Pedestrian deaths have climbed sharply since 2009, yet transportation agencies often point to small, recent dips as proof that things are getting better. Beth Osborne, president and CEO of Smart Growth America, returns to the Strong Towns Podcast to talk about the latest Dangerous by Design report and the choices that keep making American roads so deadly. She and Chuck dig into why state-owned roads are especially dangerous, how street design shapes driver behavior, and why blaming pedestrians or waiting for automated vehicles keeps the focus away from the roads themselves. The big question is this: when will we stop treating roadway deaths as the cost of getting around and start changing the roads that make them predictable?
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. I don't know if this is an annual thing or not, but Smart Growth America and Transportation for America every year puts out a report, Dangerous by Design. It's one of, I think, the most provocative set of insights on why people continue to die on our transportation system in our roadways, and I am lucky enough to have Beth Osborne, who you just heard, two or three weeks ago on the podcast, but by popular acclaim, back on to chat about this report. Beth, you're the CEO, President of Smart Growth America.
Welcome back to the podcast.
Thank you. On my way back to my desk to do this recording, I had a staffer say, "You're on again. They don't need to hear."
Oh yes, we do.
This is review time. I need to raise that in their review.
Here's the thing, and this just goes to how dynamic you were. I feel, or you are. I feel the last time we talked about transportation finance, there's this whole side of transportation safety that we didn't even get to that Dangerous by Design delves into, and I really do. Obviously, I have a ton of respect for you, and I think your organization is the leader on transportation finance, but you're also leading on the transportation safety part, and that's what I want to delve into today and get into. So, give us the setup, Dangerous by Design, and then I've got eight pages of questions to go through over the next six hours.
Rip through.
Go for it. I am going to let you set the table on Dangerous by Design, because you do this annually. Is this a report you do once a year?
Every other year.
Every other year? Okay. It just seems we just talked about this, and maybe that is because the story does not change all that much.
It's Groundhog Day. It's the same story. I will say, between reports, we do raise the issue, so we'll do interim reports. Sometimes we'll slice and dice the data in different ways, so it's not as if it happens and there's a true two-year break, but it is meant to be every other year. It goes back to 2009, which is when we did our first one, and a lot of this report is looking at the data all the way back to 2009.
The most recent data available through the federal reporting system is 2024 data, so that's important to recognize. It's two years ago. I would love to see the feds be able to get the information out in a more timely manner, and they used to be able to do that. It started to slow down before COVID. It got worse after COVID, so now it takes a good 14 to 16 months after the end of the year for the data to be made public, organized, and made public.
The top line issue here, looking at pedestrian fatalities between 2009 and 2024, is there's been a 72% increase in pedestrian fatalities. The thing that gets under my skin, and that I think comes through in the report, is my anger at the fact that it is a slight improvement from 2021, and that is the headline I saw from a ton of papers, news outlets, and safety offices. In my presentation about Dangerous by Design, there's a graph that pretty steadily goes up in terms of fatalities, but in 2020 and 2021, it goes to record highs, and then it comes down at just the most slight level. I take that bump out and show what it looks if the line just went up, and I put it back and forth and say, if first we break records so that we can revert to the mean, we celebrate. If we didn't break that record, we would be recognizing how bad this is in this country.
One of the ways we deal with the fact that we are not making our roads safer is we break records from time to time in fatalities and then celebrate coming back down from the record, even if we aren't coming back down to where we were before. I am furious about it.
I love when you are angry, because it unleashes a side of you that I think is really helpful. Let me try to give an analogy for the people who should go and download this report. We will put a copy of it in the show notes, and the chart is very compelling. I almost feel what you're saying is we have a football team that has lost 17 games a season, five years in a row, and then they win a game. What we do in our safety offices is publish reports saying, 'Hey, wins are way up this year over the last five-year trend,' and you're saying, yeah, this team still sucks.
It is so bad. They accidentally won a game, but the trend is really bad. I'm not exaggerating.
No, you're not exaggerating, and it's an excuse to change nothing. It gives leaders an excuse to say, well, things are getting better. So, yes, we are still way above 2019 levels. We are insanely above 2009 levels. If we keep on the current improving trend.
If that slope continues out into the future, it would take us. My staffer crunched these numbers. I almost couldn't believe it.
This is 2042?
2042 before we get back to 2009 levels, and in that time, 100,000 people would have to die.
Right. 2009 was not some panacea. It was just before the big leap up.
That's right, that's right. One of my other great frustrations is the point we are trying to make is as compared to our peer countries, we are seeing a problem in increasing fatalities, while other countries are seeing their fatalities generally come down. Those who have seen a bump up, are usually starting from a very low level, they've already conquered much of this problem, but we haven't, and where we differ from other countries is not in distraction. Everyone has a cell phone, we are not unique, everyone is easily distracted. It is not in alcohol, other countries have alcohol, and people who maybe drink too much and get behind the wheel, which they shouldn't do, or walk home.
In this country, we're telling people, basically, if you're going to have two glasses of wine, you better do it at home, because you can travel nowhere without it being your fault if you get hurt. That is not how other countries behave. Where we differ is one, it is the size and weight of our vehicles, especially the fact that we're allowing vehicles to be manufactured to create blind zones in front of the vehicle, which is nuts, with some vehicle manufacturers suggesting we put a camera on the front of the car, so you have to take your eyes off the road to see the road, that is a problem. The New York Times did an excellent story on this recently, and they believe that 10% of the increase in pedestrian fatalities is due to this, but fatalities are up 72% and the other place where we differ is we do not talk about the role of roadway design in impacting behavior and in creating unsafe conditions.
Amen. Let me piece all this apart, because I feel each of these is worth digging into. I brought the family, three years ago to Italy, and we took a bus to the Amalfi Coast. If you've not been, it is these tight corners and turns, and we were on a bus, and the dude driving the bus was on Facebook the entire time.
Oh God,
He was chatting and scrolling and flipping, and my kid and I were the only ones that could see it because we were right behind the bus driver. My wife and other daughter could not, and it was crazy. That reinforced my other experiences in Italy, where I would stop at a truck stop, and there'd be all the truckers having their lunch and drinking wine and everything, and then they'd just pound an espresso and get back into the truck. When you pointed out to me the last time we had this conversation on Dangerous by Design that everybody over there is talking on their cell phone when they're driving, they're American in everything except for the cars they drive and the roads they drive them on. They're not measurably different human beings.
That was a profound insight to me. I feel like there's a narrative that comes out of the safety organizations, the federal highway transportation safety groups and others. What are they attributing their success to? They're pointing to, hey, things are getting better. When they give the explanation for why, what heroic thing have they done that has made this now become better in their eyes?
I don't think they do much of that. I've said this before. The transportation program, whether we're talking at the federal or state level, is not one based on a great deal of accountability, and when you don't need accountability, you don't have to explain why things are going poorly or well. You just celebrate that they are. Sometimes I see people say there are great programs like Safe Streets and Roads for All, but that funded a lot of plans, very few of which have been actually translated into projects, so that can't be it.
We spent remarkably more making roads less safe, so that can't be it. I don't think people connect the outcomes, and our safe systems approach allows our transportation agencies to shove responsibility away from them. They're only one piece of a five piece pie. Don't look here, focus on the other four is always what I hear, and if things are going well, they say that we're doing that better, and if things are going poorly, they say we need to do that more. It is the opposite of a Vision Zero approach.
You mentioned Italy, I was in Scotland seven or eight years ago, and we stayed on a loch that connected our home to the main town with a one-lane, two-directional road, and there were garbage trucks that would go along this way, and all kinds of people on scooters, on bikes, in cars, and the reason I'm really moved by a lot of what you point out in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, but the reason it worked is the traffic was slow, you can handle any level of conflict with slow traffic, and if you're going to have high-speed traffic, you can handle no conflict. This is the issue the United States of America does not want to face. They are going to find every way possible to say that no driver ever needs to feel like they might have been inconvenienced by having to go at slightly slower speed, and if we can do that while making things as safe as is possible, we have done safety, and that is why you mentioned Italy, and Italy had 5.3 fatalities per 100,000 people. I think 2023 is the last year there's international numbers, and the UK, where I was going on two-way, one-lane roads, it's 2.6 fatalities per 100,000 people, and in the United States, it's 14.2
So almost triple what Italy is, almost seven times what the UK
Is. Correct, we're right there with Turkmenistan.
You don't hear that very often. I want to set you up to talk about the design part of this, because Dangerous by Design. The design is such a huge aspect of the outcomes that we're getting. You point out on the report, and I think the number is 58% I got it written down here. Of fatalities are happening on state routes.
Yeah, 57% of roadway fatalities occur on state-owned roads. What is it about state-owned roads that make them particularly dangerous?
I feel you can answer this a lot better than me.
Want to, I want you to, I want you to say it in your words, because I think it always helps people to have different ways of saying similar things, and
That's fair.
Yeah, and you are an expert on this aspect of it as well, so I appreciate
That the state roads are generally highways, they're really designed with the goal in mind of moving vehicles through the corridor quickly, that is the purpose, and tagged on to that purpose is a bunch of other conflicting uses, so that's why you will see cross streets, which, if you're going to have high-speed traffic, there just shouldn't be cross streets, there shouldn't be roads or driveways, there shouldn't be crosswalks, there shouldn't be pedestrians at all, there shouldn't be on-street parking every single one of those cars is a potential conflict point and I love the way the National Association of City Transportation Officials shows graphically that as you go faster your sphere of vision shrinks you lose your peripheral vision, which means you lose your capacity to see where some strange behavior might become a conflict, might become a problem in time to stop, and when you're going fast, you need to be able to see it sooner, but because you're going fast, you can't see it at all. We have, we have generated a process where physics, the concept of Newtonian physics, prevents safety because you cannot see and stop your vehicle in time to avoid a conflict that would be deadly, because there's such a plethora of potential conflicts, and those state roads, as you coined the term, strodes are the problem, because they're putting speed and conflict together. You just can't do it. Speed can't be with conflict.
Okay, let me ask this, then, because I do feel and this maybe will drift a little bit into the policy conversations we had a couple weeks ago, it feels the state and the state DOTs have an interest here that maybe is different from what the federal government has, or somehow should be more of an advocate for safety in this whole conversation. Your Dangerous by Design report is really critical of states and says the states are where this is breaking down. What should the expectation be of state DOTs and state governments to solve this safety problem? Why are they so critical, and what is preventing them from actually doing the things that they logically should be doing here,
So I think there are a lot of things going on, and very little of it is intentional. We refer to it as cultural, but I also think it might be more broad, even than that, almost circumstantial. They were created to develop a highway system, and the job was to connect cities over vast distances. We have expanded the remit of the program, both at the state and the federal level, which means they take those tools, those approaches, and apply them inappropriately within the cities. This was connecting the cities and the towns, and now it's going through the cities and towns.
There's a lack of interest and knowledge or feeling of responsibility for the movement of people within cities and communities, except when there is traffic breakdown, when there is just too much traffic congestion, because that interferes with the movement of goods and people over longer distances. If you don't understand how people move and you don't understand the role of streets within communities, you can't engage in these conversations at all. You're not even a part of that conversation, because the only conversation you're a part of is the 1940s, even 1930s through 1990s, conversation about which communities need to be connected by wide roads, where those roads are not operating at a level that allows the number of vehicles that want to go through there to move quickly, and how you break that down. This is what I've spent my career trying to figure out, and it's a balloon. You push on one side, it balloons out on another.
We're going to have to come at it from so many different angles. There needs to be punishment for doing poorly. There needs to be incentive for doing well. There needs to be a change in modeling, in standards. All of it needs to be more scientifically based, as opposed to culturally based.
We have design manuals that are based on practice, not based on actual proven safety interventions. We need to make people feel just as afraid of being sued for building something that's unsafe as building something that deviates from a highway standard. We need to hit it from all sides, and that is very challenging because the interests that are paid by the taxpayer to deliver the result we have are paid very well by the taxpayer, and they have a lot of money to spend to make sure the taxpayer keeps giving them money, whereas those of us who are trying to get a better result for the taxpayer are generally cobbling together money to fight back.
I know your phone rings a lot with people wanting help with the state D O T coming through their town with a highway. We're redoing this highway through the middle of town. It's terrible, it's awful. Help us figure out what to do. We get those calls too, and I could point to my own city right now.
We're redoing the highway through the middle of town, and oh, we're making it, we're making it better because we're going to have some street trees.
Improvement,
Yeah, it's an improvement. We're going to have street trees, so it will look better, but they took out all the parking, they closed, three out of four intersections to make, traffic move more quickly through the middle of town. I don't think, our leaders actually understand what's being done to them, and they will when it's when it's over, but it's going to be too late at that point, I want to give you an anecdote from inside the D O T,
Okay? And
Have you respond to it as a way to maybe get to a solution? I don't think I've shared this one with you before, but I remember having these conversations with people inside the D O T, and they said, if we could just work outside of cities, our life would be so much better, because it's easy to build out there. You could build wide, you can build straight. You don't have fights over right-of-way. There's not some Yahoo showing up, going, "You're taking my parking, or, "You're, even worse, or harder to deal with for them sometimes.
Is we're building this, this highway through the middle of the city to move cars quickly, because that's our mandate, and you're worried about, the drainage that's going to wind up flowing back into your business. We don't want to have to deal with that. We've got to do public meetings, we've got to do all this engagement. I had someone tell me [email protected] can build 100 miles of roadway outside of a city, for the cost of building two inside of it, get us out of this business. I feel what your report is describing is an essential two separate practices.
Yep,
People hold up the Netherlands, or even Scotland, or Italy as ways to, okay, they separate these and do them differently. Are we just asking the wrong agency to do the wrong thing?
That's a great question. It's interesting, and I see this outside of transportation too, but you have the DOTs that will say that. I've heard that too. We don't do the transportation, the regional model. We don't, that's not our job, that's not where we focus.
Where we're not supposed to do local roads or collector roads, that if we could stay in the area where we can do the stuff we do, that would be great. Except then they'd have to give up money and power.
Yeah,
So they're not willing to do that. They don't want to do it, but they don't want anybody else to do it either, and that is the challenge we run into. I've seen this in other agencies, where I've seen FBI agents not that. Analysts get certain responsibilities, but they don't want to do the analyst job. They just don't want someone other than an agent to do the job, and I can find an example in every single agency power.
This is
Human?
Yes, yeah, but I think you're right. We are asking the wrong people to do the work, and there are two solutions. One is we take that power away and we give it to somebody else, and we have that fight. The second is we say suck it up, buttercup. It's your responsibility now.
You will own it. You will be judged by it. You will be held to a high standard, and you will get to do much less of that other thing you're used to doing. We have to pick, otherwise we're just going to keep getting substandard results, which I think we have talked ourselves into as a country, is the best we can do.
Let me drill down into that for a second, because I do feel like there's a certain. I said you do this report every year, and you're no, every other year, and I'm well, it seems the same every time. There's a certain fatalism that kind of builds in here. I wonder if the whole idea of blaming pedestrians, there's a whole meme about, you're not wearing bright colors or you were jumped out at the car, or what, have you, there's a whole culture that's been built up around now assigning blame on these things, I wonder if that's just a defense mechanism for humans at some point. If you're designing these things, you have to live with the fact that they're killing people.
I'm searching for a psychology angle here to look at this, because you and I have. Both sat with engineers, they're not inhuman, they're not sociopaths, they don't not care about what makes someone who designs a strode or a collector road or an arterial not care in the same way that someone who designs, say, the car deeply cares about what someone experiences in an accident, or someone who designs a high chair, worries about if the kid's going to fall out, or someone who designs whatever actually worries about human safety. What makes the engineer different in this case?
Well, there's a lot of things. One is the person who designs the high chair, that company might have been sued for a faulty high chair, where some kid fell out and hit their head, and was, really seriously wounded, and they did better because they felt they would be held responsible. You could say the same thing for cars. Over years, we have introduced seat belts and airbags and all kinds of things that make that vehicle safer, we have roof crush standards. That's because the auto manufacturers came up and said, what, I want to make sure that if a car flips over, that roof does not collapse, and that everyone will survive.
So, I think we should potentially jeopardize the future of this company to just do a great design. Now, the government came in and told them they had to do that, and they made everybody do it, so it was fair. That level of accountability simply does not exist here, and therefore spending the time to train people in a different way is not called for, and it's not these are super well-funded organizations, state DOTs pay their engineers very poorly. I've heard this innumerable times that states are losing their engineers after they train them up, to low-capacity, poor rural counties that can pay better than the state, so it's not this is a well-resourced agency that has infinite time and money to rethink their entire approach, unless there's a reason to. For example, the legislature says, "I'm not giving you any more money unless you.
There's some accountability for doing better, or the feds say, I'm not going to let you have federal money until you do better, or the taxpayer says I think we should cut you off until you do better. That's one big thing. The other thing is, I think we talked about this a little bit too. We don't need a field dominated by civil engineers anymore. We have built an incredibly sophisticated system.
There is a use for civil engineers and structural knowledge, but we need people who are systems engineers, more of an industrial engineer model, who can look at the system and figure out how to get more efficiency out of it. We're not bringing people into the field with that approach who understand how design impacts behavior. Right now, we actually have, features on our roadways slip lanes, where the roadway is telling you, as a driver, take a right at speed,
Accelerate through the turn. Yeah.
Yes. What's in the middle of the turn, a crosswalk, and if you hit someone, it's your fault or the person's fault, not the design's fault, and not the person who designed it, and not the person who wrote into the design manual that was okay, that level of complete lack of accountability for setting up the people who are cutting your paycheck, it's so frustrating and wrong, and what I really want to do is help taxpayers understand that they are being hung out to dry, and they shouldn't allow the finger to be pointed at them, but also for the folks educating engineers that if you understand that the wide lanes scream at people to go fast, and then it doesn't matter if you put up a speed-limit sign that says go slower, because the design is screaming at them. We could get so much further because they would understand how to communicate to people, the overwhelming majority of which want to behave well. What is safe behavior in that space? We can't get there because we are still operating under an approach that was necessary when we started laying out the highways with the best knowledge available at the time in the 1940s and there's just again no accountability to update those processes.
You've worked inside government in ways that I have not, and you've also. Been in congressional discussions and lobbied legislators, and all this, and in ways that I don't have that experience. I want to give you a parallel, and then ask you if this makes any sense. Okay. After 9/11, there was this kind of crazy rush to create the Department of Homeland Security, and the idea was, okay, there's this event, things are bad, we can look at all these dysfunctions and reforms that need to happen in the CIA and the FBI and the NSA, and what we need is a central place to do.
As an outsider, and particularly with the ability of hindsight, what I kind of read into that is the functions that we created in these other places are not fitting a modern context, and instead of reforming these places, which would be really difficult and hard and lots of resistance, we're just going to screw it, chop them off at the knees and create a new thing that's going to do something different. You're nodding, and so I feel I've maybe analyzed this. Are we at a point where in Minnesota we require, and maybe we've changed this, but I don't think so. We require the head of our department transportation to be a PE, a civil engineer. Are we just at a point where we need to look at this as infrastructure of a post war expansion era, and now transportation 911 we should pretend this happened, and we need something else, and we need to create a different system to do something different.
Is that where we've come to? You're nodding, so
I do, I do think I think that there's a very broad and potentially fun policy conversation around what are we trying to accomplish here, because until we have an affirmative vision for something different, we can't answer all those questions, we're just going to default to all of the things we needed to do to accomplish the last thing, and the last thing we had to do was to build the interstate highway. The last thing we
Decided to do? Right,
That was the last time we affirmatively said this is something we need to do, but if we were going to do something where we really talked about what is the purpose of this program, what could we do? I sat down after a really fabulous conversation I had over two days with folks, along with the Metropolitan Abundance Project in Chicago, two weeks ago, and I just wrote down all the different things I can think of that could be the federal role for transportation. You could do this at the state level, too. I don't agree with all these, maybe only some of them are what you do, but it could be what it is today, which is revenue sharing with the states, that is it, that is the federal role. We are not trying to accomplish anything but that.
It could be restricting it to maintaining the interstates, it could be having a role in a new effort building world-class transit or rail. It could be helping to fund major projects that overwhelm local or state government. It could be having a regional role, because we don't have regional governance in this country, so the state and the local aren't really the right level either. Maybe the feds come in with the tools to do real regional work. Maybe it is addressing the damage in the current system, things that need to be fixed, going and figuring out how to prioritize that, and what fixing it means, and how to identify the problems that could be reconnecting communities, that could be safety, that could be safety, drainage issues, it could be anything, and maybe it's just simply something data collection and tool development, so that people are operating with good information, because right now they do not have the information or the tools to figure out how to do better.
If we could have that conversation first, then I think it makes sense to discuss whether or not you need an engineer at the top of that. So, for example, if your goal is data collection and sharing and tool development, last thing you want is an
Engineer? Yeah, it's a really good list, because I can see value in all of those things. You and I agree on the idea that civil engineers are awesome, and they're amazing people, and they do great stuff, but, systems thinking, and the whole kind of reform of the system is not something you would necessarily give to
Them. It's not their job. The beauty of a civil engineer is, it's the concept behind the Corps of Engineers, too. It is, we can show up and make the impossible happen. We can reverse a river, we can build a bridge over anything.
We'll get the troops where they need to go. There's nothing we can't do. The question is, what should we be asking them to do? What we are doing as a nation is we are telling. Them to do something I have in my mind that I haven't quite worked out.
Now, you guess what it is, and I'll tell you if you got it wrong. That's a terrible approach. It's not right to do that to the civil engineers, and it's not the right question for them. They're the implementers. Someone needs to decide what it is we're asking them to implement, and until we do that, they are going to keep implementing the last charge they were given, which is to make the cars move fast over long distances.
When you take that and you apply it within a city that civil engineers knew this in the 30s and 40s, you will kill people, that's why they suggested limited access highways, because no sane person would allow high speeds and high conflict zones. We just went on to forget that we knew that already.
Let me go way down to the block level. I feel like an engineer would say, or someone who is in the profession who reads the Dangerous by Design report would say, okay, maybe I agree with you, and maybe I think there's a role, but I go and propose a narrower lane, get rid of those slip lanes, or slow traffic down. I'm going to do a road diet, which is one of the dumbest marketing terms there is, but we know this is the idea of right-sizing a roadway.
GLP-1 for a roadway.
It's GLP-1 for roads. I love you. It's Ozempic for roads. Let's make it all positive. We can give them Botox later, and then we'll fix them all up.
You have this in the response that they will have is, well, okay, I propose that, and then everyone gets mad at me. The city council residents get mad at me. No, they're not wrong. There's a sense of the culture gets the outcome that they deserve, or they want. How much of this is you and me are part of the 1% of people who want it to be different, and how much of this is, I do see people who, I think this is fair, want the street in front of their house to be slow and safe, but then when they get off their street, they want to be able to go fast.
What is it about us that makes this so hard at the block level?
So there are a bunch of things there. Economics say that we are not alone. Those walkable areas with slow-moving traffic are the ones that are in the most demand. So, if macroeconomics has any meaning at all, that means that's what's in demand. But from an engineer's perspective, my suggestion is twofold.
One is they need to get out of the way of those projects, because there are too many times where they're the ones that say you cannot do that, where there is political leadership asking for it, where the community is behind it, and it's the public works director. I think about your opening story in Springfield, Mass., right?
Springfield, yeah,
Yeah, that says you can't do that. So, one, yes, I understand it's frustrating when you propose something and the leaders don't get behind you, but at least don't tell them no when they say they want to do it. Two, we need to update the standards. Right now, I hear almost every place I go, no, we can't have a 10-foot lane because of the standards. What if it was different?
What if it was, no, we can't have 12-foot lanes because of the standards? That would change the conversation, and those same policymakers would turn to their constituents and say the engineering experts say we really need to have 10-foot lanes here. We're not helping anybody out in that debate. I think it is fair to hold the policymakers responsible for actually leading, and the places that have had the most success have had incredible leadership. It is also impossible to equally weigh the needs of the locality and the people passing through that area.
The last thing is, and this is my positive side, I think there's unbelievable opportunity when we try stuff out. We do not have to go argue this in theory and go straight to spending millions of dollars to change up the corridor. We can go in with tens of thousands of dollars and do some temporary changes, so the people who are passing through might find out that it doesn't actually completely ruin my trip to go five miles per hour slower than I'm used to. Then the policymakers can see that there is a way to square that circle. We don't do enough of that in transportation.
We have these theoretical arguments. Humans behave the way humans do, which is that change is scary. That is a well-formed human response. There's nothing wrong if you are a human that is formed according to the biology that got us this far in existence. It's because we were afraid of things we didn't know.
That's when you were vulnerable. That's when things went bad. So our amygdala goes off and freaks out at the concept of change, and it feels the potential loss before it feels any of the potential upside. So let's calm all that down. Let's try it.
Let's go out and figure out if a redesign might work, might not be as scary as we thought, might come with some upside, and make that more the process. I think it could calm a lot of the opposition down and give the engineers a license to experiment a bit, which is a lot more fun.
There is this tension, and you describe it in the report about safety and mobility, and you see the list of goals that transportation departments have, and safety is always one of them, and they'll even maybe sometimes say safety is our top priority, but safety is our top priority after we've met our mobility mandate. Have you seen, or are there examples, or are there ways to think about actually flipping that in a real way, where we say, okay, mobility is important after safety?
I would argue that the way we define mobility is not important at all, and it actually is not what people want, when I have explained to two normal people who do not obsess about these things all the time, how we define mobility, they think it is silly, we define it as the average speed of vehicles between one spot that they're looking at and another spot they're looking at. It is dumb. People look at that and their question is, can I reach the places I need to reach within a reasonable period of time. We don't answer that with our mobility measures. What we answer is our observed window looks pretty good, or our models tell us it will look pretty good.
What we need to do is actually measure whether or not people can get where they need to go, and the beauty of that is if we measure that, we can measure it using the technology in our smartphones, which is not even new technology, it's actually pretty damn old technology at this point. We can measure how they move by car, and we can capture if the speeding up of traffic actually makes their trip longer, because we have to send them out of their way to keep the traffic moving. You think about the highway that comes through and cuts off cross traffic or doesn't allow you to turn left, so now you have to turn right three times. That is considered a mobility improvement, even though it just reduced your mobility. If we actually looked at that, we could compare whether or not local mobility is harmed by regional mobility.
We can have a much richer conversation, and once we're actually measuring whether or not people can get where they need to go, safety becomes a primary part of that, as opposed to a, oh my god, how safe do I have to make this thing? Because the safer it is, the slower people are going to go. I think the other big thing is it brings in distance. What we have done as a country is, we've said, I'm going to put everything you need very far away, and I'm going to make up for that inconvenience by allowing you to drive fast. That doesn't actually make it convenient, it's a consolation prize, and we are begging for that consolation prize, and instead we should be telling people, I want convenience, I want those things, I need closer.
I want more groceries closer to where the people are, might mean smaller groceries, I want more mix of uses, I want transportation and land use to get out of the way those regulations and those barriers to get out of the way of the production of the housing I need in the places I need, and when the trips are shorter, the fact that you go slower on the way isn't as big of a problem, because you actually arrive more places faster or sooner.
Right. Let me ask you about automated vehicles, because I do feel like there's a whole zeitgeist of people who say, 'Yep, I hear you, Beth. I hear you, Smart Growth America. We're killing too many people. Just hold your breath.
We're going to get there. Automated vehicles are going to solve this problem.' I've been hearing this for 15 years, and you read someone like Peter Norton, who's gone back and described the 1920s and 30s. We are surrounded today by miracles of technology and things that were only imagined years ago that are now in front of us. It does seem there's some physics here, though, that I'm questioning whether we could overcome, and I wonder how you would respond to the people who are dismissive of Dangerous by Design and pedestrian fatalities because this is a problem that is going to solve itself very soon.
Yeah, I think that there can often be a failure of imagination combined with real optimism. People see in AVs whatever it is they wish would happen, and they believe that technology can save us. All we need is technology to come around, and then I don't have to make the hard choices. I think AVs will save more lives in Europe than in the United States because the way they've designed their roadways has made it easier for the computer to react to potential conflict points and stop before they become deadly, and they will probably do it better than a human in the United States. We will not get as much use from it, or any other safety intervention, as has been the case for the last 40 years.
We didn't get as big of a bump from a lot of the improvements to vehicles that we made when I was part of the Obama administration 15 years ago as other countries have. That's one thing. I also am just the sort of person who can see where problems arise. For example, when somebody steps out into traffic and makes the AV stop, and that creates a traffic problem, we're going to want to get the person who's interfering with the flow of the empty vehicles out of the way. We did that.
We invented the car at a time when the street was open to all people. People stepped in the way and got killed. That's the way it was presented. So, let's get rid of the people. We're going to do that with AVs too, because the people are going to interfere with the efficient movement of those zero-occupancy vehicles.
One thing I would really people to do is look at the testing of AVs. There are videos on YouTube, and you can see where the AV gets confused by our roadway design. People get confused by that too, by the faded line, by the lack of clarity of whether or not that's a right-hand turn lane or a parking lane. The computer gets befuddled by it, not because the computer is wrong or stupid, but because it's unclear by the design where it's supposed to be. If we're willing to fix it for the AVs, why aren't we willing to fix it for the humans?
I can see a world with a bunch of empty vehicles clogging up our roadways, so I don't see why we're willing to have that kind of zombie-vehicle future in the hopes that a computer can see conflict and stop on a dime, refuting Newtonian physics better than a human can. It's just convoluted to me, and it really screams lack of bravery in terms of standing up for the policy that you actually want.
Yeah, I always felt if automated vehicles truly were going to work, because you still have the same perception-reaction time problem as you do with a human. Part of it is you've got a perception time. If you can shorten that by having a processor do it instead of a human brain, which would be astounding because the human brain works faster than a processor, but let's say you could make the processor do it and perceive the person stepping out and all that as quickly as a human, you still have the reaction time, which is, we're going to press the brake and slow down. When you're going 50 miles an hour, physics takes a long time, because you can't brake instantly. The car has to slow down.
I always assumed that the way the automated vehicle companies would deal with this would be that they would have to drive the cars really slow. I thought that if you're in the city and the speed limit is 25 miles an hour, the automated vehicle would never exceed 25 miles an hour and would spend most of its time below that amount. I never, and I'm just naive, ever thought that you would program a Tesla to drive 40 in a 25-mile-an-hour zone. That's insane. No one would ever do that.
The liability in doing that would be crazy, and you're just going to be mowing people down, and it's not going to matter. That's exactly what has happened, and I'm really shocked by it. I don't understand it.
No accountability in this program at any level. We are setting the computer up to fail, just we've set up the humans to fail.
Yeah,
Maybe we'll feel better about blaming Google, but I think Google probably has a fleet of lawyers that will fight hard against that. I also think that the thing we need to deal with AVs, and look, I've been in so many meetings about how AVs are going to fix so many things. It's going to fix traffic, it's going to fix mobility issues, it's going to help the poor.
It will cure cancer, it will solve the Mideast peace crisis. Yeah.
Absolutely right. The fact of the matter is the OEMs have already figured out that all the money is going to be in having every single person who owns a vehicle now own their own AV, and all of those AVs are going to be out there, and what is going to make them safer is the fact that they're all going to be locked in never-ending traffic, and that is the biggest thing that works for us humans, safety-wise. Americans' best safety intervention is traffic
Stifling congestion.
It creates the safe speed that we need, and unfortunately, that's the only thing that our leaders, well, if
If there's one thing we can count on, the traffic engineering profession to deliver us consistently, it is safety through increased levels of stifling congestion. So, maybe Beth, they've just jiu-jitsued us, maybe they're two, three steps ahead of us, they're hey, we are about safety. Here's our plan.
Here's our plan. Nothing will move any place ever again.
Everybody, the report is Dangerous by Design. We will share it in the show notes, but just go to Google and type Smart Growth America, Dangerous by Design. You will get the direct download of this year's report. Give it to your city council members, give it to your local staff, let them know that they're part of the solution. Beth Osborne, President and CEO of Smart Growth America.
Thank you so much. I'm just so grateful that you're here again, chatting with me.
Well, I appreciate your elevating this. I would love for people to go look at the interactive map to see where the fatalities were, because we've mapped them out in a much more friendly way than in the past, and if you can go and look at the roadways that are inviting the danger and focus in there, you're going to, you're going to go further with any kind of conversation. It doesn't, it's not every roadway. It is a particular list, and you can dig into that. You can give that information to your city council, to your legislators, to your congressman.
I hope that everyone gets great use out of it. Thanks, as always, Chuck.
It added a bit to my Minnesota smugness. I'm not pretending, obviously, we have a lot of issues here, but then there are days when I'm oh, maybe not as bad, so
Definitely it could definitely be worse. It could definitely be worse.
Yeah. Where I'm from, Louisiana, much worse.
I know the great thing about Minnesota and road safety is that we have this thing called winter, and I try not to say this too loudly, because everyone thinks winter, oh my gosh, traffic is everything's so unsafe in the winter, but that's actually what makes it safe, because the roads are icy and slick, and everybody drives cautiously. Fatalities are way lower in the winter than in the summer, even though it is theoretically more dangerous.
Know we can't talk forever, but it's so hard to not share another story. I remember reading a Time magazine article, or maybe it was a Newsweek article decades ago, and it talked about how the stretch of interstate with the fewest crashes was in southern Louisiana, and the reason for it was the roadway was in such bad shape, people had to drive slow.
Yeah, well, I remember a study that came out during the pandemic about how Canadians were just nicer people because they took their vaccines at higher rates, and the evidence of them being nice, one of the things was they have fewer traffic crashes per mile, and I'm what are you talking about? Okay, correlation and causation. Yes, Canadians are wonderful, I love them, and maybe they are more conscientious, and are going to take vaccinations at higher rates, but my gosh, that's not why crash rates are lower. But that was a
Really good example. Again,
We
As taxpayers are giving our money over to agencies that create confusing design and designs that encourage us to do things that are dangerous. I took defensive driving. You're not supposed to drive really slow when the design is screaming to go fast, and when everybody around you is going faster. Then, when you behave in a perfectly reasonable and predictable way, and the inevitable mistake that the design sets up occurs. It's your fault.
We, as taxpayers, should not allow people to take our tax dollars, build something that sets us up to fail, and then blames us. Let's stop doing that.
Maybe someday we'll just do, a six hour live stream, and you and I can just chat forever. That would be that would be very nice, Beth. Thank you. We will talk again soon. Thanks everybody for listening.
Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.
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