Life and Death Every Quarter Hour

By Jeffery Brubaker, AICP

"Death Every Quarter Hour: U.S. Puts Up With the Highway Hazards It Could End": The headline could have been published yesterday. In 2015, there were 35,092 traffic fatalities in the U.S., or one every 15 minutes. But it's actually from the July 7, 1958, issue of Life.

A few years ago, my fiancé, who is a history teacher, and I found ourselves flipping through old magazines in a used bookstore. It was fascinating to see how some things have changed and others have stayed the same. I ended up buying this particular issue of Life, and the article motivated me to look back at the state of transportation safety 60 years ago and highlight the progress that has been made and where it has stalled.

To view the Life magazine pictorial essay, "Death Every Quarter Hour," go to tinyurl.com/jq3bjkl. The essay starts on page 73.

The Life article's headline and subtitle are stark and fed up. The author (uncredited) doesn't hold back, and neither does the photo editor. There is a gruesome, uncensored image of a crash of "six teen-agers near Denver, Colo." who hit a pole going 90 mph. Another shows a 22-year-old visiting the grave of a three-year-old killed in a crash he caused. Monthly visits were part of his sentence.

The author laments the "appalling ... senseless commonness" of traffic fatalities, noting the discrepancy in how we respond to them versus other causes of death. Plane crashes are investigated "in minute detail." Polio is combated by "massive research programs" (the disease was in freefall thanks to Jonas Salk's vaccine). Yet traffic deaths "get only cursory attention," and drivers "do not care enough to change their driving ways."

The grim images and words were meant to capture readers' attention, but the majority of the article constructively highlights some of the embryonic traffic safety efforts under way at the time. Sixty years later, such efforts have paid off.

The long drive toward safer roads

Unfortunately, things got worse before they got better. Historically, rises in fatalities have correlated with upticks in driving. In 1958, the motorization of the postwar period was in full swing. The number of cars per person had already increased 77 percent since 1945.

From 1950 to 1975, vehicle miles traveled per capita doubled. The efforts documented in the Life article were overwhelmed by the flood of automobility. Hubris outstripped practicality. It would be an understatement to say that safety took a back seat to the freedom of the open road. It wasn't even in the car.

I mean this both figuratively and literally. Consider this description of the '57 Chevy by Earl Swift in his book, the Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways: "In a collision, the '57 didn't absorb energy; it was a battering ram a foot longer than a Hummer H3, nearly two tons of dumb metal strapped to a big-assed engine, its steering column a spear aimed at the driver's breastbone, its beltless passengers free to carom about an all-metal cabin softened only by a thin layer of paint."

It was a year before a young consumer advocate named Ralph Nader started publishing on auto safety. It wasn't until the middle of the next decade that the precursor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was formed.

Many road safety policy, planning, and engineering milestones were on the distant horizon.

How we judge the rise and fall of traffic risk since 1958 is influenced by which statistics we think are most important.

• The fatality rate per mile driven can be viewed as a traffic safety indicator.
• The fatality rate per capita can be viewed as a public health indicator.
• The raw number of fatalities is most important to initiatives such as Toward Zero Deaths and Vision Zero.

Traffic safety is complex not only because of these different perspectives, but also because there are so many contributing factors. Let's look at four themes from the Life article.

Speed

"MAD RUSH: Racing at 60 mph through blurred landscape, driver does not have time to save his — or someone else's — life in emergency. Driving too fast is a factor in 38% of all fatal accidents." — Life, 1958

Speed can be seen as one of the most elementary contributing factors in a crash, since crash severity is influenced by the kinetic energy of the collision. It was also the impetus for the first big backlash, in the early 1920s, against driving on city streets, which had always been primarily for people — walking, lingering, socializing, and buying and selling goods. As Peter Norton writes in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City: "Above all, early critics of the automobile blamed its speed."

By the 1960s, the perception of speed, at least by traffic engineers, had been inverted. It was now desirable, and the kinetic energy problem was addressed by "passive safety" design, which meant designing the road to forgive inevitable high-speed incidents. Runoff- the-road crashes could be mitigated by providing clear recovery zones, removing roadside barriers (or designing those barriers to be breakaway). The new interstates and other controlled-access highways facilitated fast speeds without the "friction" found in urban corridors. However, as Eric Dumbaugh described in a 2005 Journal of the American Planning Association article, the passive safety principle found its way to those local streets as well. That meant higher design speeds in contexts that otherwise could have been slow-flow and walkable.

Not until the 1980s and '90s did the pre-1930s view of speed as being undesirable — in certain land-use contexts, at least — become once again popular. Neighborhood traffic calming, already mature in Europe, began to blossom, following pioneer cities like Berkeley, California, and Seattle. In St. Louis, the first Schoemehl pots — large concrete planters named after the mayor who championed them — were getting plopped down at intersections in an attempt to limit cut-through traffic.

Today, many municipalities have traffic management programs. Traffic calming has evolved to achieve co-benefits like aesthetics and stormwater filtration. Trial measures and tactical urbanism allow for quick, inexpensive deployment. Manuals from the National Association of City Transportation Officials and the Institute of Transportation Engineers have advanced the state of the practice for both residential and commercial streets. However, speeding is still a contributing factor in about a third of crashes.

Safety Belts

"SEAT BELTS alone might save 5,000 lives a year and would reduce crash injuries by 60%."

By 1958, car companies had begun to offer seat belts as optional features. These and other safety features were, according to Life, "not very salable." What's more, they were two-point lap belts, with no restraint for the upper body. (Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin had just started working on designing the three-point lap-and-shoulder belt that year.)

Safety belt usage languished below 20 percent until the mid-1980s, when more and more states made it mandatory. Today, the three-point belt has made it to all seats in the car, and the cumulative efforts of enforcement and education have helped ratchet up belt use to 88 percent.

Half of all auto passengers killed in car accidents in 2014 were among those 12 percent who didn't buckle up. Nevertheless, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that safety belts now save more than 12,000 lives per year.

Drunk Driving

"TENNESSEE ROADBLOCKS: About once a week somewhere in Tennessee state troopers turn out en masse for an unannounced crackdown. They stop cars and trucks, examine licenses, look for mechanical deficiencies. They also keep an eye out for drunken drivers, who are involved in 30% of U.S. accident fatalities."

By the 1950s, drunk-driving laws were already on the books, but the invention of the breathalyzer in 1953 transformed the basis of enforcement from the subjective judgment of a police officer to a legally defensible numerical reading.

But progress didn't occur until the laws themselves evolved. The 1970s were rock bottom. Many states lowered their legal drinking age, legal blood alcohol content was higher, and the public awareness generated by anti-drunk-driving organizations was still a decade away. It wasn't as much a matter of simply prohibiting driving under the influence as it was enacting laws that suspended driver's licenses, prohibited open containers, and required ignition interlocks, among other supporting sanctions.

Nationally, traffic deaths involving alcohol impairment have dropped by about 25 percent since 2006, but the number hovers around 10,000 per year, or more than one every hour. NHTSA estimated that the direct economic cost of all alcohol-impaired-driving crashes in 2010 alone was $44 billion, about equal to the entire federal transportation budget.

Why is drinking and driving still so common? Late-night fixed route transit service, safe ride buses in college towns, taxis, and ride hailing services give plenty of alternatives, ones that should appeal to the highest-risk age cohort (16–34). Also, as millennials and empty nesters alike continue to move to walkable neighborhoods, the hope is that their favorite bars are a leisurely stroll or short bike ride away. Rural taverns and suburban restaurant-pub hybrids may be more challenging.

Walking

"PERIL AFOOT: Pedestrians are involved in nearly half the fatal auto accidents in cities. In bad weather, when drivers have a harder time than usual, pedestrians are often careless crossing streets."

Pushing pedestrians to the sidelines began on limited streets in the late 1800s to accommodate urban rail lines, but drastic change came in the 1920s, when street use by pedestrians was stigmatized and then legally restricted. This change is meticulously documented in Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic.

In the early '20s, streets were a dangerous admixture of modes. People, especially kids, weren't used to looking out for so many cars. Traffic regulations were in their infancy. Traffic control technology was trial and error, lacking uniformity. As a result, fatalities increased dramatically. "In the first four years after Armistice Day," Norton writes, "more Americans were killed in automobile accidents than had died in battle in France. This fact was widely publicized, and the news was greeted with shock. The carnage inspired a popular safety movement unlike any before."

Norton describes how, as the decade progressed, the blame for the death toll shifted from motorists to pedestrians. Campaigns popularized the term "jay walking" to shame unmindful street wanderers. Autos gained near-exclusive priority of street space, and the new profession of traffic engineering started to organize their flow.

In the middle of the century, suburbanization drew residents away from the city center and shifted commercial prominence from downtowns to shopping malls and office parks. Walking maintained its prevalence for some trip purposes. For example, in 1969, 50 percent of kids walked or biked to school, a proportion that is around 15 percent today. Compared to today, more people walked to work in 1960, when the U.S. population was only 180 million.

Today, walking makes up three percent of commutes and 11 percent of all trip purposes. Between 4,000 and 5,000 pedestrians are killed each year. The raw number is moderately lower than two decades ago, but the percentage of pedestrian fatalities as a proportion of all traffic deaths has increased from 11 to 15 percent.

Trends in U.S. Traffic Fatalities, 1955–2015

Although traffic fatality rates per capita and per motor vehicle miles traveled (right axis) have dropped in the last 60 years, the raw number of annual fatalities (left axis) continues to hover above 30,000.

Sources: NHTSA, U.S. Census Bureau.

Fortunately, the emergence in the 1990s of planning for smart growth, new urbanism, and transit- oriented development brought a revitalized focus to walkability and transit use. Compact, mixed use, and in fill development began to increase opportunities for living in places with transit access and where utilitarian walking trips are possible and desirable. Pioneering engineers joined with planners to rethink street cross-sections. The concept of complete streets countered the trend — now with 70 years of practice behind it — that streets should be designed principally for auto throughput. Development regulations increasingly required sidewalks and bike lanes on new streets. On existing streets, road diets now allow engineers to transform surplus auto capacity into multimodal elements like bike lanes, curb extensions, medians, refuge islands, and landscaping, bringing benefits like reduced speed, shorter pedestrian crossing distances, and more greenery.

The state of the practice on pedestrian safety advanced further with academic research and design guides. Federal resources, such as the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center's PEDSAFE guide (2013), described appropriate safety countermeasures for different types of site conditions. Pedestrian crossing islands, hybrid beacons (aka "HAWK signals"), and road diets are now among the Federal Highway Administration's Proven Safety Countermeasures.

One of the most important trends in the last 20 years has been Vision Zero. Its underlying principle is that no traffic deaths or serious injuries are acceptable (see "The Safest Streets," Planning, May 2015). Urban corridors are designed for low speeds to reduce impact energy, and education and enforcement play a supportive role. To date, over 20 U.S. cities, a handful of states, and the U.S. government (through its Strategic Agenda for Pedestrian and Bicycle Transportation, announced last fall) have a Vision Zero policy.

Where do we go from here?

Now that we've seen snapshots of the rollercoaster ride of traffic safety in recent American history, if we were to imitate Life, we could survey today's most promising trends. In my view, these would include Vision Zero, protected bike lanes and multiuse paths, systemic safety analysis, roundabouts, promoting increased transit use (especially as an alternative for higher-risk drivers), land-use planning that promotes location efficiency, and better enforcement of distracted driving, to name just a few.

At a minimum, we need to face the reality that, 60 years after Life's attempt at a clarion call, the U.S. still sees one traffic death every quarter hour. If planners, engineers, and other safety stakeholders work hard enough, then 60 years from now, we'll have finally outrun our past and eliminated traffic fatalities and serious injuries.

Jeffery Brubaker, AICP, is a transportation planner with the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments in California. The opinions expressed in the article are his own.