NTSB Chair After Car Crash: “There’s a Problem With That Road Design”
(Source: Flickr.)
It can be easy to look at a single car crash and say alcohol, reckless driving, or cell phone use was the cause. But when we consider the 38,000 deaths and 4.4 million serious injuries that happen every year on U.S. roads, those are numbers far too big to ignore or attribute to random driver error. Design is the problem. We’ve designed our roads in a manner that encourages speeding and discourages paying attention to people outside the vehicle, especially those on foot.
Until we take seriously the role of design and remember that every single one of those 38,000 people is a mother, a son, a grandfather, a friend, these deaths will keep happening.
Just last week, we saw an article in The Washington Post about how the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board—the very agency tasked with investigating transportation accidents and deaths—experienced her own harrowing car crash in November. Jennifer Homendy was sitting in Northern Virginia traffic when a car suddenly came barreling toward her and hit her vehicle. She experienced a concussion and bruises, but thankfully nothing worse.
Rough start this AM. Was in a line of cars stopped at a light. A RAV4 never slowed and rear-ended me at about 50 (per driver). I saw him coming and just braced. Significant damage to my vehicle. Thankful for seatbelts, airbags, safe vehicles, & @IIHS_autosafety crash tests.
— Jennifer Homendy (@JenniferHomendy) November 2, 2021
Her response to the incident is striking, though. She doesn’t call out the driver for texting or being distracted. In the Washington Post interview, she comments that after the crash, “When the tow truck operators and the police showed up, they said to me, ‘Oh, there’s a crash here every week.’ You know what that says to me? That there’s a problem with that road design.”
Homendy highlights the root of so many car crashes in America: dangerous design. She also insists that we stop accepting tens of thousands of deaths as the status quo, and the price we pay for using cars. Homendy points to the way we handle accidents in the airline industry, something her agency directly deals with: When a plane crash kills 50 people, we don’t say, “Well that’s just the cost of doing business.” We send out a massive investigation team. We look at every possible cause of the accident and figure out how to prevent it from ever happening again. This is also something we’ve talked about at Strong Towns previously (check out this video to learn more).
Compare this to the way we handle traffic deaths in America. Homendy explains, “In road safety, we tend to say, ‘Oh, it’s just all enforcement or it’s just all education.’ In aviation, we got to zero for years because we took a holistic approach. That’s what’s needed on our roads.” The “zero” she’s referring to is “zero deaths.” It’s something many people scoff at as an impossibility when it comes to car crashes, but Homendy believes “damn right it’s possible.”
How do we get there? Homendy suggests that “if there’s a high-risk area, [state and local governments] can go out and assess the area to see what is really causing all these crashes. In Bellevue, Wash., they made a small change in a traffic signal after walking the area, and it cut crashes at that intersection by 60 percent.”
For more ideas for how you can change the design of your streets to make them safer for everyone, check out our Local-Motive course “Let’s Fix a Dangerous Street in 24 Hours or Less.” The time to put a stop to traffic deaths is now—and you don’t have to be the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board to do it.
The driver was operating their vehicle entirely lawfully at this intersection in Grand Junction, CO—yet a person was nearly killed and the driver’s car was totaled. Who do we blame? (And what’s the point of assigning blame?)