Could Dutch-Style Roads Save 22, 000 Lives Each Year In the US?

Written By: Jebediah Reed  |  Posted: Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

That's the underlying suggestion of a recent post at the Project for Public Spaces blog, anyway, which compares Dutch and American road design strategies.

By and large, the US has taken the freeway as a model for all its roads, favoring big, straight thoroughfares with wide lanes and shoulders. In short, the kind of road that allows you to go fast and drift around a bit without slamming into an embankment or a parked car or something. The philosophy came out of freeway design and strategies for making high-speed driving safer. By the late 60s, there was plenty of evidence this "forgiving" approach was working on the Interstates, so traffic engineers sensibly decided that the principles should be applied to all our roads. With everything from suburban boulevards to city streets, we've essentially been creating mini-freeways. And our road fatality numbers have fallen 15 percent in the last 35 years - so what's anybody complaining about, you might ask. After all, whatever we've done is making drivers safer.

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