This Will Change How You Hear Traffic Reports
My favorite kind of horror in fiction is grounded in the mundane and everyday. The juxtaposition of the polite, the pleasant, the mundane with things that strike at our deepest fears is why a movie like Get Out or Parasite is so effective. Or even something like The Matrix, in which normal life is only an illusion masking a world of horrific violence.
But one of the reasons these stories work is that we all know it's actually true—though not in the specific senses that a horror or sci-fi film might posit—that just outside the frame of our day-to-day lives are often horrific truths that, while not any kind of secret, we keep out of sight and out of mind. For our own sanity, if nothing else.
We don't actually need to draw on sci-fi or horror to see this. We just have to look at what happens every day on our streets. I've often found myself wondering what things an observer, transplanted to our society from another place and time, or maybe another planet, would be horrified by specifically for the nonchalance with which we treat it. I always conclude that the awful human toll taken every day by motor vehicles would be one of those things.
The Banal Horror of the Afternoon Traffic Report
Every afternoon around 4:30, FM radio stations all begin to do their rush hour traffic reports. The stylistic conventions of these are exactly the same in every U.S. city and across many types of station, as far as I can tell:
1-second-long identifying jingle, possibly involving a car horn
Bland, vaguely danceable looping background music kicks in
Name of the segment's sponsor is announced
And then the DJ matter-of-factly lists off major slowdowns around the area. In my region, the greater Tampa Bay Area, this sounds a bit like this:
"Alright folks, it's time for the Q105 Traffic Center brought to you by Rubenstein Law. We've got a crash on Hillsborough Avenue just east of the Veterans Expressway blocking two of the westbound lanes and causing a significant slowdown. Things are moving slowly on I-275 south of Fowler, and reports are just in of a crash on Dale Mabry at Kennedy that's blocking the center of the intersection, so you're gonna want to plan an alternate route if you're headed that way. Police have cleared up the remnants of an earlier crash on U.S. 19 in Pinellas at Ulmerton Road; things were a little slow headed northbound for a while there, but it should be all good now for your afternoon commute."
Another sponsor call-out wraps things up. "If you see traffic issues, call the SafeTouch Security traffic tip line."
I’ve long found these breezy reports horrifying specifically for the way they're clearly not meant to be, nor are they widely understood as, horrifying.
The list of traffic jams the upbeat DJ wants to inform you about over a techno beat as you plan your commute is, in some measure, a list of places that people have just been injured or killed. In the five Tampa Bay Area counties covered by our local radio market, 562 people died in traffic collisions in 2019, or an average of three people every two days. That's out of a total of 68,652 crashes, from which there were 47,655 injuries. That’s 130 injuries per day.
Statewide, the Florida Department of Health estimates that 3,273 people died in traffic collisions in 2019, or nine deaths for every single day.
Of course, they're not going to tell you that they're nonchalantly listing off places where someone may have just died. You're not going to learn the name of anyone who was rushed to the hospital. You won't know the story of the woman on foot just trying to cross the road to the bus stop, the name of the bicyclist on the way from their retail job to their evening shift at a restaurant, the outcome of the emergency surgery performed on the father whose teenage daughter, his passenger, will suffer neck pain for years as a result of the crash, along with a feeling of terror that wells back up whenever she crosses a bridge.
There'd be no reason for them to tell you that even if they could; it'd be a heck of a downer, and it's completely beside the point of these little updates.
Now there's miles of angry motorists stretched as far as eyes can see
There are a billion breathing beings each with schedules to keep
They get a long look at the tow truck as they sit and grit their teeth
Hating that which comes between them and their coffee-Titus Andronicus, "Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape with the Flood of Detritus"
Another grim secret is hidden in the daily traffic report, if you pay attention. It's that a large share of the severe crashes happen on a tiny fraction of our streets. This is so true that, although I live an hour away from Tampa (where almost all of our radio stations are based), I can rattle off the names of major Tampa and St. Petersburg arterials just from hearing enough of these radio reports.
I make a little game of looking the street names up on Google Maps when I'm no longer driving. They all look the same. They're all 4 to 6 lanes. They almost always have speed limits between 35 and 50 miles per hour, heavy traffic volumes, and lots of turning traffic. In other words, they're all stroads.
A stroad—a dysfunctional combination of a city street meant to provide access to local businesses and residences, and a wide, fast road meant for longer-distance travel—is the most deadly kind of vehicle facility we can build, and it's not even close.
These are the places, not where all crashes occur, but where a hugely disproportionate share of the ones that injure or kill people occur. Roughly 30 miles per hour and up is the speed at which a crash becomes lethal; at 20 it almost never is. And think about the circumstances in which it's physically possible, not just to go that speed, but to hit someone while still going that speed, without the chance to slam your brakes. There are a few:
Someone is turning onto a busy stroad from a side street, or vice versa, and gets hit.
Someone is trying to cross a busy stroad on foot, and gets hit.
Someone runs a red light at a large stroad intersection, and causes a high-speed crash.
Meme via Planning Peeps.
That's most of it. In most other circumstances, it's possible to crash your car but less likely that you'll be going so quickly for it to be devastating, unless you're truly a reckless driver. On a freeway, on the other hand, you're certainly going at dangerous speeds, but you don't have the chaos of people exiting and entering the roadway at unexpected points and angles, requiring sudden stops.
Stroads kill. The mantra-like repetition of the same road names, over and over again, on your local radio station every afternoon is proof that stroads kill.
Now what are you going to do about it?
The Strong Towns, #SlowTheCars is our campaign to make streets safer and more prosperous. If you’d like to learn more streets, roads, and the important—literally, life-saving—difference between the two, check out the Transportation section of our new Action Lab. For more on how to take safety into your own hands by slowing the cars in your city, check out the resources in this recent article by our Content Manager John Pattison.
Cover image via Wikimedia Commons.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.