Cruising Down the Street

In the United States, there are numerous forms of violence ranging from the opioid crisis, shootings, and terrorist attacks and people are always looking into how decrease and in the end stop all of those and many more dangerous events. Whenever it comes to car accidents many Americans turn their heads and have accepted it as something that is a natural part of life. In America almost 40,000 people die each year in car accidents and the number keeps increasing. Society needs to address this problem before it gets even worse, and there is a myriad of ways to decrease and possibly eliminate car accidents and their tens of thousands of fatalities. There is focusing on pedestrians, altering and fixing roads, incentivizing safer driving practices, and the list goes on. We must take these steps to make the world a safer place for pedestrians and drivers alike.

We live in a car centered, dependent society which means we value the convenience a car can give us instead of valuing our fellow citizens. According to an estimate by the National Safety Council, pedestrians accounted for 7,700 deaths (19.6%) related to car accidents in 2019. Though everybody is affected by this it disproportionally affects Black and Brown people as they are more likely to not have a car and live in areas that are dangerous for pedestrians to walk. To solve the issue of people who are simply walking in their communities and dying because of car accidents, we need to adopt a pedestrian first mentality. Putting pedestrians first looks like what some European countries are doing which is implementing car free zones and making sidewalks continuous throughout intersections. According to an Institute for Transportation & Development Policy article, their program intitled Pedestrians First wants to see cities built for babies, toddlers, and their care givers. Cities where everything is within walking distance and has children’s safety in mind as the believe that if it is safe for children then it is safe for the rest of the community including the elderly and those physically impaired. This would include placing more sidewalks along streets and roads, creating more walkways and crosswalks, and altering roads.

As conversation about infrastructure is always in the air, the condition of our roads is of concern when it comes to safety. However, we never seem to question why our roads function the way that they do. The way that most of the roads in the United States operate are not safe for anyone essentially as they were built with speed, instead of safety, in mind. If we were to design our roads differently and effectively then there would be a significant decrease in crashes. We can do what is transportation planners call a ‘Road Diet’ where we minimize the number of lanes, create a lane for left hand turns, and add bike lanes. The Road Diet adds complexity to the roads, so people must be more cautious when driving. More components of a Road Diet include adding roundabouts to more rural areas, narrowing lanes, adding curves, and making it easier for pedestrians to cross the street. This benefits everybody as it creates safer conditions for driving, biking, and walking. Although Road Diets could help mediate a lot of our issues, it is often hard to create those changes as the federal government has made little to no effort to make the states change as the federal government continue to send money to the states. Though things are subject to change it is not reasonable to wait for it, we must make change on our own until the people in power care about the safety of their citizens. We must change the way we function to create safer driving conditions and decrease the number of car accidents, fatal and non-fatal.

There are many ways to change how we drive on roads to be safe; one would be lowering the speed limit in conjunction with having traffic cameras to ensure that people are following the rules. This should incentivize people to drive slower and follow the speed limit. However, growing up in Baltimore City where there are numerous traffic cameras in most neighborhoods, I still see people speed daily. This is why I said that we need to change the way that we function in order to create safer driving conditions and to decrease the amount of car accidents. People must learn how to respect one another, if we were to respect each other then there would not be an issue when it comes to driving. People would think twice about driving over the speed limit as they would be concerned for others safety as well. They would not drive distracted since they know it would be a danger to other people. Teaching people respect starts in the home and at school, we learn through interactions. Though miniscule, this step could create the most change not only when it comes to driving but in society as a whole.

Car accidents and the fatalities that follow can no longer be ignored, we must change a lot about our roads and ourselves to make them obsolete. It may be a time-consuming task, but it is what we should do to honor the lives lost from car accidents. We can change the laws and incentivize people to follow them, we can alter the roads, and we can teach people to respect one another. It takes hard work and will to get things done and as Americans we can do it, we can make the change.

Works Cited

Bolotnikova, Marina. “America’s Car Crash Epidemic.” Vox, Vox, 19 Sept. 2021, https://www.vox.com/22675358/us-car-deaths-year-traffic-covid-pandemic.

“Car Accidents Cause Death, Injury and Trauma. Why Do We Shrug Them off? .” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 24 Oct. 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/car-accidents-cause-death-injury-trauma-why-do-we-shrug-ncna1282193.

Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. “Pedestrians First.” Pedestrians First, https://pedestriansfirst.itdp.org/about.

“Introduction.” Injury Facts, 19 Apr. 2021, https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/introduction/.

“Pedestrians First: A Tool for Walkable Cities.” Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, 14 Oct. 2020, https://www.itdp.org/2018/02/07/pedestrians-first-walkability-tool/.