The US exception on roadway deaths
Country faces rising fatalities
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 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 US 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 United States, 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 United States 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 US 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.
Much of the familiar explanation for America’s road safety record lies with a transportation system primarily designed to move cars quickly, not to move people safely.
“Motor vehicles are first, highways are first, and everything else is an afterthought,” said Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board.
That culture is baked into state transportation departments that have their roots in the era of interstate highway construction (and through which most federal transportation dollars flow). The fatality trends over the past 25 years, though, aren’t simply explained by America’s history of highway development or dependence on cars.
“Other countries started to take seriously pedestrian and cyclist injuries in the 2000s — and started making that a priority in both vehicle design and street design — in a way that has never been committed to in the United States,” said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute.
Other developed countries lowered speed limits and built more protected bike lanes. They moved faster in making standard in-vehicle technology such as automatic braking systems that detect pedestrians and vehicle hoods that are less deadly to them. They designed roundabouts that reduce the danger at intersections, where fatalities disproportionately occur.