What is a Stroad? (with COVID Highway Safety Notes

Reports, announcements, statistics from NHTSA, NTSB, FHWA, IIHS, and others related to Highway Safety
MSI
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What is a Stroad? (with COVID Highway Safety Notes

Post by MSI »

Saw this in a recent article, thought might as well post up
  • What is a stroad? One type of roadway that’s especially dangerous is what Charles Marohn, a municipal engineer and urban planner, calls a “stroad”: places that try to be both a street, with access to shopping and leisure, and a road, where drivers move from place to place at high speeds, but do neither well.
The article was from Vox:
In which they include:
  • Cars killed 42,060 people in 2020, up from 39,107 in 2019, according to a preliminary estimate from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating preventable deaths. (NSC’s numbers are typically higher than those reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) because the NSC includes car deaths in private spaces like driveways and parking lots, and it counts deaths that occur up to a year after a crash.)
  • That increase occurred even as the number of miles traveled by car decreased by 13 percent from the previous year. It was the biggest single-year spike in the US car fatality rate in nearly a century, and 2021 is on pace to be even worse.
  • In a recent report on car fatality rates in OECD nations, the US ranked among the worst. Most of America’s peers have shown a clear downward trend in car fatalities over the past two decades: Belgium, France, Spain, and the Czech Republic all had per capita car death rates comparable to the US in 2000 and have since more than halved them. America’s fatality rate has decreased, too, over the same period but not by nearly as much, and it’s started to show signs of ticking back up in the past decade.
  • And like so many other major causes of mortality, people of color are disproportionately affected. Cars last year killed 23 percent more Black Americans and 11 percent more Native Americans than they did in 2019 (compared to a 4 percent increase for white Americans).
  • Cars killed 6,205 people walking in 2019, an increase of 51 percent from 4,109 in 2009, according to the NHTSA. (The National Safety Council estimates a higher number, 7,700 pedestrians killed in 2019.)
  • Worldwide, the car death rate is even higher than in the US, and it’s especially bad in the Global South. Cars kill 1.3 million people worldwide every year, more than murders and suicides combined, and most victims are pedestrians, bikers, and motorcyclists — not car passengers, who tend to be wealthier
  • How to bring down car deaths: Controlling speeds on roads is the most important goal of any car safety strategy.