Roadway deaths an American tragedy
About 1,000 people gathered on a bright morning on the National Mall the Saturday before Thanksgiving for what has become an American tradition: mourning a roadway fatality. With the Capitol in the background and the tune of an ice cream truck looping nearby, the crowd had assembled to remember Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, who was biking home from her sons’ elementary school when she was crushed by a semitruck.
Langenkamp was, improbably, the third foreign service officer at the State Department to die while walking or biking in the Washington area this year. That is more foreign service officers killed by vehicles at home than have died overseas this year, noted Langenkamp’s husband, Dan, a foreign service officer himself.
“It’s infuriating to me as a U.S. diplomat,” he told the rally in her honor, “to be a person that goes around the world bragging about our record, trying to get people to think like us — to know that we are such failures on this issue.”
That assessment has become increasingly true. The United States has diverged over the past decade from other comparably developed countries, where traffic fatalities have been falling. This American exception became even starker during the pandemic. In 2020, as car travel plummeted around the world, traffic fatalities broadly fell as well. But in the U.S., the opposite happened. Travel declined, and deaths still went up. Preliminary federal data suggests road fatalities rose again in 2021.
Safety advocates and government officials lament that so many deaths are often tolerated in the U.S. as an unavoidable cost of mass mobility. But periodically, the illogic of that toll becomes clearer: Americans die in rising numbers even when they drive less. They die in rising numbers even as roads around the world grow safer. American foreign service officers leave war zones, only to die on roads around the nation’s capital.
In 2021, nearly 43,000 people died on U.S. roads, the government estimates. And the recent rise in fatalities has been particularly pronounced among those the government classifies as most vulnerable — cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians.
“Motor vehicles are first, highways are first, and everything else is an afterthought,” said Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The pandemic made more apparent how much U.S. infrastructure contributes to dangerous conditions, in ways that can’t be easily explained by other factors.
“We are not the only country with alcohol,” said Beth Osborne, director of the advocacy group Transportation for America. “We’re not the only country with smartphones and distraction. We were not the only country impacted by the worldwide pandemic.”
Rather, she said, other countries have designed transportation systems in which human emotion and error are less likely to produce deadly results on roadways.
What the U.S. can do to change this is obvious, advocates say: like outfitting trucks with side underride guards to prevent people from being pulled underneath or narrowing the roads that cars share with bikes so that drivers intuit they should drive slower.
“We know what the problem is; we know what the solution is,” said Caron Whitaker, deputy executive director at the League of American Bicyclists. “We just don’t have the political will to do it.”