dangerous by design Archives - Transportation For America

VIDEO: Pedestrian fatalities continue to rise. Here’s why.

Beth Osborne talks with a CBS reporter on the side of a wide, busy roadway as a car speeds past

In a conversation with CBS Sunday Morning, T4A’s executive director Beth Osborne explains that our roads are dangerous by design.

If you watch CBS on Sunday mornings, you might have caught our own Beth Osborne talking about dangerous street design. She was joined by John Barth, who’s working on Complete Streets implementation in Indianapolis, and Latanya Byrd, a safe streets advocate in Philadelphia.

In the clip, Beth explained why more people are being hit and killed on our nation’s roadways. She noted that vehicles have gotten bigger, and streets continue to be designed for speed over safety. As we explained in our report Dangerous by Design, the combination of speed and size leads to deadly consequences for people walking, particularly people of color.

The interview follows news from the Governors Highway Safety Association that pedestrian fatalities reached a 40-year high in 2022. But people walking aren’t the only ones who pay the costs.

“It turns out when we build things unsafe for pedestrians, we build them unsafe for everybody. There’s really nobody winning in this system,” said Beth.

A decade of prioritizing speed over safety has led to 62 percent more deaths

Dangerous by Design 2022 from Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition

Smart Growth America’s new report Dangerous by Design 2022 uses more data than ever to understand how design impacts travel behavior. The findings confirm what we’ve always known: it’s impossible to prioritize both safety and keeping cars moving quickly.

More than 6,500 people were struck and killed while walking in 2020, an average of nearly 18 per day, and a 4.5 percent increase over 2019. Today, our colleagues at Smart Growth America released their new report, Dangerous by Design 2022, to explain why. When streets are designed for vehicle speed as the top priority, pedestrians and other road users pay the price—often with their lives

And the burden isn’t shared equally. Low-income residents, older adults, and people of color are at greatest risk of being struck and killed while walking.

People of color, particularly Native and Black Americans, are more likelty ot die while walking than any other race or ethnic group.

The Covid pandemic only heightened these issues. As driving decreased, congestion evaporated and speed increased, leading to more pedestrian deaths. Yet, at the same time, the pandemic unearthed a long-dormant demand for walking across the nation, and places with safer infrastructure saw fewer deaths.

The new Dangerous by Design report underscores the nationwide need and demand for safer streets. Read the report and join the public briefing on July 28th at 3 p.m. ET with the report authors and special guests to learn more about its findings. Register here.

This edition also includes guest supplements:

The role engineering plays in dangerous design from Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns
How to design for slower speeds and safety first from NACTO
The safety impact of vehicle design from America Walks
Why safer design is the most effective enforcement solution from Fines & Fees Justice Center

How can your community get safer?

Often, decision makers will claim that road safety is their top priority. In a recent hearing, Shawn Wilson of AASHTO said state DOTs and AASHTO are committed to doing everything they can to make roads safer. Representative Peter DeFazio asked an important follow-up question: if safety is the top priority, why are state DOTs transferring federal funds for safety (in this case, Highway Safety Improvement Program/HSIP dollars) away from safety projects?

That’s a great question from Rep. DeFazio, but we’d have a more pressing follow up: This claim that “safety is the top priority” has rung out from all states, even as pedestrian fatalities skyrocketed 62 percent up to historic highs since 2009. Why should we believe them any longer? These safety programs, while valuable, are tiny compared to the massive influx of cash into conventional road-building programs creating the safety problems in the first place. Here’s what we’d like to ask: why are we asking states to solve safety with tiny safety programs? Why isn’t our entire transportation program a safety program? How will we ever succeed using a million dollars to solve a problem being created every day by a billion?

This passage in the report (p. 28) gets to the heart of why we allocate historic amounts of money to infrastructure and only see the problem getting worse:

There are plenty of examples of successful safety improvements that have reduced fatalities on specific corridors within many of these largest 100 metro areas. But these metro areas have built 70 years of dangerous roads to retrofit, and these improvements, while welcome and needed, are the exception and not the rule. For this reason it has failed to lead to meaningful reductions in deaths across metro areas, states, and the nation. And at the same time states and cities are improving safety on specific corridors or intersections, many are building new roads with all of the same old issues. We need a transformation in the entire system—the task is monumental, and the effort needs to be sustained for years at the scale of this enormous problem.

Fatalities are increasing not because money from tiny programs like HSIP is being transferred out. It’s happening because we don’t make safety the top priority for every dollar spent. That’s why it’s one of our three key priorities.

If road design that prioritizes speed leads to more traffic fatalities, the opposite is also true. Designs that encourage slower speeds make all road users safer. Unfortunately, that’s not the status quo approach, and it’s hard to get our leaders to change their ways. The new infrastructure law could address street safety needs—if your state and local leaders are willing to make safety the priority. Learn about opportunities for safety funding on our blog.

Advocates can identify street safety needs and bring them to light. Read our recent blog on identifying infrastructure needs, even in the streets we’re most used to navigating. And visit this blog post for advice on keeping local decision makers accountable.

Dangerous by Design 2022 includes 5 key recommendations to make our streets safer. Read them in the new report.

Vision Zero won’t happen without Safe Streets for All

Seattle Vision Zero sign: Look Out for Each Other

The infrastructure law created a new grant program to help communities tackle the increasing rate of roadway deaths. The Safe Streets and Roads for All program allows localities to take direct steps to improve safety for all roadway users, whether they’re setting up a Vision Zero plan or actually planning, designing, and constructing street safety improvements. Funding is available now.

Is there a particularly dangerous street near you? We and Smart Growth America want to see it. Share photos and videos of your streets on Twitter with #DangerousByDesign and/or tagging @SmartGrowthUSA. Learn more on Smart Growth America’s website.

In a recent House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing, expert witnesses and representatives alike expressed their commitment to Vision Zero as well as their concern for underserved and marginalized communities. Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) got the discussion started, and his words are worth repeating:

“While pedestrian safety impacts all Americans, the risks are not evenly distributed. According to a recent Governor’s Highway Safety Association study, Black children ages four to 15 had the highest rates of fatalities involving pedestrians as a percentage of all motor vehicle traffic fatalities.”

Up to this point, localities across the United States had to rely on their own resources or engage in long, frustrating negotiations with their state DOTs to tackle roadway safety issues with existing federal formula funds. Now, localities that want to implement Vision Zero plans have a more direct route to funding and guidance through the new Safe Streets for All (SS4A) program. Created by the infrastructure law, the SS4A program sets aside $6 billion over five years to fund studies, planning, and project construction to increase the safety of all road users and shift the paradigm in road construction to safety over speed.

The Safe Streets for All program is open for business

The USDOT has released a Notice of Funding Opportunity for local authorities, state and local governments, tribal groups, and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). Any of these entities can now apply alone or through a joint application with other entities (encouraged). Because of the historical complexities in applying for federal grants, the USDOT’s R.O.U.T.E.S. tools have been made available to support communities needing technical help with applying and processing grants, especially rural and underserved communities.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) requires a Comprehensive Action Plan (otherwise known as a Vision Zero plan) prior to funding the planning and construction of safety projects with SS4A program dollars. SS4A funding opportunities are available for applicants in varying stages of Vision Zero planning. Applicants who are starting from scratch or who require a considerable amount of work to complete an Action Plan should apply for an Action Plan Grant (or a Supplementary Action Plan Grant for plan update work). An Action Plan Grant consists of a safety analysis, equity considerations, planning structure, and other aspects that culminate in a plan to achieve the goal of Vision Zero. Likewise, applicants who are ready to build projects in their Vision Zero plan should apply for an Implementation Grant.

Type of grant	Max funding
Implementation Grant	$30 million
Action Plan Grant (localities or tribal governments)	$1 million
Action Plan Grant (MPOs)	$5 million

Drawing from the program’s $6 billion, the FHWA expects to fund hundreds of Action Plan Grants and about 100 Implementation Grants. As shown in the table above, different allotments of funding are provided for different stages of implementation (with the maximum amount of $30 million provided for Implementation Grants). If an applicant is selected for a grant through SS4A, the entity must commit to Justice40 goals including the allocation of 40 percent of funding to low-income or underserved communities.

After the application process, the FHWA will assess applications using criteria considering safety, equity, effective practices and strategies, project readiness and more.

Maximizing the potential of programs like SS4A is essential

An excavator digs a massive hole titled "Dangerous Roads $$$". On the other side of the hole, a man tries to fill the hole with a small pile of dirt (labeled "Safety Improvements $." The comic is labeled "U.S. Approach to Road Safety." — *Produced for T4America by visual artist Jean Wei. IG/@weisanboo*

While disappointing but not surprising, the majority of funding from the infrastructure law sticks to the status quo of giving states wide flexibility with their federal dollars, which many states use to widen roads, build new ones, and/or prioritize speed above safety, often perpetuating the same problems that programs like SS4A are created to solve. (Dangerous By Design 2022, an upcoming report created by the National Complete Streets Coalition and Smart Growth America, will get into some of these concerns.) For this reason, it’s vital that every dollar of the new SS4A program is maximized, helping as many communities as possible capitalize on this opportunity to create safer, more equitable roads that serve vulnerable road users. USDOT should act upon their commitment to equity within this program and prioritize projects that mitigate danger in marginalized communities, where the most vulnerable road users live and travel.

SS4A applications are due on September 15th. Transportation for America members get hands-on assistance in application to competitive grants such as the SS4A. Those interested in becoming members can inquire on our site.

Transportation for America members have access to exclusive resources that provide further detail on this topic. To view memos and other members-only resources, visit the Member Hub located at t4america.org/members. (Search “Member Hub” in your inbox for the password, or new members can reach out to chris.rall@t4america.org for login details.) Learn more about membership at t4america.org/membership.

Month of Action Week 2: Tackling our deadly streets

With Congress writing long-term transportation policy this month, we need to make sure that this bill doesn’t continue the broken status quo. This week, we need you to take action to support the Complete Streets Act.

With the Senate writing long-term transportation policy right now, our Month of Action is going full-steam ahead. Thank you if you took last week’s action to send our template reauthorization letter to your member of Congress.

For Week 2, we need you to take action to support the Complete Streets Act.

The number of people struck and killed by drivers while walking increased by 47 percent over the last decade, as our partners at Smart Growth America found in the latest edition of Dangerous by Design, to be released tomorrow. We are in the midst of an astonishing safety crisis as the United States has become—over decades of broken policy—an incredibly deadly place to walk.

But a handful of leaders in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced a bill that would finally require states and metro areas to design and build safer streets for everyone. The Complete Streets Act of 2021 is desperately needed but it will take your support—and the support of your members of Congress—to get this bill passed into law.

Keep an eye out tomorrow for Dangerous by Design 2021, Smart Growth America’s report showing how dangerous each state and the largest metro areas are for people walking.

Safety over speed week: The key to slowing traffic is street design, not speed limits

Today, as “safety over speed” week continues, we’re running a guest post from our friends at Strong Towns that uses some simple pictures to explain how street design is a far more powerful tool for slowing down traffic and prioritizing safety compared to the strategy of lowering speed limits.

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, and we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here. Follow along on @T4America this week and check back here on the blog for more related content all week long. Today’s post was written by Strong Towns and was originally posted in January of this year. We are thankful to Chuck Marohn and his Strong Towns team for letting us repost it here.

The cost of auto orientation—designing our towns and cities around the easy, fast movement of cars—is not just measured in dollars and cents. The number of U.S. traffic fatalities in 2017 topped 40,000 people. Nearly 6,000 of those people were on foot—a 25-year high. Each of those people had a unique story. Each of them had a family.

And after each high-profile crash, we all hear the same litany of advice from law enforcement and traffic safety professionals.

“Be hyper-aware of your surroundings.”

“Always obey the speed limit.”

“Speed is a factor in 30 percent of crashes.”

“Safety is a shared responsibility.”

And yet, we know that people are sometimes going to make mistakes. Even conscientious drivers make mistakes. People walking, going about their business, are going to make mistakes. No one is going to be hyper-vigilant every moment that they’re out in the world. And why should we have to?

We can’t regulate our way to safety. We must design our streets to be safe.

Two simple photos reveal what it means to design a street to be safe, versus counting on the speed limit alone to do the job. This meme was created by planner Wes Craiglow of Conway, AR, and shared on social media by the “Transportation Psychologist,” our friend, Bryan Jones. We first shared it back in 2015, but it remains timeless, so here it is again:

As Wes points out: “The meme is intended to help viewers consider how different street designs makes you feel as a driver, and ultimately affect how you behave behind the wheel. Generally speaking, as depicted by the lower photo, narrower travel lanes, shorter block lengths, and a tree canopy, all contribute to drivers traveling more slowly. Conversely, wide lanes, long block lengths, and open skies, as seen in the upper photo, communicate to drivers that higher speeds are appropriate.”

Look again at the two photos. Imagine yourself behind the wheel of a car on each street. On which street would you drive faster? On which street would you exercise more caution?

“Forgiving” design is a misnomer

The first photo looks like tens of thousands of suburban streets all over America. It’s entirely representative of something the transportation engineering profession calls “forgiving design.” The premise is simple: drivers will make occasional mistakes—veer a bit out of their lane, fail to brake quite hard enough—and if the street is wide, with high visibility in all directions, and free of immediate obstacles such as trees and fences, those mistakes won’t be catastrophic.

The problem: this street feels too forgiving to a driver. Too safe and comfortable. So drivers speed up. The engineers didn’t account for this aspect of human psychology.

This residential street is built like a four-lane highway, and so even though its legal speed limit is 20 miles per hour, it’s no surprise when somebody guns it up to 40 miles per hour or more down a street like this. It feels natural to do so. It feels safe. But it isn’t safe—because on a city street, unlike a freeway, there might be people around. People who will most likely be badly hurt or killed if a speeding driver hits them.

Read transportation engineer Jon Larsen’s explanation of why the forgiveness of slow speeds is better than the “forgiving” design of wide streets.

The paradox of street design: if it feels a bit dangerous, it’s probably safer

The second photo, on the other hand, represents the most basic, frugal approach to designing a street for slow speeds. It’s not perfect. It lacks sidewalks or bicycle facilities, which some of our readers might take issue with—and yes, many places ought to have those things.

But this “slow street” does something really profound and important. It causes drivers to slow down, whether or not there’s a posted speed limit or law enforcement is present, because of the uncertainty and sense of heightened risk.

The street is narrow. Visibility is limited—look at that front left corner of the intersection, where a red fire hydrant stands next to a white fence. The lack of visibility there is not a safety hazard: paradoxically, it’s probably the single biggest thing that promotes safety at this intersection. Because if you’re driving here, and can’t see whether a vehicle is approaching from the left, what are you going to do?

That’s right. You’re going to slow down.

Read Daniel Herriges’s article on why narrow streets can deliver a ton of benefits to our cities and towns at low cost.

Why 20 miles per hour?

If we could keep most urban traffic to 20 miles per hour or less, we could eliminate the vast majority of deaths from car crashes in our cities and towns. We wouldn’t eliminate mistakes—people, both inside and outside vehicles, are going to make them—but those mistakes would rarely be deadly.

The place for wide lanes and “forgiving design” is on a high-speed road. City streets, on the other hand, should be places for people. We know how to design streets that will slow down traffic automatically, without the need for heavy-handed enforcement, and regardless of what the speed limit sign says. We just need to do it.

Read Chuck Marohn’s article on the crucial difference between a street and a road.

Learn more about our Slow the Cars campaign. Do you like this content, and want to help us produce more like it? Become a member of the Strong Towns movement, and support Strong Towns’s work to make our streets safe, welcoming, and productive places for people.

Thanks again to Strong Towns for participating in yesterday’s Twitter chat, for letting us share their content here, and for running our post on slip lanes from earlier this week.

Safety over speed week: Slip lanes would never exist if we prioritized safety over speed

A specific design feature on our roadways is the quintessential embodiment of what happens when speed is the #1 priority and safety becomes secondary. Slip lanes, those short turning lanes at intersections that allow vehicles to turn right without slowing down, are incredibly dangerous for people walking. Yet states & cities keep building them. Why?

Slip lanes by Taras Grescoe on Twitter

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, where we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here.

Any traffic engineer or transportation official would surely tell you that safety, if not the most important consideration, is truly a core priority. But embedded deeply in our federal transportation program is another guiding principle that stands in direct opposition to safety: “Cars need to always move fast and never slow down.” Whatever the stated priorities are, this hidden prerequisite makes every other goal a nearly impossible task—especially safety.

Slip lanes on roads and streets are emblematic of what it looks like in practice to sacrifice safety on the altar of speed, where this underlying goal of “keep cars moving fast at all times” runs counter to the goal of “keep everyone safe while moving from A to B”—even if you say that safety is important. If we truly prioritize safety, as T4America is suggesting in our second principle, we would never build a slip lane on a local street again. ¹

What are slip lanes and why do they exist?

It’s important to remember that slip lanes were created to solve one specific set of problems: vehicle speed and delay.

They were borne of the simple realization by traffic engineers that cars turning right—even on a green light—can produce dreaded congestion because slowing down to a safe turning speed can delay traffic traveling straight. So to solve this one problem, they started adding lanes that allow traffic to make right turns without being required to slow or come to a stop, often accompanied with an additional lane on the approach or the exit. Whether you live in a rural, urban or suburban area, this feature isn’t hard to find: they’re a regular feature in most environments that were designed and built with federal money and guidance over the last 50 years.

Safety was always at best a secondary consideration, though it really wasn’t considered much at all for decades as traffic engineers started adding slip lanes to road projects all over the country.

Slip lanes are dangerous because they prioritize vehicle speed over the safety of everyone who needs to use the road

Slip lanes increase the distance that people have to cover to cross a street, put people into spots that are often the hardest for drivers to see, and encourage drivers not to slow down when approaching an intersection and a crosswalk—the precise moment they should be the most careful. This slip lane I saw in N. Fulton County, Georgia earlier this summer is a pretty typical design.

Traveling east on N. Hembree Road (with a speed limit of 40 mph!), if a driver is planning to turn right here and sees the green light ahead, all the design cues are directing the driver to blaze through the right turn onto Alpharetta Highway without slowing down. That driver could be hitting maximum speed right as they reach the crosswalk across the slip lane—exactly the spot where engineers have said that a pedestrian should “safely” cross this street.

I saw a woman crossing here and I was astonished to see that in the time that it took her to take just three steps from the middle of the street towards safety, a minivan goes from entirely out of the frame to just 10 feet away from her.

Because slip lanes were borne of the sole focus on avoiding vehicle delay, all efforts to make them “safer” will be limited. Safety is not why they exist. Even the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) knows they are inherently unsafe—it’s astonishing to read their guidance for making them, in their words, “less problematic”:

Intersections should be designed to accommodate safe pedestrian crossings using tight curb radii, shorter crossing distances, and other tools as described in this document. While right-turn slip lanes are generally a negative facility from the pedestrian perspective due to the emphasis on easy and fast vehicle travel, they can be designed to be less problematic.

How are slip lanes emblematic of safety losing out to the ultimate priority of speed?

Here’s an intersection in Minneapolis with slip lanes on all four sides. These don’t exist primarily to make anyone safe—safety is an add-on consideration to the primary desire to keep cars moving as fast as possible through this intersection. Those crosswalks and pedestrian “islands” that you see aren’t designed to get anyone across this street in the safest way possible, they are a half-hearted attempt to make the best of a road designed explicitly to keep cars moving quickly above all else.

Making the experience for people walking on a “negative facility…to be less problematic,” is a pretty interesting choice of words to describe a deadly design feature at a time when pedestrian fatalities are hitting numbers not seen since 1990. But we keep building them because moving vehicles quickly and without delay is the outcome we care about above all others.

What prioritizing safety over speed would look like

As we say in our second principle, local and arterial roads must be designed to put safety first. Protecting the safety of all people who use the street must be a priority reflected in the decisions we make about how to fund, design, operate, maintain, and measure the success of our roads. The next surface transportation law must make safety a priority and start to undo the damage wrought by decades of federal design guidelines and billions in federal transportation dollars.

So what would this look like in practice? This small change in Arlington, Virginia is a great example.

This is a minor collector road that runs largely through a residential neighborhood—not too far from the future home of Amazon’s second HQ. This slip lane made it possible for drivers to whiz into the neighborhood street without so much as a tap on the brakes. Look down the street and what do you see right after cars have sped through the gentle right turn? A crosswalk. That’s what it looked like back in 2009, but here’s what it looks like today:

The lanes were narrowed, the slip lane was eliminated, the right turn was converted into a sharper turn that requires drivers to slow down before turning, and the crosswalk was moved to the safest and shortest point of the intersection where pedestrians will be the most visible. ²

It’s very possible that because cars now have to slow down to turn right, that traffic occasionally slows down on the main road. There could even be a slight back up if a few people are turning right and have to yield to someone crossing the street. But this change is exactly what it looks like in practice to prioritize safety over vehicle speed or delay.

While this small change is certainly one worth celebrating, this isn’t the standard practice of state DOTs that control the lion’s share of federal transportation funds, and speed remains their number one priority—even if they have a stated commitment to safety. This project was the result of a local county making decisions on their own and with their own funds. Most states will not change their practices unless Congress gives a guiding directive that the lives of the 40,000 people who die as a result of traffic fatalities each year are more important than a few seconds of delay.

Access to safe, convenient transportation is a fundamental right. Today, most Americans are denied this right because their roads—not just their highways—are designed to move vehicles at the highest speeds possible, and roads are not designed for people walking, biking, or taking transit as a priority. Safety may be important, but it’s never the top priority when designing these streets.

Until we come to grips with the fact that moving cars fast at all times of day without delay is a goal that can’t always be squared with our other priorities—especially safety—and until we can admit that perhaps everyone is not going to be able to go fast all the time, we’ll continue building unnecessarily large and expensive roads where thousands of people are killed each year.

No more slip lanes. Because safety should be a primary goal of our transportation investments.

Competition: Which street is the most dangerously-designed?

This week, we’ll be taking a deep dive on our second principle for transportation policy: design for safety over speed. Throughout the week, send photos of streets in your area that are designed for speeds far higher than the posted speed limit or where the speed limit is way too high for the context. On Friday (Nov. 8), you’ll have a chance to vote for the worst offender.

At slow speeds, cars can mix safely with other road users. High-speed interstates remove conflicts to keep people safe. But when people and high-speed traffic mix, that’s a recipe for disaster.

There’s a difference between the speed limit posted on a road and the speed the road has been designed for. People will drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the speed limit. Wide, straight lanes with open skies, long blocks, and few traffic signals or stop signs tell drivers it’s okay to go fast. Conversely, narrower lanes, more frequent crossings, and street trees can encourage slower speeds that are more appropriate for developed areas.

Off the interstates, in areas with shops & restaurants, offices, schools, and homes, we should be designing for slower speeds—speeds that keep people walking, biking, or taking transit safe and comfortable. Too often these very streets are designed to encourage high-speed thru traffic and then we wonder why our streets are so dangerous to people walking and biking.

Send us photos of dangerous streets in your area! Email us at jenna.fortunati@t4america.org or tweet your photo(s) to @t4america and tell us a little bit about it. On Friday, we’ll poll our followers to identify the most egregious example of a street that prioritizes speed of people’s safety.

Examples of unsafe streets abound, and it’s not just suburban arterials. Take for example, Georgia Ave NW through the heart of Washington, DC. The posted speed limit is 30mph, but this four-lane, two-way road is arrow straight and drivers rarely travel at or below 30.

Within a few hundred yards of this photo there are laundromats and pharmacies, numerous bars and restaurants, homes for thousands of people, an elementary school, and a church. There’s also a metro stop and a dozen different bus stops—people walking are everywhere. Yet the design of this street clearly prioritizes the speed of car traffic over the safety of everyone else.

We want you to send us photos of streets where cars routinely drive above the speed limit (or where the posted speed limit is way too high) because the street isn’t designed to prioritize safety, or not designed appropriately for its busy context. Snap a photo this week and send them to us with a short description via twitter or email. On Friday, we’ll hold a poll on our Twitter account where you can vote for the worst offenders.

Safety over speed week: There’s one thing that almost every fatal car crash has in common

We face an epidemic of people struck and killed while walking and biking because our local streets—not just highways—are designed to move vehicles at the highest speeds possible rather than prioritizing the safety of everyone. It’s high time to stop sacrificing safety on the altar of speed with the tens of billions that the federal government spends every year. Here’s how Congress could make that happen.

Let’s start with a number: 49,340.

That’s how many people were struck and killed by cars while walking on streets all across the United States between 2008 and 2017. Almost 50,000 preventable deaths.

And yet, by and large, we call these crashes “accidents.” We still believe that these 50,000 deaths, and the deaths of almost 32,000 people every year killed inside of vehicles, are either just the cost of doing business for our transportation system, or were the product of bad behavior: distracted drivers, fatigued drivers, drunk drivers, or drivers not wearing seat belts.

There’s no doubt that distracted driving increases crash risk and should be punished. But distracted driving can’t explain all of these deaths. There’s one thing that almost every crash has in common, though: high vehicle speed.

When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking.

In 2017—the year in which pedestrian and cyclist fatalities first reached the highest level since 1990—the NTSB issued a landmark study about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, finding that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds.

It’s easy to ignore something that you don’t understand, and most policymakers don’t understand when and how high speed roads can be safe—and when they aren’t.

When are high-speed roads safe, and when are they deadly?

The only way to make a high speed roads safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets; and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. Of course, this is something we frequently do: it’s called a limited-access highway.

But we’ve tried to design for similar high speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly. Think of any suburban road lined with retail, offices, schools, and homes. Those streets—with multiple destinations along them—are designed like highways.³

Graphic from Strong Towns

Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, explains that most cyclist and pedestrian fatalities occur on these 35-50 mph arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but with all the conflict points of the slower speed streets, like slip lanes or numerous curb cuts for entrances and exits across a sidewalk.

Reducing speed is the best solution

If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

And we know exactly what speed these roads need to be designed for: 35 miles per hour, or less in many cases. But 35 should be the ceiling for these types of roads, not the floor, when it comes to design speed.

We are pursuing higher speed roadways because we have placed jobs and services far away from the homes of the people who need them. We make up for the inconvenient location of everyday necessities with higher speeds in hopes of shorter travel time, but it never works out that way. Instead, we get a lot of traffic congestion as everyone floods onto the same roads, seeking the same far-away, disconnected destinations. Even in free- flowing traffic, people save seconds or, rarely, a minute or two. And for that, we sacrifice thousands of innocent lives each year. More often than not, those killed are children, the elderly or those with lower incomes.

We need to better measure how speed contributes

Currently we only call a crash “speed related” when someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high, or if the speed of the car played a factor in the crash or fatality even if the speed was under the posted limit. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits.

It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street safe and appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds.

Congress can make protecting the safety of all people who use the street a priority by reflecting this in the decisions they make about how to fund, design, operate, maintain, and measure the success of our roads. The federal program should require designs and approaches that put safety—for everyone—first.

Many of the most dangerous states for people walking are planning for more people to die

13 Americans per day were struck and killed while walking from 2008-2017, according to a report released today by our colleagues at the National Complete Streets Coalition. Dangerous by Design 2019 also shows how some of the most dangerous states are, astonishingly, committed to making the problem even worse.

View the rankings and the full report

Download the full report.

Over the last decade (2008 through 2017, the most recent year with data available), drivers struck and killed 49,340 people walking in communities large and small across the U.S. To put that into perspective, it’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing—with no survivors—every month. During a period when fatalities for people inside vehicles went down 6 percent, pedestrian fatalities increased by 35 percent. Since the last version of Dangerous by Design was released two years ago, the problem has only gotten worse: 4 out of 5 states and major metro areas have become more dangerous for people walking.

How are states planning to tackle this problem?

More than a third of all states aren’t planning to do anything at all. 18 states—including 10 of the 20 most dangerous for people walking—planned to actually increase the number of people killed while walking or biking from 2017 to 2018.

New requirements from the Federal Highway Administration require state departments of transportation to set performance targets for traffic fatalities and serious injuries and then monitor their progress over time. Back in 2017, states had to update their safety goals for 2018, which included setting target numbers for deaths and serious injuries among people walking, biking, or using other non-motorized forms of travel.

Did states respond by setting ambitious targets and creating accompanying plans for how they’d spend their share of billions in federal transportation dollars to make their streets safer for everyone? Unfortunately, a closer look at these targets reveals just how low the bar is for safety in many states.

18 states established targets for non-motorized deaths and injuries that are higher than the number of people killed or injured in the most recent year of data reported. With billions in 2018 federal transportation dollars available to them to devote to improving safety, more than a third of all states committed to…doing what they did last year—or worse. 10 of these 18 states are among the top 20 most deadly according to Dangerous by Design 2019.

The only “acceptable” number of deaths on our roadways is zero. We can and must raise the bar by requiring states to set safety targets that reduce rather than increase the number of people killed or seriously injured while walking or biking on our streets, ultimately working toward eliminating all traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. However, to make this vision a reality, we need strong federal policy with binding enforceable requirements that hold states to higher safety standards. Dangerous by Design 2019 helps make this case.

For more information on epidemic of people struck and killed while walking and to see the full rankings of the top 20 most dangerous metro areas and states, view the full Dangerous by Design report.

This content, adapted from Dangerous by Design 2019, was co-authored and edited by T4America staff.

Introducing “Dangerous by Design 2016”

Crossposted from Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition.

Dangerous by Design 2016, released today by our colleagues at Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, takes a closer look at the alarming epidemic of pedestrian deaths, which are on the rise after years of declining.

Between 2005 and 2014, a total of 46,149 people were struck and killed by cars while walking. That averages out to about 13 people per day.

Each one of those people was a child, parent, friend, classmate, or neighbor. And these tragedies occurred across the country — in small towns and big cities, in communities on the coast and in the heartland.

The fourth edition of this report being released today again ranks the most dangerous places for people walking by a “Pedestrian Danger Index,” or PDI. It also explores who is most at risk of being struck and killed by a car while walking, including data that looks at pedestrians by age, race, ethnicity, and income.

Explore the online feature to see the full rankings of the 104 largest metro areas in the country and all 50 states, as well as interactive maps of where fatal collisions occurred.

View the data and maps

Join us for the kickoff

Interested in learning more about Dangerous by Design, and what states and metro areas are doing to combat this epidemic? The report authors and other special guests will be talking about this new research during a kickoff webinar today (Tuesday) at 1 pm EST. You are invited.

Register for the event to to learn more about the findings and to hear from the report’s authors, national transportation policy experts, and local advocates about how we can make streets safer by design.

Will Elaine Chao address pedestrian safety?

A confirmation hearing for Elaine Chao, Trump’s nominee for transportation secretary, is scheduled to take place this week, on Wednesday, January 11th on Capitol Hill. We want to make sure pedestrian safety is on her mind.

Tell the Senate Commerce Committee to ask Chao how she plans to address pedestrian safety.

As always, we welcome your reactions, questions, and ideas. Share them on Twitter at the hashtag #DangerousByDesign.

Help show just how dangerous our streets can be for people walking

This fall, our colleagues at the National Complete Streets Coalition will release Dangerous by Design 2016, a report that will again rank the nation’s most dangerous places to walk using the Pedestrian Danger Index. This year’s report will dive deep into how income, race, and place play an outsized role in how likely people are to be killed while walking. And they’re looking for your help when it comes to illustrating just how bad it can be out there.

For too many people, a walk is a deadly risk. Poorly designed streets have led to an epidemic of pedestrian fatalities, especially among people of color and in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods. More than likely, one of these dangerous streets or intersections is near you or is one you have to use every day. When T4America last released a version of this report back in 2011, we had powerful photos submitted from all over the country.

Help illustrate the hazards you face everyday by expanding upon those photos previously submitted. Send in photos of streets in your neighborhood that are “dangerous by design.” Streets like these:

Poorly designed streets like these above — often built or designed with federal dollars or guidelines — endanger pedestrians, cyclists and drivers alike. And as this latest edition of Dangerous by Design will expand upon, people of color and census tracts with below average income are disproportionately represented.

Here’s how you can help:

Send in photos via email to photos@completestreets.org.
High resolution photos are preferred for maximum quality.
Please indicate how photos are to be credited if used online or in the report.
Provide information about the photo. Where was the photo taken? Is this a street that you have to use regularly?

We want to see the missing crosswalks, missing curb ramps, and the long and dangerous treks along busy highways. We want to see every way that our current road designs have failed to provide for the safety and convenience of everyone that needs to use them. Help show just how difficult and dangerous we’ve made walking for so many people. The NCSC folks are preparing the report now, so pass them along soon!

Its National Walking Day, but too many people will have to walk unsafe streets

You may not have known it — its not the most publicized special day on the books — but today is National Walking Day. Some of you may have traded part or all of your drive or transit trip today for a walk to work. But for many, every day is walking day, and it happens on streets with dangerous or inconvenient conditions that no one should have to endure just to walk to school, their job, or the grocery store.

Last Friday, I spent some time driving around the sprawling Atlanta, Georgia metroplex photographing some well-known trouble spots for pedestrian safety. Though some improvements have been made in places, there are still so many unsafe streets, corridors and intersections for pedestrians, finding streets that are dangerous by design is about as easy as blindly putting your finger down on a map.

The Atlanta Regional Commission has helped address some of these problems through their popular and oversubscribed Livable Centers Initiative that gives metro communities small grants to help make a dangerous street safer, improve MARTA access, add new crosswalks or streetscaping, or other small improvements to the built environment that help improve quality of life for residents. And T4 America partner PEDS has had their boots on the ground for years now, working hard to make metro Atlanta more walkable. But we need far more of these kinds of efforts — and similar efforts from others in cities across the country — to make the kinds of improvements we need to save lives and end the 4,000-plus deaths that happen to people walking each year.

Many of these deaths occur simply because the design of a road just hasn’t adapted to the changing needs of all the people who use it.

Consider: at one point, Old National Highway in South Fulton County was probably a sleepy state highway through a relatively unpopulated area on ones way south out of Atlanta. Now, its teeming with retail on both sides of the street just south of Interstate 85. Add in the fact that its a relatively low-income area (read: people more likely to walk or take transit) with apartment complexes on both sides of the main highway and you’ve got a street that no longer meets the needs of everyone who uses it, and certainly not for the people who live there.

Though the first few miles away from Interstate 85 have sidewalks and there are a handful of signalized intersections with crosswalks, sidewalks soon end completely and there are many stretches where there are no safe places to cross for hundreds or thousands of feet — all in an area with MARTA bus stops on both sides of the highway. The sidewalks may end, but the walking doesn’t, as the desire paths through the grass indicate.

Of course, the most well-known road in Atlanta thats dangerous for walking and biking is certainly Buford Highway. This stretch near Clairmont Road is a whopping seven lanes across, with crosswalks often so far apart as to be merely dots on the horizon.

This corridor is lined with more affordable apartments and has also been a popular landing place for Latino and Asian immigrants for years, and many portions of the street are filled with small ethnic shops catering to the local clientele — many of whom are likely to be walking. According to the data in our map, in just the few miles from I-285 south down to 400, 20 pedestrians were killed from 1999-2009. There are stretches with no sidewalks on either side of the street and no safe crosswalks almost as far as the eye can see.

In this picture alone, not only are there no sidewalks but there are nine separate curb cuts where this man could be easily struck by a right-turning car before reaching the next safe crosswalk at the intersection.

Some key improvements have been made on Buford Highway in recent years, though, which have helped to increase safety. Thanks to recent efforts by Dekalb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation, a busy stretch of Buford Highway south of Doraville with high density of retail on both sides of the street received several new signalized intersections as well as new pedestrian-only mid-block crossings that use a special light called a HAWK signal. This is a light that stays dark until a pedestrian pushes a button, activating a light that flashes before turning red for cars. These crossings also include a refuge to shorten crossing distances and give people a safe place to wait while crossing.

And then there’s southern Cobb County, the northern Atlanta suburb where Raquel Nelson was walking when her son was killed and she found herself prosecuted after the fact. Some busy corridors have sidewalks and some don’t — though walking isn’t very pleasant next to seven lanes of traffic — and crosswalks can be interminably far apart.

This photo below bears some similarities to the conditions on the street where Raquel Nelsons son A.J. was killed, which isn’t too far from here.

Note the bus stop on the other side of the street with a Cobb County bus approaching. See a marked crosswalk anywhere? Perhaps this man is trying to catch the bus? What happens when the bus drops you off and you need to reach a destination across the street? Should we really expect people to walk half a mile out of the frame to find a safer place to cross, and then walk half a mile back?

And some streets around here just have zero accommodation for pedestrians, including a busy street that serves two major universities and the county’s biggest employer (Dobbins AFB/Lockheed) right in the center of the county.

Keep in mind that these pictures represent just one busy American metropolis — there are hundreds more cities and thousands of places with similar conditions that need urgent attention. We have a long way to go to retrofit these streets to help make them safer for everyone that needs to use them. The complete streets provision in the Senates MAP-21 bill would be a step in the right direction, as would be the flexible funding that local governments can use to help address some of these dangerous areas under the Senate bill.

With 67 percent of all pedestrian fatalities happening on federal-aid roads — many of which that were designed in this unsafe way because of federal design guidelines and standards — theres a clear role for the federal government to play in improving them.

So what would happen in our communities if we started by looking at our map of pedestrian fatalities to see where the worst trouble areas are and devoted a small slice of transportation money into small, tangible improvements like new sidewalks, new crosswalks, and new signals for making walking safer and more convenient? What if we made it a clear priority to make every day National Safe Walking Day?

Wouldn’t we be saving lives immediately? And for a small price?

Update on Raquel Nelson: petition delivered to Cobb County

UPDATE below. More than 5,200 of you signed our petition to push for freedom for the Atlanta mother who was charged in her son’s death when he was killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing a street in front of their apartment complex. Raquel Nelson is due back in court next week, but we wanted to let you know — especially those of you who signed that petition — that we were able to deliver that petition to the Cobb County Solicitor’s Office a few weeks ago.

With the help of a terrific partner group in Atlanta called PEDS, we had the petition delivered to the Solicitor’s office. Sally Flocks, the executive director, and Liz Coyle with PEDS were kind enough to take a trip out to Cobb County to deliver your names in person.

Unfortunately, Solicitor General Barry Morgan refused to take a few moments to meet with PEDS, a well-respected group in Atlanta, to accept the petition and hear a little more about the underlying problem of streets that aren’t safe for people on foot or bike.

Here is a few notable thoughts from Sally Flocks and PEDS about delivering the petition.

Solicitor General Barry Morgan’s refusal to meet with representatives of PEDS to accept the Transportation for America petition disappointed us. By meeting with us, Morgan could have learned why members of Transportation for America – as well as over 5,000 petitioners, believe Raquel Nelson should be pardoned of all charges. When we arrived in Marietta, the receptionist would not allow us to enter Morgan’s office to hand the petition to his assistant. Instead, she came to the receptionist’s desk to pick up the petition we had handed him.

On our way to the Solicitor General’s office, we drove by the Marietta [bus] Transfer Center (pictured below), where fences block access to the street for over ¼ mile. The closest signalized intersections are over a half mile apart. Victory Drive intersects South Marietta Parkway between the signalized intersections, which means it’s legal for pedestrians to cross anywhere they want. Yet “no pedestrian” signs have been installed to discourage pedestrians from crossing a high-speed five-lane street.

If I could wave a magic wand, the Solicitor General would have joined me for a bus ride to visit the location where Raquel Nelson and her family had attempted to cross the street. To catch a bus back to his office, we would have had to cross the street. Perhaps then the Solicitor General would understood why Cobb County needs to stop treating pedestrians as second class citizens.

Well said, Sally. We especially want to recognize all of you who added your names to this petition. Though we wish we could have gotten that meeting and bus ride with the Solicitor General and put your names directly in his hand, you can be sure that the calls and emails and petitions that have flooded into that office in the last few months have made a significant difference in this case, and helped to publicize the larger issues at hand nationally.

We can’t thank you enough for your support. We’ll continue to keep tabs on this story in the coming weeks.

UPDATED 10/24/11 2:30 p.m.: The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that her second trial is starting tomorrow. It also includes that apt nugget to describe her situation:

With interviews on ABC’s Good Morning America and news outlets CNN, Reuters and the BBC covering her initial trial and sentencing, Nelson became the face of public transit users and perpetual pedestrians whom a sprawling suburbia has left behind.

Photos of dangerous streets have been streaming in

After putting out the call far and wide for pictures of streets designed for speeding traffic at the expense of safe travel by people on foot or bike, we’ve been getting some great — and by great, we mean frightening and terrible — photos of inconvenient, poorly-planned, dangerous and downright hostile conditions for pedestrians.

Here is a sampling of some of what we’ve received so far.

Bladensburg-22 Originally uploaded by wtrecat to Flickr.

MD 450 just west of junction with MD 202. Very busy road with no pedestrian crossing at this spot across from El Primo international market, 5403 Annapolis Rd.

Note that this photo from Maryland just outside D.C. is taken at a Metro bus stop. And there appears to be no safe crossing immediately nearby.

Incomplete Street Originally uploaded by Boenau to Flickr.

No sidewalks? No problem!

There’s no sidewalk at all along this road. And the overgrowth forces anyone trying to walk out into the roadway. If there is a crosswalk at the light up ahead, pedestrians have to cross at least 8 lanes of traffic and a median to make it across.

Incomplete Street Originally uploaded by Boenau to Flickr.

As if walking on the goat path isn’t bad enough, rainfall drains and collects on the grass, forcing pedestrians into the street.

Just because there aren’t any sidewalks doesn’t mean that people won’t or aren’t walking. It has to be terrifying to walk on this narrow strip of grass next to 3 straight lanes of high speed traffic. And once again, if there is a crosswalk 200-400 yards down behind this pedestrian, people on foot will have to cross at least 6 lanes of traffic and a median in one light cycle.

elkton_rd3 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Submitted photo by Frank Warnock of Bike Delaware. www.bikede.org/ (Please credit photographer, not T4 America.)

Smooth, graduated turning radii like this are especially dangerous to pedestrians. Turns are engineered like this so traffic can make a right turn while only having to barely slow their speed, making it extremely hazardous for people on foot to cross from the island back to the side of the road.

IMG_6603 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Bee Caves Rd/RM 2244 west of Walsh Tarlton Lane in Austin, Texas. Roadway under TxDOT jurisdiction. Submitted photo by Joan Hudson, P.E., of the Texas Transportation Institute. (Please credit photographer, not T4 America.)

The photos we got from this supporter in Texas were all taken on roads managed by the Texas DOT. Pedestrians here have to walk in a ditch with nowhere to escape to if a car veers slightly out of the lane.

Photos like these could be taken in almost any place in the country. These conditions are far too common and much too accepted by the people who plan and design our streets and roads. Two-thirds of all pedestrian fatalities in the last 10 years occurred on roads much like these — high-speed arterials designed first and foremost for moving speeding traffic as fast as possible with little consideration for the needs or safety of people on foot or bike. Federal dollars and design guidelines have helped create these dangerous situations across the country, and the federal government shouldn’t be able to walk away and pin the problem on the states.

Simple policy changes and priorities for spending at the federal level can help save lives immediately.

We’re not finished collecting these photos — we want to see yours! When you send them in (click here for instructions), feel free to include location information as well and we’ll plot and share the location. And bonus points for photos that show people in them.

Thank you so much to the dozens of people who sent us photos or submitted them to our Flickr group. Keep it up!

Governor Cuomo signs Complete Streets legislation as New York Times surveys pedestrian safety in Orlando

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to sign Complete Streets legislation is a step forward for pedestrian safety, though a New York Times report out of Orlando yesterday illustrates how much further we have to go.

First, the New York measure — known as “Brittany’s Law” in honor of 14-year old girl struck by a car in a crosswalk on her way to school — sailed through the legislature with unanimous votes and broad-based support earlier this summer. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a T4 partner, played a pivotal role in passage of the bill, along with the New York chapter of AARP. Republican Senator Charles J. Fuschillo, chairman of the transportation committee in the upper house, was the original sponsor.

Complete streets policies aim to make new and reconstructed roadways safe and accessible for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, wheelchair users and transit riders, as well as motorists. Sadly, the status-quo for most users around the country is woefully unsafe and insufficient, perhaps nowhere more so than in Florida.

“As any pedestrian in Florida knows, walking in this car-obsessed state can be as tranquil as golfing in a lightning storm,” wrote the Times’ Lizette Alvarez yesterday, continuing:

Sidewalks are viewed as perks, not necessities. Crosswalks are disliked and dishonored. And many drivers maniacally speed up when they see someone crossing the street.

Then there are the long, ever widening arterial roads — those major thoroughfares lined with strip malls built to move cars in and out of sprawling suburbs.

New York Times photo from the story by Chip Litherland.Send us your photos of similar unsafe streets designed for speeding traffic

Alvarez, who spoke with T4 America for the piece, noted that four metropolitan areas in the state were ranked as the worst in the nation for pedestrians in our Dangerous by Design study, with Orlando at number one. And, as her reporting demonstrated, these statistics are borne out by real people everyday:

Just down the street, the same scene played out repeatedly, only pedestrians raced across the road (where there was no median) to a neighborhood supermarket. One group included a child in a stroller. The road, like so many others, was built for cars and not people.

Fortunately, Orlando officials are starting to see the situation with the urgency it demands. They are building miles of new sidewalks, putting in audible pedestrian signals and instituting measures to slow traffic. Frank Consoli, traffic operations engineer for the city of Orlando, told Alvarez the goal was “to change the culture and this thinking that is car-centric.”

But local efforts alone will not suffice. As the article points out, many roads fall under multiple jurisdictions with conflicting priorities. That’s why actions like those of Governor Cuomo and New York State legislators are crucial — to ensure the kind of uniformity and safety that pedestrians everywhere deserve.

As we pointed out in Dangerous by Design, two-thirds of the 47,700 pedestrian fatalities from 2000-2009 occurred on roads eligible for federal funds or with federal guidelines for design. Since federal transportation dollars have helped build these unsafe streets that treat pedestrians as an afterthought, the federal government must play a role in fixing the problem.

In the House, Democrat Doris Matsui of California and Republican Steve LaTourette of Ohio have introduced national complete streets legislation, and Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is sponsoring a companion piece.

Portions of the Orlando metropolitan area, incidentally, are represented in Congress by John Mica, the powerful chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Will Mica respond to the needs of his constituents by making safe and complete streets a priority in the next transportation bill?

We’re gathering pictures of unsafe conditions for pedestrians to show online and in meetings with members of Congress here in D.C. Share the conditions near you by sending in photos. Details here.

Raquel Nelson’s story may be rare, but the dangerous conditions are not — show us

Many of you were shocked by the story of Raquel Nelson, the single mom in Atlanta charged with vehicular homicide when her son was killed while crossing an unsafe street with her. While shocking, head-scratching stories like hers are thankfully rare, it’s emblematic of the road design in many places that we live, and we want to make sure that Congress gets that picture loud and clear.

We want to show them that roads like Austell Road by Raquel Nelson’s apartment — 4 lane speedways with few considerations for pedestrians — are far too common.

So send us your photos of dangerous, unsafe and poorly planned streets out there across America.

We want to see what streets look like out there for people trying to walk. We want to see the missing crosswalks, the 1/2 mile treks to the nearest crosswalk along a 50 mph highway, and dangerous roads designed for speeding traffic rather than safe walking. More than 47,000 people were killed while walking from 2000-2009, and a large majority of them occurred on roads fitting these descriptions.

A few details about how to send in photos or video:

Email: You can email photos to us at photos@t4america.org. When you send them, please let us know if we can upload these to our Flickr account (with your credit information in caption like this one.) Anywhere we use your photos, we’ll always give you credit.
Flickr: Add photos to the T4 America Flickr group, and tag them with “dangerous by design” so we’re sure to see them. If you have photos but don’t want to add them to the group, you can just add the tag “dangerous by design”. We always prefer photos licensed with Creative Commons, so we can use these photos in meetings with Congress or on the blog with credit given to the source.
Video: You can upload videos directly to our Facebook page, but Youtube or other video sharing sites are fine. Send us a link. If you send in videos directly to the email address, they need to be under 10 mb.
If you’ve got another way to show us your photos other than these, drop us a line at photos@t4america.org

Over the next few weeks we’ll highlight some of the most heinous conditions and worst design here on the blog.

Poorly designed streets — often built or designed with federal dollars — endanger pedestrians, cyclists and drivers alike. Too many people are walking in these places where they’re likely to become the next statistic because of streets that are dangerous by design. Show Congress what this looks like and help us paint a compelling picture of why we need to invest in safer streets in the next transportation bill.

Your photos will help us in our meetings with Congress and other transportation officials as we press for policies and funding in a transportation bill that will help make walking and biking safer on streets around the country.

Here are some examples of the dangerous and inconvenient conditions pedestrians face in our cities and communities every day.

The New York Times photo by Chip Litherland

New York Times photo by Chip Litherland

Sidewalk Infill_ 82nd 022 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Credit to April Bertelsen
Pedestrian Coordinator
Portland Bureau of Transportation

image003 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

(Please credit photos to Dr. Scott Crawford. Posted here with his permission)

Walking & Roads Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Credit to Stephen Lee Davis/Transportation for America

Walking in the ditch Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Photograph by Stephen Lee Davis/Transportation for America.

New York Complete Streets clears legislature, awaits Governor Cuomo’s signature

Complete streets legislation passed both the New York State Senate and Assembly unanimously this week and awaits Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signature.

Once the legislation becomes law as expected, New York State will follow in the footsteps of hundreds of other states and municipalities that have already started prioritizing the needs of all users on their roads, whether on foot, bicycle, in a wheelchair, or using a personal vehicle or public transit.

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a T4 partner in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, played a pivotal role in pushing the bill, which was sponsored in its latest iteration by Republican Senator Charles J. Fuschillo, the chairman of the chamber’s transportation committee. The New York AARP was also closely involved in securing passage.

“Everyone knew that something had to be done, so the political will was there,” the state AARP’s legislative director Bill Ferris told Streetsb log New York City.

A national complete streets policy was a key recommendation of our recent Dangerous by Design 2011 report, which documented the more than 47,700 preventable pedestrian deaths in the Untied States between 2000 and 2009. These tragic deaths are too often treated as a fact of life, when we’ve built roadways more suited to speeding traffic than people. Complete streets policies, like the one passed in New York State, make streets safer for all users, no matter their mode of transport.

As Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s executive director Kate Slevin said earlier this year, “We’ve repeatedly found that what makes a road dangerous is poor design — exactly what a state complete streets law will fix.”

The unanimity in this week’s roll call votes was impressive and significant, but did not come without some legislative maneuvering. As Jim O’Grady of WNYC described it:

Some highway superintendents complained about the cost of adding bike lanes and similar features to road projects. So the bill was changed in a late negotiation to require them in the design phase, while making their implementation optional if they’d put a project over budget. A town or county cannot be sued if it chooses not to install complete street features for budgetary reasons.

This bipartisan victory in one of the nation’s largest states should catch the attention of Congress — which has its own complete streets bills in the hopper — as members draft priorities for the next transportation bill. Tell your representative to support Complete Streets and stop preventable pedestrian deaths today.

White House launches advisory group on rural issues that includes transportation officials

President Obama signed an executive order today creating an advisory group for rural issues. The group will be tasked with developing recommendations for boosting economic growth, job opportunities and quality of life in rural communities.

The Executive Order notes that sixteen percent of the population lives in rural counties and that these areas are essential to future economic competitiveness.

“Though rural communities face numerous challenges, they also present enormous economic potential,” according to the order. “The Federal Government has an important role to play in order to expand access to the capital necessary for economic growth, promote innovation, improve access to health care and education, and expand outdoor recreational activities on public lands

Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, will serve as chairman and will be joined Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and dozens of other Cabinet and administration officials. Including these voices will ensure cross-jurisdiction solutions are considered.

The transportation challenges of rural areas are well-known, yet cannot be overstated.

More than 1.6 million rural households in America lack access to a personal vehicle, and rural areas and small towns tend to have higher concentrations of older adults and low-income families, precisely the groups that are less likely to drive or be able to afford a car. The need for increased travel options in these communities was outlined in our Dangerous by Design 2011 report, which found that while only 24 percent of Americans live in rural areas, the areas account for more than 27 percent of pedestrian fatalities.

As Congress continues its deliberations over the next transportation bill, rural transit needs have finally begun to receive more of the attention they deserve. Senator Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat who chairs the Banking Committee that oversees transit, has called for additional resources to help small providers maintain service levels. And, Representative Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee whose West Virginia district contains a number of rural counties, has said she will “certainly remain a strong voice for making roads safer for pedestrians” as the next bill is crafted.

Rural transportation needs were also the subject of recent report from the Rural Policy Research Institute, or RUPRI. You can read their full report, which includes a number of recommendations for the next transportation bill, here.

Photo courtesy of Huron County Transit.

Newspapers across the country call for increased pedestrian safety following Dangerous by Design rankings

Jackson, Mississippi Credit: Dr. Scott Crawford.

This week’s release of Dangerous by Design has prompted several newspapers to editorialize in favor of tough pedestrian safety measures that address the urgency of the 47,000 killed and 688,000 injured on unsafe streets between 2000 and 2009.

The report generated ample coverage in Florida, home to the nation’s four most dangerous metropolitan areas for pedestrians: Orlando, Tampa, Miami and Jacksonville. Statewide, 5,163 Floridians were killed between 2000 and 2009, at a cost of $22.2 billion.

The Orlando Sentinel weighed in Wednesday, warning: “If you like to walk in Florida, the bad news just keeps coming,” continuing: “What’s attractive about living in a place where it’s dangerous to even walk?”

The Sentinel also turned its attention to Florida’s elected officials who are in a position to make a difference:

Can we look to our current leadership to correct this dubious distinction? Well, U.S Rep. John Mica wants to lift the requirement that 10 percent of federal gas tax proceeds be spent on things like sidewalks and bike lanes. And Gov. Rick Scott’s new Secretary of Transportation, Ananth Prasad, recently testified before Congress that, when money’s tight, it might not make sense to build — you guessed it — sidewalks and bike trails.

(Ed. note: The Sentinel figure is too high — in fact, about 1.5 percent of total federal transportation dollars go toward making walking and biking safer.)

The Gainesville Sun reached a similar conclusion in “A death defying act: Walking across Florida’s mean streets,” saying: “Facilitating the fast movement of automobiles is a far higher priority than saving lives.”

In West Virginia, several newspapers covered the report and the Charleston Daily Mail ran an editorial titled “Protecting pedestrians should be a priority.” They wrote:

Improving safety for pedestrians is essential if the state is going to promote walking as part of any program for healthier living. Given this state’s abysmal rankings in most health categories, the issue seems worthy of government attention.

West Virginia is the home of Nick Rahall, the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, as well as key Republican Shelley Moore Capito, who this week announced her intention to fight for pedestrian safety in the next transportation bill. The state ranked 24th out of 50 in overall pedestrian danger index.

Up north, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted Pennsylvania’s relatively favorable ranking overall while imploring Mayor Michael Nutter to continue efforts toward promoting a walkable city. Philadelphia has already expanded bike lanes and instituted a Complete Streets policy.

And in Hawaii, which had the highest fatality rate among senior pedestrians, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser similarly urged renewed focus on the needs of all road users.

Failure to adopt a policy that helps seniors and all citizens use transportation without undue hazard would be a mistake, more costly in the long run and a contradiction in a state that prides itself on its year-round enjoyment of the outdoors.

You can view more state rankings on our report map here.

UPDATE: The Detroit Free Press, hailing from the cradle of the American auto industry, echoed similar themes this weekend, editorializing: “Designing walkable streets and public places is important to building healthy, livable cities that attract talented employees, innovative businesses and creative entrepreneurs.”

Also, several lawmakers responded in the wake of the report.

Lawmakers move to address pedestrian safety in the wake of Dangerous by Design

Tuesday’s release of Dangerous by Design outlining the 47,700 deaths and 688,000 injuries to people while walking on unsafe streets has renewed Congress’ focus on pedestrian safety in the next transportation bill. But what substantial steps the House and Senate will take to promote safer streets and improve conditions for walking remains very much in play.

As we point out in the report, federal dollars and/or design guidelines have contributed to the dangerous conditions on the roads where two-thirds of these people have died, so the federal government can’t now throw up their hands, pass the buck and declare the ongoing carnage “a local problem.”

Representative Shelley Moore Capito (right), a West Virginia Republican and member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told the Charleston Daily Mail that she will “certainly remain a strong voice for making roads safer to pedestrians” while crafting the transportation bill. More than 200 people were killed while walking in West Virginia from 2000 to 2009, according to the report, at a cost of $1.02 billion, and the Charleston metro area had 56 of those fatalities. The entire state ranked 24th out of 50 states in overall danger to pedestrians.

Over in the Senate, the Environmental and Public Works Committee has been drafting their part of the bill and looking for points of agreement among the top four committee members from both parties. Many T4 partners from across the country have been communicating with EPW offices for the last several weeks urging the Senate to retain dedicated funding for making walking and biking safer, a key recommendation of Dangerous by Design 2011.

Sen. Boxer released a joint statement yesterday with her fellow Committee leaders from both parties on the broad principles they’ve agreed upon for the next transportation bill. (Read T4’s official response here.)

• Funds programs at current levels to maintain and modernize our critical transportation infrastructure;
• Eliminates earmarks;
• Consolidates numerous programs to focus resources on key national goals and reduce duplicative and wasteful programs;
• Consolidates numerous programs into a more focused freight program that will improve the movement of goods;
• Creates a new section called America Fast Forward, which strengthens the TIFIA program to stretch federal dollars further than they have been stretched before; and
• Expedites project delivery without sacrificing the environment or the rights of people to be heard

Boxer told reporters she supports federal efforts and funding for walking and biking. “Certainly any mode of transportation – roads that support alternatives such as bike paths, walkways – will be included and get good attention,” she said, according to Streetsblog Capitol Hill, though negotiations continue on all aspects of the bill not included in these core principles above.

California had 6,957 pedestrian deaths from 2000 to 2009, including 2,533 in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and 938 in the Riverside-San Bernardino metro area, which made the list of the top ten most dangerous metros at #5. California ranked 16th out of all 50 states, according to the report’s Pedestrian Danger Index for states.