If you were planning on going out with your friends tonight, how do you think you would get there? Most of you would answer with something to the effect of “well, I’d drive, obviously. How else would I get there?” But what if I told you that didn’t have to be the case?
                I decided to write this article because of a motor vehicle accident that happened recently in my hometown of Hartselle, Alabama. This wreck sent five people to the hospital and took the life of a 17-year-old student at Hartselle High School. One of the people who was hospitalized is a 14-year-old kid who played basketball with my brother last year. He is currently in critical condition at Children’s of Alabama, right down the street from where I live.
                I see this hospital every day as I walk to class, and I can’t help but think about the kid fighting for his life inside. It’s tragic—but even more so because it is unnecessary. And he’s not alone. Thousands of young people in the U.S. face this same fate every year because of the way we’ve built our cities. According to the CDC, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among teens in the US. Approximately 2,800 teens were killed and 227,000 injured in 2020 from motor vehicle accidents. Keep in mind that this was the year when the entire country was on lockdown, and most people didn’t go anywhere unless they had to. Most people just accept these deaths as a necessary evil, but this doesn’t have to be the case.
                In 2019, the CDC conducted a study comparing vehicle death rates in the US to those of 28 other developed nations. The study showed that the US had the highest population-based death rate among all 29 nations. This means that citizens of other nations are on average 2.3 times less likely to die from a traffic accident than in the US. This is something that needs to be addressed, and to do that one must ask “why is this the case? What do these other nations do better than the US?” The answer is two words: urban design.
                When traffic fatalities happen, the first thing most people do is blame the person who is legally at fault. While in many cases—such as drunk driving—that blame is justified, it misses the broader systemic issue. Most streets in the US are designed with speed and traffic flow as top priorities, and safety as an afterthought. This kind of design doesn’t work because humans inevitably make mistakes, and on these roads, those mistakes often turn fatal. Urbanist youtuber Flurfdesign explains this concept very well in his video “Road Safety is NOT Your Responsibility.”
                This is not the case in most of the other nations because almost all of them have good public transit, not just as an alternative to driving, but as the norm. Take Japan for example. They have the Shinkansen, a high-speed train network that is the main method of transportation used for inter-city travel within the country. Japan’s cities also have world-class local public transit networks, with Tokyo’s being considered by some to be the best in the world. The US on the other hand has the Interstate Highway system, a network of highways where cars drive at 75 miles per hour just a few feet away from each other. These highways are not only used for inter-city travel, but for travel within cities as well. Highways cut through most of the major cities in the US, many times reaching six, seven, or eight lanes in each direction. This not only causes more traffic because of a phenomenon known as induced demand, it is also wildly unsafe. This would be one thing if this were an option people could avoid, but for most Americans, driving is the only way to get around. This is called car-dependency which is defined as “a community, lifestyle, or place where a private car is essential for daily mobility and access to essential services, jobs, and social activities because alternative transportation options like public transit, walking, or cycling are inadequate, inaccessible, or unsafe.” This is how most of the US is built, and it is the reason we are #1 in traffic fatalities. If we want to fix this public health crisis, the answer isn’t to decrease speed limits or enforce rules more strictly, it is to address the underlying problem: the unsafe design of the nation. If we want fewer families grieving and fewer kids in hospital beds, we must stop designing cities for cars and start designing them for people—through transit, safe streets, and walkable neighborhoods.