Cheating death everyday
This is almost twice the percentage who fear crime and violence, and more than double the percentage of the global average of those in fear of traffic.
How fearful residents of and visitors to Alaska’s largest city, a national leader in pedestrian deaths, might be is unknown. But an American Automobile Association (AAA) survey would indicate such fears are indeed warranted in a society where the idea of driving defensively seems to have been largely replaced with a desire to drive aggressively.
And more than one in 10 of those drivers admitted to AAA that they had engaged in “violent actions such as intentionally bumping another car or confronting another driver.”
The U.S. didn’t arrive at this state of affairs by accident; it got here by design and the relentless promotion of the idea that motorists should be able to travel everywhere as if on the “open road.” Traffic engineers actively encouraged this idea by designing ever wider roads and freeways through urban areas.
Expansion maintained the “open road” idea right up until the point it didn’t, because it was also encouraging both urban and suburban sprawl, and all the people living far from their jobs soon had no choice but to travel to them by motor vehicle.
As a result, the roads filled up, and drivers once happy about how easy their long drive to work got madder and madder and madder at the delays on the road. That pretty much killed the idea of being courteous to other drivers, because being courteous might slow one down.
And getting anywhere had become a race.
Add in steady improvements in motor vehicles that made them easier to drive and ensured they did a better job of protecting their occupants and a woman’s truck became her weapon for battling through a world of enemies. Same for a man in a car.
Thus driving became a video-game experience where the goal is to win by getting to the finish first.
Multi-faceted danger
This has left roads filled up with people driving at speeds that exceed their driving skills, roaring through neighborhoods at high speeds as if no one lived there, and ignoring traffic control devices, like stop signs and stop lights, designed to help keep motor vehicles from slamming into each other because, well, they will, like speed limits, slow you down.
Some of these drivers could even be reading this. Maybe someone like the young woman tailgating me at less than a car length in the right-hand lane of the Glenn Highway northbound a couple of weeks ago. And this when she could easily have moved into the open left lane, which is what I did after realizing she was fixated on driving dangerously close to another vehicle at 68 mph.
Yes, I/we were speeding. The Glenn speed limit is technically 65 mph. But you won’t find many drivers sticking to the speed limit on this Alaska version of a freeway. Not even when it’s snowing or foggy, and the roads are dangerously slippery or visibility limited.
One might hope the red-state, Anchorage-bound drivers from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley would be smarter about weather dangers than the blue-state dingbats of California, but somehow they now regularly manage to end up in the sort of massive, multi-car pileups for which The Golden State long ago became famous.
Thankfully, deaths are relatively rare in these sorts of divided-highway smashups because all of the cars are moving in the same direction, which minimizes the force involved in the collisions. Where deaths tend to happen most often now are in urban environments where vehicles are involved in head-on collisions or t-bone collisions at intersections, and where inattentive drivers have become ever better at killing pedestrians and cyclists, whether the latter are on bicycles or motorcycles.
Since then, the numbers have flipped. About 60 percent of deaths now take place on urban roads. Part of the reason for this is that urban areas have become increasingly dangerous spaces for people not buckled into a steel superstructure and protected by air bags, although the latter group, comprised of motorists and their passengers, still represents the majority of the dead.
The Institute did, however point out how deadly urban areas have become for those noted in encased in steel. In 2024, it reported, “more than 80 percent of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths occurred in urban areas. Motorcyclists were (also) more likely to die in urban than in rural areas.”
Pedestrians and motorcyclists were, for whatever reason, those most. A reported 5,880 pedestrians – more than 18 per day – were struck down and killed on urban roads. The number of dead motorcyclists – 4,072 – wasn’t far behind.
Why pedal cyclists fared so much better is unclear. Maybe bike lanes do work at least to some degree to save lives. The number of dead pedestrians outnumbered the 858 dead pedal cyclists by nearly seven to one, with the number of dead motorcyclists outnumbering the dead pedal cyclists by about five to one.
Very few of any of them were killed in “accidents.”
Acts of God
“Accidents” are acts of God over which humans had no control. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has pegged the percentage of motor vehicle collisions and crashes that are “accidental ” at 6 percent.
It assigns 94 percent to human error, while concluding that in “about 2 percent of the crashes, the critical reason was assigned to a vehicle component’s failure or degradation, and in 2 percent of crashes, it was attributed to the environment (slick roads, weather, etc.).”
Among the estimated 2,046,000 drivers involved in the 94 percent of crashes and collisions caused by human error, the Administration reported that the problem for 41 percent of the drivers was that they weren’t focused on the road ahead due to “inattention, internal and external distractions, and inadequate surveillance.”
Another 33 percent were reported to be “driving too fast for conditions, too fast for the curve, (making) false assumption of others’ actions,” engaged in an illegal maneuver or misjudging gaps in traffic or the speed of another vehicle.
About 11 percent were said to have driving skills that limited their ability to avoid an avoidable collision, and 7 percent were literally asleep at the wheel.
Speed, of course, only compounds the danger of these human errors. Thus speed was cited as a key safety issue when the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) published three reports on the growing dangers to so-called “vulnerable road users” (VRUs) just prior to the pandemic.
Chief among 30 (NTSB) recommendations for making urban areas safer were lower speed limits and “automated speed enforcement” to put some teeth in those lower speed limits.
“The effect of speed is especially critical for pedestrians involved in motor vehicle crashes because pedestrians
lack protection,” the agency wrote in its Pedestrian Safety report. “The average risk of a pedestrian being severely injured in a motor vehicle crash is 10 percent at an impact speed of 16 mph. The risk increases to 25 percent at a vehicle speed of 23 mph, 50 percent at 31 mph, 75 percent at 39 mph, and 90 percent at 46 mph.”
What the report failed to note, but probably should have, is that lowering speed limits in traffic-busy urban areas would also save the lives of a lot of motorists, nearly 11,500 of whom died on urban roads in 2024, according to the Insurance Institute.
That works out to about 31 deaths per day or approximately one every 46 minutes. Motorists have every bit as much reason to be worried about dying on the roads of Americans today as pedestrians and cyclists of both sorts, but if the Gallup poll is right, the majority of them – 66 percent – appear to give it little thought.
It would be interesting to know what the percentage might be if the poll was limited to vulnerable road users in a country where many are express fear about walking or riding a bicycle for obvious reasons.
As the NTSB noted, “traditional (U.S.) street systems, designed for motor vehicle traffic, may not serve pedestrians well, for several highway engineering reasons:
- They may lack street design elements such as sidewalks, crosswalks, curb
extensions, and speed bumps. - They encourage high speeds.
- They have complex intersections with multiple turn lanes.
- Pedestrians have long waits at some crossings.
- Arterial roads through urban environments have wide, multiple lanes that are
difficult to cross. - Urban thoroughfares can separate neighborhoods from shopping, work, and
entertainment.
Anchorage, which set a record for pedestrian deaths in 2024 only to match it again last year, checks at least five of the six NTSB boxes defining unsafe design.. About the only one it misses is the one dealing with “complex intersections,” and that’s probably a good thing given that drivers in the state’s largest city are so bad.
Were there complex intersections, motor vehicles would likely have them blocked by collisions much of the time. As it is, they seem able to block even simple intersections.
Dimond Boulevard and Dimond Center Dr. in South Anchorage last week/Nextdoor
Ignoring the dangers
Though a sizeable number of Americans would now seem to recognize the danger built into the nation’s roads, doing anything about it is not easy.
Almost everywhere in the country, Anchorage being among the everywheres, efforts to reduce speed limits run into opposition from motorists arguing that slower speeds will inconvenience them. And speed camera enforcement brings on protests about a government invasion of privacy, although there is no privacy on a public road.
As for “road diets,” another NTSB suggestion, there is opposition from those who fear they might dent the metal on their vehicle by hitting something if lanes are narrowed or believe that converting four-lane streets to three-lane streets with a turn lane in the middle will add to traffic congestion, apparenlty unaware that what really causes traffic congestion is everyone trying to drive to the same place or places at the same time.
And there is really no solution to that problem. Ask anyone who has spent an hour or hours crawling along at 20 mph on six- to 20-lane I-5 between Seattle and Portland. It’s a reality of life in the U.S. that the wider and smoother you make roads, the more people will drive them and, as a result, any short-term gains in reducing traffic congestion disappear.
As for safety, narrowing lanes or reducing their number has been shown to cut crashes and save lives.
“Narrower streets did, they added “help promote slower driving speeds, which in turn, reduces the severity of crashes. Narrower streets have other benefits as well, including reduced crossing distances, shorter signal cycles, less stormwater, and less construction material to build.”
Those shorter signal times might have something to do with traffic flow staying the same on roads in a country where so many race to the next stoplight in order to be stopped by another red light.
The Administration’s website also added that “even the most basic road diet has benefits for pedestrians and bicyclists, regardless of whether specific facilities are provided for these modes…..The speed reductions that are associated with road diets lead to fewer and less severe crashes. The three-lane cross section also makes crossing the roadway easier for pedestrians, as they have fewer travel lanes to cross and are exposed to moving traffic for a shorter period of time.”
Lastly, it noted the “livability benefits” that can “improve the quality of life in the corridor through a combination of bicycle lanes, pedestrian improvements, and reduced speed differentials, which can improve the comfort level for all users.”
Biggest danger
Livability is not some woke nonsense to be mocked or dismissed, either. Especially not in a country where the young are so increasingly unfit that the Department of Defense frets about being able to field an army in the future.
Suffice to say, there aren’t a lot of kids running around “playing Army” in American neighborhoods as in the 1960s, because many parents are afraid to let their kids run around in the neighborhood for any reason for fear they will be run down by a motor vehicle.
This is a legitimate concern for not only children, but for everyone in a society where a significant number of drivers think it is the responsibility of pedestrians to look out for motor vehicles. When Progressive, the insurance company, surveyed drivers, it found that nearly 30 percent were so carbrained that they were unaware “that pedestrians crossing with the light have the right of way.”
When it came to unmarked crosswalks, where motorists are also legally required to yield to pedestrians in Texas as in Anchorage and many other cities, the survey found that “identification of unmarked crosswalks at an intersection remained very low in 2023 (2.2 percent), though slightly higher compared to 2022 (0.6 percent) and 2021 (1.2 percent).”
Legally, as in Texas, unmarked crosswalks exist at every road intersection in Anchorage, but any pedestrian entering one expecting a motorist to obey the law requiring he or she to yield should be prepared to die because if America has become a risky place to drive, as a third of the population fears, it has become a far, far riskier place to walk or cycle.
The result?
People walk and bicycle less and less, and partly because of this decline in lack of physical activity, Americans keep getting bigger and unhealthier. The average waist size of an American male is now pushing 41 inches, according to the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), and that of the average woman has ballooned to 38.5 inches – more than three inches more than that of the 35-inch average of a U.S. male at the start of the 1960s.
Looked at in the big picture, calming traffic to encourage more people to walk and cycle in this country would provide an even bigger health benefit than the reduction in traffic-related fatalities that kill about 40,000 per year.
Forty thousand is a big number, but the sedentary lifestyle and a lack of physical activity is now helping to lead millions of Americans toward premature deaths every year.
A brisk, 10-minute walk would do it, but most Americans don’t want to walk that far. When surveyed by the CDC, 79 percent identified at least one reason they’d rather drive if they wanted to get somewhere even 10 minutes from their home.
Most Americans, it would seem, have become so addicted to motor vehicles that they don’t care if their bodies turn into big heaps of early-decaying jello. And if all their driving discourages other Americans from trying to avoid that fate by walking or biking on occasion, so be it.
