You are grossly negligent if you show a conscious indifference to the safety of others. In other words, you’re aware that the safety of others is endangered, but you don’t do anything to act on that knowledge.
Virtually nothing Strong Towns has done or said in ten years has inspired as much anger or controversy as the times we have argued that the engineering profession, for designing and building unsafe streets, deserves a share of the blame for the statistically inevitable tragedies that occur on those streets.
And yet, this is some of the most important work we have done in our ten years. Because lives are at stake. People continue to be killed on urban streets that are designed to move cars quickly through complex environments.
Among the cases that Strong Towns President Charles Marohn has written about at length:
Springfield, MA: “An Open Letter to the City of Springfield”
Buffalo, NY: “Dodging Bullets”
Orlando, FL: “The Bollard Defense”
Albany, NY: “A Statistically Inevitable Outcome”
There’s more where that came from. All over this country, we build urban environments where we tell ourselves we want lively human activity. We fill them up with businesses, libraries, parks, schools, homes, where people are certain to be coming and going. And then we run stroads through them that are engineered so that drivers will travel at speeds that will kill a person who is hit.
We design streets that are forgiving of driver error—wide lanes, clear zones in case you run off the road—as 1800 cars did in 15 months on on road studied in Orlando. But in doing so, we ensure these streets are utterly unforgiving of errors committed by those on foot. We do this despite that we know death will be the statistically inevitable outcome sooner or later.
Is the engineering profession intellectually and institutionally prepared for a world in which we stop doing this, and accept that urban environments require slow streets?
The Strong Towns Tension With YIMBYism
Alex Alsup: How Much of the U.S.'s Housing Stock Is Locally Owned?
Where Strong Towns Stands As We Enter Another Election Year
Why We Need To Show Empathy Toward Drivers in Conversations About Street Safety
Benjamin Herold: The Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
What Is the Role of Philanthropy in Building Stronger Towns?
Sam Quinones: Recovering Addicts Are Having a Bottom-Up Revolution in This Small Kentucky Town
Tony Jordan and Chris Meyer: Pushing for People Over Parking
Eric Goldwyn: Why U.S. Transit Is So Expensive (and How To Fix It)
Meet the Freeway Fighters Who Are Suing the Texas Department of Transportation
Shima Hamidi: Narrow Lanes Save Lives
Minnesota Introduces First-in-the-Nation Bill To Eliminate Minimum Parking Mandates Statewide
Where Is Sprawl Good? (Featuring Joe Minicozzi)
Reading Member Comments—Live From Buc-ee’s!
We’re Seeing a Groundswell of People Doing Amazing Things in Their Communities
We Must Become More Sensitive to the Stress Our Cities Are Under
Seth Kaplan: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time
Conor Semler: A New Decision-Making Framework for Street Design
Strong Towns Is Jane Jacobs in Action
The Arguments for Speed Cameras…and Why They Don’t Hold Up
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