Seattle, Portland, SF enshittified their roads, limited the traffic speed, choked the streets with bike lanes, drank all the KoolAid.
Yet the deaths _increased_.
So now you have a road where the speed limit used to be 35, but is large and straight enough to comfortably go 45, with a speed limit of 25. That causes people to go wildly different speeds and (in my opinion) makes it a lot more dangerous.
As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
My city has been doing traffic calming projects where they redesign the road for the speed they want people to drive at and that has actually worked well.
All lowering the speed limit does is make it easier for cops to harass poor people, it doesn’t actually change the way people drive.
If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential. You're blaming the rule followers, when in fact it is the people with the patience of a toddler causing the speed differential.
Driving is, in most cases, the only life-and-death activity you undertake during your day, and if you don't have the emotional capacity to handle not being where you want instantly, you don't have the emotional capacity to handle a machine that can kill other people.
Your own article has a chart with the number of deaths by year, and the noisy upward trend from 2016 is pretty clear. But I admit that I did not check the data for 2025 before I wrote my post.
So my post can be amended to: "Increased or stayed the same". There is definitely no _decrease_ compared to the previous state.
Narrowing lanes creates new hazards because cars sold are only getting larger and can barely fit. There is too often no margin for error.
There are no roadworthiness inspections in these states. Many people are driving on worn tires and suspensions. Most people don't even know what types of tires they have or what the tire pressures are.
Don't even get me started on how easy it is to get a driver's license with no clue how to drive. If they wanted to reduce deaths they should start by raising the bar on license difficulty.
The article talks about using design and engineering out of the problem. I do not believe that is what was done in the cities you cite, even if that was their headline intention.
I'd love for my city to just focus on making other forms of transportation more appealing. More bus lanes, more (properly designed) bike lanes, etc.
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
I wrote a blog post about my learnings there - "Engineering over enforcement":
> Enforcement philosophy is rooted in the idea that behavior can be controlled by threatening punishments. Engineering philosophy believes that infrastructure can be designed to incentivize desired behavior. When Oslo sought to reduce pedestrian deaths, it turned to engineers.
> [ . . .] Intersections are one small example where philosophies can diverge. But, as I learned in Oslo, engineers have a whole toolkit of methods to make cities safer. Bumping out a curb slows down turning speeds and protects pedestrians. Bike lanes can be safer by being raised above the street instead of relying on a painted barrier. Limiting how far cars can see ahead of them slows them down. Behavior can be designed rather than just enforced, and in aggregate these small changes can make a city safer.
Alternatively, greenhouse-gas bumps.
Dunno which genius in my town put them on a road riddled with potholes, poorly filled road cuts and marsh-related unevenness.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
The reasons for that are not clear, and urbanists obviously are afraid to investigate it. For fear of being branded "car-brain" and denied the cushy positions. I have a suspicion that in the US the destruction of city streets just _encourages_ reckless behavior from drivers.
Probably it comes down to culture. Finns and Norwegians are just generally more law-abiding.
Do you have a link handy for this?
Since it started in 2015, accidents are down 50%, but deaths up 90%. This analysis leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't see per-capita stats (Seattle had massive growth during a lot of those years), and we don't really enforce traffic laws at all anyway, so IDK what to think without digging in further.
Enforcement didn't work because people won't follow the law anyway or engineering didn't work because people tried to drive through the obstacles or approach them with the same speed and smashed/smooshed more?
What didn't?
> and resulted
Correlation is not causation.
If you try and drive somewhere unfamiliar here you are pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of ticket as half the roads are one way, and you can't turn into the other half for random reasons.
Oh, most left hand red arrows in the city, start red when the main light goes green, and they have cameras on them too. You can literally see the camera lights flashing non stop when you walk along.
Add to this, zero rules for pedestrians, no one waits for the lights if they can see a break in the traffic.
This is despite a relatively small (but real) reduction in casualty figures that came with the change.
MoonWalk•1h ago