Signal 2: The Best Tool for Reducing Traffic Deaths? More Transit!
World Health Organization reports that the number of traffic fatality is over 1.25 million worldwide in the year of 2010. It means that one person is killed per 25 seconds which is a lot. Also in the US, the number of people who were killed by traffic accident was 38,748 in 2016 which is 16.8% of total injury deaths(2016, National Vital Statistics Reports). It goes without saying that this is the major cause of deaths not only in US but also most countries in the world. The problem is that traffic fatality is the “incident” related to urban design and there is report to go into detail.
According to the report, traffic accident mortality rate is low in areas where public transportation sharing is high compared to car-dependent cities. More specifically, the mortality rate for Birmingham (auto-dependent cities) is 18.5 per 100,000 people while the mortality rate for Boston (public transport) is 2.3 per 100,000 people which is 1/8 of Birmingham’s. The report points out several reasons. First, mass transit like train or bus is safer than automobile. The train hardly cause accident and traffic fatality of bus rider is much lower than automobile’s. Second, transit oriented design negatively impacts on traffic accident fatality. Transit oriented cities are non-motorized friendly designed and population density is relatively high which means low vehicle-miles-traveled. Third, risky drivers(teenagers, elders, drunk driving) has options so that they drive less.
The report focus on the difference between cases and descriptive statistics. To be more powerful suggestion, the statistical modeling with objectively measured factors including total population, total length of roads, vehicle-miles-traveled and etc have to be conducted to control correlation between variables.
