?”

So much of that has changed. I do think a lot of things haven’t changed, though. I think what people care about is really the same. It hasn’t changed all that much. It’s really just how we tell people is dramatically different.

And, you know, the visuals matter a lot more even though they mattered before ’cause you always had a picture with your blog if you wanted people to pay attention.

Uh, like a lot of those newspapers just don’t exist anymore.

So the landscape is just so different. So one of the things that we kind of experimented with this year with Dangerous by Design was spending a little bit more time and money and effort in that ecosystem of, like, YouTube and content creators and all that kind of stuff. We’ve, we’ve done more video, I mean, for a while now, for, I don’t know, s- five, six years.

Mostly slightly longer form. Sometimes, you know, fun, cute little three, four-minute illustration-heavy kind of things. But, like, this year with Dangerous by Design again, we have, like, a long in-depth story, five, six minutes on, uh, what’s happened in Orlando that we can get into a little bit. Mm-hmm. But we also reached out to City Nerd.

Ray Delahanty makes terrific videos, and we reached out to him with a partnership to talk about Dangerous by Design, which is kinda new. Yeah. I think there’s a lot that could be done in that area to kinda get this story out and into different forms. What’s really interesting, too, is, you know, the, the average age of the people that we talk to on Capitol Hill, we get older, they never change.

You know, the median Hill staffer that we’re talking to, you know, they’re like 25, and that never changes, right? Hmm. People come and go, and for the most part- Whoever was around when the last reauthorization happened, they’re not gonna be around for the next one. You know, they turn over a lot of times, you know, in a five-year period.

I was talking to somebody recently and they were saying like, “You know, we watch a lot of videos in our office.” Like, that’s kinda what gets passed around and, “Oh, did you see this?” and, “Did you see this video?” It might be a short, it might be a longer thing, but that’s really kind of become a little bit of a preferred medium for people, which is really interesting.

So there’s, there’s a lot more that can be done there. I still think we need, you know, messages and formats that connect with people in some of the same old ways, but there’s a lot of room to do a lot of things differently and a lot of things better and, and reach audiences. But ultimately what you’re trying to do is solve the problem for an audience that’s just become incredibly fragmented- Oh my gosh, yeah

and, uh, atom- atomized, right?

And then when Twitter came out, obviously it was very centralized. It, for at least the- Mm … policy people and things like that. Not everybody got on Twitter, and not everybody’s still on Twitter. I don’t use it anymore, but, you know, that kind of format anyways, Blue Sky, Twitter, et cetera, Threads, kind of punches above its weight in terms of, like, the policy people that are on there, the news people that are on there, the, the, everybody else.

But the rest of the world is on the TikToks and the everything else, and the videos, and the Instagrams, and whatever. So I always just think that’s fascinating to see over time how things change. But let’s talk about the report. So I wanna talk to you about Dangerous by Design. Uh, how many years ago? You said 10 years, I think.

Uh, how many years has it been since you guys started putting this out?

It was a kind of a reissue of a report that the old Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, STPP, y- they did a report called Mean Streets, which was the first version of this, and it is, you know, some of the same methodology with the Pedestrian Danger Index, which we have since moved away from. But, um, yeah, I don’t know how many exactly ’cause we- we’ve done it every two years for a while.

We did one back-to-back years, uh, because of COVID data and how important it was to kind of chronic. We did one in 2021 and then 2022, but we do it, usually do it every two years, so I, I don’t know. I’ve, I’ve lost count. I think I’ve been involved in this report 9 or 10 times at this point. It’s been a lot.

You know, we have kids on skateboards that get categorized in with people using a wheelchair, an assistive device, and it becomes cleaner, cleanest to just look at pedestrians, which is what we have always looked at in Dangerous by Design.

You know, that makes me feel like we’re behind a lot of ways ’cause the European Union is just like, “Okay, we’re gonna standardize this for all cities. You all have to report this to us if you want funding.” And so I think that that’s interesting, too, thinking about kind of the juxtaposition between, like, what they just did this last week, it was just this last week- Mm-hmm

and what we do, uh, in terms of data collection a- and reporting and things like that.

I think this is the first time we’ve done it too, where we made a global comparison. How does the US compare to its peers? Not just, you know, how does the US compare to, uh, Norway or whatever, with the lowest fatality rate in the world. We took a, a whole host of global peers. But on the data side, I mean, I, I think most people don’t realize just how bad and inconsistent, and most importantly, slow this data is.

You know, we call this report Dangerous by Design 2026. We release it in 2026. This data is through the end of 2024. We compare two five-year periods, so 2020 to 2024, and then 2015 to 2019. And, you know, 2024 ends, and then it takes them all of 2025 and part of 2026 to aggregate that data at USDOT that comes from states and is reported by states, and prepare it for release.

This data, I think, came out in April of 2026 So it’s 16 months after the end of the period you’re looking at.

USDOT as well. And it becomes a really tough claim to make when we’re not measuring safety well-

And so they have kinda like preliminary numbers. They count things a little bit different than the feds do, and they release their estimates. But again, they’re estimates. You know? Yeah. They’re… It- it’s not based on, on hard data. And i- in all the time that I’ve worked on this, other than small changes, you know, 2009 I think they added latitude and longitude so you could start to map the fatalities, which is something that we’ve always done to, to look at where they’re happening.

But other than that, there’s not a lot that’s changed with the data. We’re still kinda doing the same things. You know, the categories have, have barely changed over that time. Uh, there’s a lot of growth. I mean, it’s really exciting to have this model from the EU, perhaps, that could be worth emulating and looking into because USDOT and, and NHTSA, you know, they govern this process.

They create this accident form for all the, all the fatalities that are recorded that the states then have to use. So this is one of the areas that we identify in the report where it makes a lot of sense for there to be a little bit of a top-down solution. There’s a lot of room for the feds to step in and really lead on the data gathering and collection side.

There’s a lot of things that need to happen from the bottom up on this, but that’s one of the areas that where it really makes sense for the feds to have a much stronger role.

You know, the headlines this last year, it really depends on who you ask. The NHTSA, I think it’s the NHTSA administrator, when the data first came out, you know, they declared, “American roads are safer.” And it really, it really comes down to what you’re comparing that to. This last year, it, it was a small decrease of, you know, 3, 4%, something like that.

We had 7,000 people struck and killed while walking in 2024. That’s roughly 19 deaths per day. You know, while we’re having this podcast, really good chance that someone’s killed while walking somewhere in the US right now. That’s the reality. If you back up a little bit, from 2009 to 2024, the total people killed while walking, struck and killed while walking, is up 72%.

Um, it’s an insane rise, and, you know, celebrating a 3% decrease at a time when we’ve just gotten back down to a number that I think is higher than every year on record since 1982, other than the last three years, that’s not progress, and it’s not worth celebrating. So while fatalities have ticked down slightly, and those GHSA numbers, uh, that I just saw this last week show that they may be ticking down again in 2025, we have a long way to go to get to a level that any of us should feel like is acceptable, and we have a long way to go just to get back to even just where we were two or three decades ago

We shouldn’t be thinking about what it was then, which was not as good as we want it to be. Right. We should be thinking about getting back to something that’s even bigger or, or changing what we think transit should do for us. And I feel like that’s the same conversation that should be happening here, which is in 2013-ish, that area at the bottom of the Great Recession, that was the kind of the low, it seemed like the, a low-ish point, uh, in that time period, if I was looking at the chart correctly.

And then we just kind of shot back up and, uh, you know, if we’re trying to go a per- percent down of where we are right now, which is horrible compared to that 2013 number, but even if we go back to that 2013 number, that’s still bad, right? Like-

I feel like sometimes we can get distracted by that because ultimately the idea is to, like, not have any deaths overall, right? I realize that’s a really hard goal at this point in time. Uh- Mm-hmm … but, you know, that discussion I think, you know, could change and be better.

So we’re all thinking about soccer. I’m a big DC United fan. I’ve been here in Washington, DC for, for, uh, 20 years. DC United, a- at least a handful of times in the last six or seven years, has won what’s called the Wooden Spoon. They, uh, give it to the team that finishes in last place with the least number of points.

So I think in 2022, DC United won the Wooden Spoon with, like, 27 points. The top team in the league had 60, 70 points, something like that. Um, the next year, we increased our points total for DC United by 48%. We got that 27 points up to 40, and we missed the playoffs for, like, the 10th year in a row. We won three more games than we did the season before, and if the ownership threw a party and wanted to brag about that, they would get eviscerated by their fans that are so frustrated.

They are so frustrated with all of the losing. They don’t wanna be in 23rd place instead of 28th. They’d only wanna be in 15th place because they don’t wanna miss the playoffs. They wanna get in the playoffs. They wanna finish first. They wanna finish second. You know, it’s for a club that’s, you know, that’s won the championship, you know, four times over the last 30 years or whatever.

That’s a lot like what we’re dealing with here. Like, yes, wins are up. Fatalities are down slightly. The standard that we should be going for is so much higher than did we make a 3 or 4% decrease. You know, I think, uh, we have this in the report this time. If, y- you know, this progress that a lot of people were celebrating about the 2024 numbers, if we continued that progress, we wouldn’t get back to where we were in 2009 until 2042 2009, I think we had about 4,000 people killed, struck and killed while walking.

2009 might have been kind of the low point before it started to go back up. The overall high point I think is back in the ’70s, just like traffic fatalities writ large were at their, you know, highest levels, uh, of all time, all traffic fatalities, uh, in the ’70s. Yeah. Um, you know, before declining for a long time.

But yeah, we, we have a long way to go and, and, and that’s part of what we wanted to do with the report this time in this section with the global comparisons is kind of, is kind of resetting what the baseline is. I mean, by all means, we should say, “Hey, look, the needle moved in the right direction from 2024 compared to 2023.”

That’s not bad news. That doesn’t make it good news. And s- you know, slightly more safe, um, slightly less deadly is not the same thing as safe. So it’s really about trying to hold ourselves to a higher standard. The other thing is, you know, does anyone who’s really claiming this is a victory, do they understand what we did?

Did we do anything different? ‘Cause it feels like we’re just kinda lucked into an increase. It’s not like we dramatically changed anything in the last year or two or three. I saw people pointing to the Safe Streets For All grants and projects. Like, so few of those are in the ground, you know? And I’m, I’m sure they make a difference, but that’s not gonna, that’s not gonna move the needle in the way that we need it to move.

The, the scale of change is much greater, and we really wanna start to hold the US to a higher standard. And I mean, if we can get into the numbers that, you know, we compare to globally, but, like, Canada, Canada’s traffic fatality rate is, like, half of ours. Like, Canada for the most part, it looks a lot like the US, right?

Go to Quebec and you’ll see some signs in French but, you know, you go to Toronto, you, you could be in a US city. It’s not dramatically different. It doesn’t look dramatically different. The cars look pretty similar. You know, you’ll see people driving big trucks there. It’s not all that different. And man, if we could just, if we could just get to Canada’s traffic fatality level, we would save thousands of lives every year, and that’s a long way off.

That’s a long way off for us.

Yeah. There’s actual consequences for not spending money or not getting the results that you want to. And so in this instance, in terms of, like, transportation policy, like, how do we get to a point where we can actually have those real tangible consequences for folks that are underperforming? Because the underperformance is they’re, they’re trading consequences in terms of money and power and whatever else for people’s lives, right?

It’s a clear trade-off for the ability to drive faster, right? So I’m wondering where, where we can get to a point where we can actually have consequences for not doing as well in terms of your, your ratings or the way that you address safety. Because- Yeah … they’re obviously saying safety, but they’re not doing anything about it.

You, you don’t get the money from the TV contract that you had- Yeah … anymore. And so there is something to say about having some consequences, like some ability to, you know, say, “You didn’t do this correctly, and so until you improve, uh- Mm-hmm … we can’t help you in this instance,” or, “We can’t help you more until you improve,” or something along those lines.

I’m not sure. But maybe that, you know, what does that look like?

Happens every five years, right? Sets all the policy and funding levels. Kind of every

The thing that all the states and AASHTO, their trade organization, always has wanted forever, they will never stop asking for this, is more flexibility in how they spend the money, right? The federal transportation program is essentially a federally funded state administered block grant program. You know, there are some restrictions on the funding, but for the most part, the feds hand blank checks to states, and they can spend it, you know, however they want.

There’s not a lot of performance required. So after, you know, years of saying, “We want more flexibility, we want more flexibility,” the law in 2012, MAP-21, it essentially created a new structure for measuring performance. And the trade-off was we’re gonna give you more flexibility, we’re gonna get rid of some programs, we’re gonna consolidate them together, and then you’re gonna be free to spend this on the projects you think that you need are most valuable.

But we’re gonna create this new system of performance measures where we’re gonna have to measure and assess, track things, safety, reliability, congestion, um, I think there’s nine total performance measures, right? But just laser in on what happened with safety. So they said, “We’re gonna create this safety performance measure.

States are gonna have to set targets each year for how many people are gonna die on their roadways.” And they did that, and the whole process got incredibly watered down during the, you know, rule making regulation process. And essentially what it is now is like a pretty worthless paperwork exercise that honestly we would be better off without.

The only use of this process right now is that it gives us some transparency into which states are at least thinking about safety in an ambitious way. ‘Cause you can go to, uh, the FHWA dashboard for all of these performance measures, and you can see what states are setting. And I don’t know, the last time we looked at this there were I don’t know, 15, 20 states that were setting targets, like literally saying, “In the next year, we are planning for more people to die on our roadways.

Here is how we are planning to get, how we are planning to get there.” And the, the problem with this system is not that the system exists, it’s that there’s no penalties. It’s not binding. You’re, you’re free to say more people are gonna die. You can continue get, uh, getting an increased amount of federal funding for that.

When you meet those targets, you don’t get penalized, you don’t get a reward. If you’re a state that lots of states set targets for fewer people to die in the, you know, in the coming years on their roadways, and some of those states are even spending money in a way where they’re trying to get to that outcome.

If they get there, do they get a reward? Do they get additional funding? You know, no. If they don’t get there, are they penalized? Do they lose money? Do they have to spend money on safety? Uh, no. They don’t have to, right? But you can start to see the outline of what a program would look like that was oriented around safety.

Uh, I think it would be something along those lines where, you know, having money that goes down to states, you know, we don’t have a fundamental problem with that. The problem that we have is that we’re getting a really incredibly bad return on the money that we’re sending to states and even to metro areas.

You know, we’ve spent, you know, whatever, a trillion dollars in surface transportation funding at the federal level in the last, you know, whatever it is, 20, 30 years maybe since the ISTEA in, in 1991. And what do we have? The engineers say that our roads and bridges are in roughly the same shape as they were back then.

Safety has only continued to get worse and worse. Um, why are we pumping more money into a program that is not oriented around accomplishing anything? So that would be, like, a really basic way to bring promotion and relegation, which I know- … I’m gonna say. I know there’s a, a vibrant debate about that in the soccer world.

Um, I see you pro rel truthers and those who are opposed. Um, but that is a, that is a way that you could bring, you know, promotion and relegation to the transportation arena. You know, we don’t even have to be prescriptive about how you get there, but say, “You have to reduce traffic fatalities or you’re going to lose money.

It’s gonna come with a penalty. And here is a whole suite of ways and solutions that are proven for things that you can go and do to make your streets and roads safer and try to get to those reductions that you say, you know, is your top priority.”

Uh- Yeah, right … but that just speaks to, like, the fact that, that sometimes the money is actually more powerful than the lives that they might save. You know, it’s like- Mm-hmm … I know it’s a rhetorical way to think about it, but-

What should states do with the money to improve safety if they had the ability to, or if they were, you know, pushed into it? Like, what are the things that we should let them do or focus on instead of what they’re doing now, which is obviously not working?

That’s one of the things that is really great about this interactive map that everybody can find as part of Dangerous by Design. You can type in any address or, you know, city. I think this version of it, it may be limited to the city, but it’ll… Anyway, it’ll draw a bunch of dots in an area and it’ll show you, you know, 15, 16 years of pedestrian fatalities.

And you can, you can start to map your city’s high, you know, fatality network on your own. But, you know, every city knows, uh, for the most part where their most dangerous corridors and their most dangerous intersections are. Starting there should be step one. Looking at the last, I think, five years, a little more than half of all fatalities are on state-owned roads.

You know, the roads that the states own are by far the most dangerous out there. Design characteristics are all, you know, pretty similar, pretty wide lanes, but they’re all… You know, for the most part, the really dangerous areas are places where we’re trying to accomplish a bunch of goals that are opposed to one another at the same time.

We’re trying to make a corridor that can move people really, really fast, and we’re also gonna put driveways every 10 feet and have a million things that you wanna see and do and stop at along that entire, you know, stretch. You can’t do these things at the same time. This is the stroad, right? That we’ve heard all about.

So there’s a million things that could be done to improve safety on these corridors. It’s, you know, it’s different in every one, but it almost always involves finding ways to reduce speed, which is the number one culprit in these fatalities. The higher speeds are, the more likely people are to be killed, uh, in ways that we, that we probably are underestimating because some of this data and research on that factor is so very old at this point.

They’re all somewhat similar. They’re big and you can go fast, but the difference is the land uses around them.”

They’re trying to get to the grocery store, and that’s a lot of where the, the conflicts happen. And so it’s interesting to think about, like, the cities know where a lot of their conflicts are, right? They can pick it out, and they can make some changes in terms of street design. But going forward, all of the sprawl and the exurban development that’s happening, there probably should be something related to that too because this is where a lot of those conflicts are gonna happen in the future.

And so if we can curtail that, and this is something that we’ve of- talked about a lot is land use and transportation are very, very, uh, tied together. But I thought that was interesting to think about it from that perspective rather than, like, just pure road design, but actually the design of our communities is kind of what the, what the biggest problem is, especially on some of these arterial roads on the outskirts of towns.

They had crossed and were on the, like, concrete median, and one of her children pulled out of her hand. It was basically a mid-block crossing. And it’s, like, three-quarters of a mile to a, you know, controlled intersection with a light, you know, to her right, half a mile to a controlled intersection to her left.

She did the very logical thing that she had probably done, you know, dozens, hundreds of times, is walk from this bus stop that had been deliberately sited here because of the apartment complex that was across the street. That’s a land use problem and a transportation problem. It’s, it’s, it’s both things at once.

And, you know, the notion that we’re gonna ask somebody to walk, you know, an extra 15 minutes just to get to something that they can see right across the street, uh, is insane. You know? Put a light in, put a crosswalk in. Find some way to make this safe, or don’t site the bus stop there, which doesn’t solve her problem, doesn’t, you know, improve accessibility for the people that live there, but, you know, it, you can find tons of places where this is the problem.

And, you know, uh, this video that we made about Orlando still has plenty of issues. I mean, their rate of death per 100,000 people is actually higher now than it was in 2019 when they were number one in our report. They’re, I think, 25th in this report. But we profiled this corridor right near this elementary school, and it has this great aerial shot, and you can kinda see.

It’s kinda similar to the road I just described, where there’s, like, you know, there’s traffic lights pretty far apart, like maybe a mile apart. And they put in two separate, you know, mid-block crossings with lights and signals and high-vis paint and widen the sidewalk so it’s technically, like, a multi-use path for them in their, you know, terminology.

Big, wide, like, 10-foot sidewalk on one side. And those are the kinda interventions that are required when you have already made the land use decision of, you know, having these things that people need on both sides of these streets that are, you know, impossible or dangerous or incredibly uncomfortable to try to get across.

It’s- Five point something, I think, in, in the report this time. Just to put that in context, you know, five, five point something deaths per 100,000 people. When we did this report in 2019, the highest rate in the country was, I think, Orlando at 3.5. So like Memphis a- and, and Albuquerque to some degree in, in number two have just surged so far out in front of everybody else.

And as we’ve talked to Memphis, I mean, the first problem they have is that they have a lot of incredibly dangerous arterials that are where the bulk of these deaths are occurring. As we’ve talked to people in Memphis, there’s so many things going on in Memphis that it has just not been able to get to the top of the list of any elected leadership.

There’s not, um, as best as we can tell, and I’m sorry if I’m leaving someone out who’s spoken about this issue and been, been a champion for it, but, uh, not the mayor, not anyone on the council has really like risen up and been like, “Guys, we have to do something about this. We have to change something.”

Maybe moments here and there, but as we talk to people down there, they’re just like, “We’re having surges of crime, we’re having homelessness, we’re having,” you know, all these problems that we’re, that they’re trying to tackle, that it just hasn’t risen to the top. And, you know, kinda quietly over a decade they’ve become far and away- The most dangerous place for people on foot with numbers that are, I mean, really kinda eye-popping.

Just, you know, going from, you know, w- whatever it was, 20, 30 people being killed a year to 60 or 70 just within the span of a couple years. And they have these arterials, b- Poplar, Union, um, trying to remember the names of them, that m- for the most part are all state-owned. So they have to work with the state on this, but it’s tough to tell the state they’re doing a bad job when the numbers aren’t great on the streets that you own, and it doesn’t look like your city is willing to do what it takes to make the streets safer that they control.

There’s wonderful things that they’ve done here and there. They’ve got some wonderful people working for the city we’ve talked to and have good relationships with, but again, it’s the scale of the solution is just dramatically smaller than the scale of the problem. We’re not gonna get there doing very small street safety projects, you know, one or two or three a year at a time.

It, the, the number’s just gonna keep going the other direction until the response matches the scale of the epidemic that’s really going on there in Memphis.

The Black population is really big, too, but no- nowhere near what the Native population is. The, so I’m curious, like, is that because of just where it’s located? You’d mentioned Albuquerque in, in New Mexico, I think is, that’s part of it. But what’s interesting to read that and be like, “Well, what’s going on?

What’s going on with that?”

You know, and you go down to the lowest census block, you know, quartile, um, and that’s where almost all the, you know, the lion’s share of these deaths are happening. Take, take Memphis, you know, for, for example. If they’re only doing, you know, three or four or five, like, really ambitious safety projects a year where they’re really, like, spending money to reconfigure an intersection or add a really complicated, expensive mid-block crossing that requires, you know, planning and engineering and some traffic studies and that sort of thing, you know, are those gonna go, all things being equal, to the part of town that has no political clout and lower incomes and people that aren’t as engaged in the process because they’re working three jobs to barely make ends meet?

You know, it’s easy to see how these things happen and how, again, where when the interventions that you need, the scale of them are enormous, and they’re not gonna happen everywhere. But the places where they’re most needed. And it makes a really good argument for, with very limited resources, trying to steer these to the places that are the most dangerous, not the places that, you know, have the people most agitating for something necessarily

very sprawly type development. In California, I was like, “Oh, California.” But then I was, looked at where it was, is, is the Bakersfields and the- Yeah, inland … the Sacramentos and inland in the Central Valley. But a lot of these places, and it kind of goes back to that comment I made about Eric’s discussion about Europe, is like cities that developed pre-war versus post-war seems like a big difference there.

And we know that places like Davis, California, which have huge, you know, numbers of people who are biking and stuff like that. And Norm Garrick and, and Wes Marshall and others have done research on looking at, you know, the crash rates and things like that for these places who have really tight street grids versus the ones who are, you know, sprawling and have the dendritic, more, uh, flowy, floral types of-

of, of systems. And so I think that’s really fascinating, too, to look at it from the geographic perspective, which is, like, that Sun Belt growth has actually led to a lot of this, uh, kind of carnage.

You know? I- is it Hoboken that hasn’t had a, you know, traffic fatality in- Yeah … in a few years, right? I think Jersey City is somewhere similar. Um-

But, like, Hoboken just, it’s wonderful what they’ve done. And it, and you absolutely can have carnage on a street grid of narrow streets. There’s plenty of places that have- Yeah … shown that that’s possible. So it’s wonderful the stuff they’ve done, daylighting their intersections and slowing speeds and all that stuff.

It’s wonderful. They absolutely should keep doing it, and places should copy them. But they don’t have a lot of six-lane, you know, arterials. They don’t have a road that has the, you know, suicide turning lane down the middle. They don’t have anywhere that’s, you know, where it’s, like, just a, a mile between safe, quote, unquote, “safe, safe crossings” where there at least might be a painted crosswalk and a, you know, a traffic light.

So yeah, it, it, it makes a huge difference. I mean, I think the thing that we don’t understand about that, it- it’s not like it’s just ’cause these places are sprawling and they’re Sun Belty and it’s kind of new growth. It’s that we, we built these roads up to a standard. Yeah. And the standards are terrible The standards are the problem.

The standards are, are what needs to change. I mean, this is a huge topic to get into. I’m sure you’ve talked to, you know, Wes and, and others about this. There, there’s tons of latitude for places to follow these standards in a way that’s a lot safer, and use their engineering judgment to design streets that are safer.

You know, you, you don’t have to have 13-foot lanes in a place when you can get away with 11-feet lanes. But they, but they do that ’cause that’s been the practice, that’s been the status quo. Like, there’s just so much inertia in that system. But there’s plenty of places within that Sun Belt and within these places that are the most dangerous where you can find success stories.

Like, you can find places that have done things different. You can find places that had a dangerous corridor that have made interventions, that have made crossings come at the expense of vehicle speeds, but it’s made a better place for people to live in and travel within, rather than just for people to travel through.

So it’s definitely true that a lot of this is in the Sun Belt and in these places that have mostly had their population boom post-1950. But a lot of that, it hasn’t just happened organically. It’s happened because we designed these things this way on purpose, and it’s not set in stone that it has to be that way.

And infrastructure changes. You know, it’s gonna look very, can look very different in those places in just 10 or 20 years, the same way that they look very different right now than they did 10 or 20 years ago.

So, or people’s land. The excess land seems to have caused people to build these really crazy wide roads because you have access to it. I know in Bakersfield where, like, where my, where my brother-in-law and my sister live, there’s, like, some super crazy wide roads that you’re never gonna need to expand it that much, and you’re never gonna carry that many cars.

It looks like they have, you know, two lanes, but it looks like it was built for a six-lane road that’s never coming. Yeah. And so that is insane, too, in terms of, like, the design of it and how the safety reflects that over time. So with, you know, housing crisis and as, as it is, like, you know, that land could be used for something else, too.

And, you know, everybody comes to DC claiming we’ve gotta repair our crumbling roads and bridges, and we’ve gotta fix everything, and then they get a whole bunch of money, and they go out and build a bunch of new stuff that all comes with, you know, 50, 75 years of, of locked in maintenance costs. They’re all liabilities.

You know, to channel my, to channel my, uh, strong towns- … um, hat, like that’s, that’s how we’ve gotta think of them. But we keep bailing places out, so they’re… To me, that’s, that’s one of the places where you can start to make a difference. Like cut off this, this spigot of just… I mean, that’s not coming from the gas tax, by the way.

That’s just coming from all taxpayers, and it’s coming from your grandkids. We’re paying for the stuff that they’re gonna have to find some way to maintain, and they just, there’s just not the money for it. So cut the spigot off for this stuff, and I think you’ll see safety improve.

That’s a really great question. I’ve never been to Provo, but they have been down at the bottom of the list for a while, haven’t they?

So in order to get those oxen turned around, you have to have a wide road, uh, which is the fable I think. I’m not sure how true it is. It could be very true or not true, but that’s the story I’ve been told.

The cues that the streets that and roads that we drive on give to us that tell us to drive fast, that tell us, “You don’t have to pay a lot of attention here even though you’re going through a place with tons of complexity and people and, you know, the most dangerous kinds of streets,” all that stuff. I think that’s the most important factor.

But- People do behave differently in different places. I do think there’s some truth to that as you look at some of these lists. And having just, if you spend any time traveling the country and, you know, going around, you’ll, you’ll… If, if you live in a place where you feel like people drive nuts, and you can visit some other places and be like, “Wow, it just seems like a little chill here.”

I don’t think it’s the thing that’s… I mean, look, we do far too much blaming victims and, um, you know, blaming drivers and making this all about behavior, and we need to enforce it all out and that kind of thing. I think the best street is a self-enforcing street that, you know, has a speed limit of 25 and was designed for 25, not 45.

You know, we, we… Last summer we had the chance to drive from DC up to Maine, and we were in Burlington, Vermont. Lovely city in the summertime, um, I think. As a, as a, as a Southerner, I don’t know if I wanna be there in January. But my kids are all city kids and they’re, you know, they’re used to looking out for themselves when they cross the street and, you know, assuming that the street they’re crossing, the light’s gonna turn red and, like, two or three people are gonna blaze through there.

You know, you don’t just look at the walk sign. You, you know, they’re, like, they’re street wise. And we were walking in downtown Burlington and, like, before we have gotten to the stop sign up the street, we could see somebody slowing down to, like… You know, it’s a crosswalk with no stop sign. They’re like, “You know, we’re gonna go ahead and stop and, you know, wave you…”

And we’re in places like that, and it was just like, what? Behavior can be a little bit different in places, and certainly in places where there’s a lot of, like, social cohesion. Too, I think, and people know each other, and maybe it hasn’t changed a lot over a period of time. I don’t, I have no idea if that’s what’s going on in a place like Provo or not, but I do think there’s something to that.

I think, I, I think in some places behavior is different. I think behavior is largely shaped by the environment, you know, around us that we give people, that we give drivers and people walking and biking and everything else. That’s the best way to keep people safe. But behavior really factors into it too.

But I would love for people in Provo to come and, and pipe up and, and let us know what they’ve got going on out there. Send us some pictures and, and video so that we can see it, ’cause their numbers are good, certainly compared to the other end of this list.

you should go out there immediately and change- Yeah … the street with cones and do some tactical urbanism, like, in that spot, and then also let people that come later in the day that didn’t see this crash happen know that something happened. Because what happens often is, like, you know, there’s a collision in the morning, it gets cleaned up, and then nobody’s none the wiser about what happened there earlier in the day.

Maybe there’s a little bit of taillight glass on the concrete or whatever. Mm-hmm. You, you’ve seen this before. Um- Yeah … but just kind of, like, letting people know that, like, there is danger out there and that, you know, there’s something to be said about alerting people to that danger. And so I’m, I’m interested in that too, is like, w- what are some of the things that we could possibly do to, like, aside from numbers on a page, aside from, like, uh, police reports, uh, or the local news telling you that something happened, like, letting people know that there are dangers in the streets, and maybe they would be more understanding or receptive if they saw it happen more often, which is when it actually happens versus, like, it being just kind of brushed over and under the rug.

Like, that, that really kinda ripples through with people when it happens. A lot of people’s cynicism about government and cynicism about whether or not anyone cares, y- you can draw it back to the… I mean, a lot of these places, uh, where these things happen are, like, it’s places where somebody’s been crying out for a crosswalk or an intersection or slower speeds or, you know, whatever it is for years and years, and it keeps happening.

And nothing, you know, uh, there’s some project that’s always five years off, been in the planning process or whatever. Um, I, I think that’s one of the most exciting things that I’ve seen in the last, especially in the last 10 years. Taking a lot of forms, tactical urbanism or quick builds or better block, whatever it is, we kinda do a, teach a model of this with local communities we’ve been doing the last few years.

But the, the urgency that people feel at the local level and their willingness, people that, I mean, may not agree about much else will all come together and rally together to make some changes in a short-term way and it, that doesn’t cost a lot of money, and you can prove th- these things and let people test them out.

Um, I was listening to Beth, our, our CEO was, you know, talking about this. And it’s, uh, it’s funny ’cause it’s something I talk about and I still do communications trainings from time to time. Change is really, really hard. When, when people face change, it produces anxiety, right? It’s the, our immediate response to anything that’s different is anxiety.

And when we get anxious, our, like, rational brains immediately shut down. Like, and we’re not ever gonna make any decisions at that point about something in a, in a rational way. So when you’re talking about a big, complicated, expensive, multi-year infrastructure project that’s gonna, you know, take away this parking lane or, you know, make some huge change, like, people are just predisposed to be really anxious about it and not be able to make a good decision about how they feel about it.

Not, at least not a rational decision. So this idea of being able to, at really low cost, design something and put something that people can react to and test and see and experience and, you know, rather than having to lean on what they might think about it if it gets built, you can instead see how they do handle it in reality.

Does this make you safer? Does it make things more dangerous? Does it slow things down or not? You’re not having a theoretical argument or discussion anymore about it. I think this is terrific, and it’s a, I think the idea of E- especially with the pedestrian deaths saying, uh, immediately rushing to the scene and saying, “Why did this happen?

How can, what can we do tomorrow to make this safer? What can we do, you know, next month, six months, a year from now? Like, what does the scope look like to make this safer?” I think that’s great. And, and the rise of people willing to do the temporary projects and now encouraged at the federal level with Safe Streets For All grants for the last few years.

I think that’s wonderful and, and hopefully that’s something that can help people see the kinds of changes that are needed, and also that they’re nothing to fear. It’s not a big deal. It’s gonna make your community a better place, a safer place for everybody that needs to use it.

We’re, we’re always talking about education. I don’t know that it’s moving the needle. We’ve had a lot of talk in the last 10 years about enforcement, you know, especially i- in the age of Black Lives Matter and, and rethinking the approaches that we’ve, you know, long leaned on and could they be different?

But the thing that we just have not talked about, that people don’t wanna ask about, which is why we do this report, is design. How does the design of the streets and roads that we use affect our behavior? We don’t wanna think of ourselves as, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re free will beings that can do whatever we want, and we’re not affected by our environment.

But the data and the research says otherwise, and how we drive and how we behave behind the wheel, it’s totally shaped by the environment around us. So, um, not necessarily a question that, uh, that you didn’t ask, but it’s really at the heart of this report. We want people talking about design and thinking about what kind of designs, what kind of changes, what kind of interventions can really move the needle in the way that we need to, to get this number down from, you know, 7,000 people a year to, to zero one day.

We, we wanna see this go away as an issue, but we have a long way to go.