[OC] Ausfallstraßen machen 9 % der Straßenmeilen in den USA aus, verursachen aber 62 % der Fußgängertoten (NHTSA FARS, 2022 bis 2024)

Looks like the Pareto Principle strikes again! 🙂

These are the worst kinds of roads. Designed entirely around cars with pedestrian traffic at best an afterthought, if they are considered at all. Cars drive way too fast, and it forces pedestrians to travel far to travel short distances. A store can be right across the street, but you’d have to walk a mile in order to navigate the few crosswalks that actually exist, plus the large parking lots.

It was a mistake to allow business to be built, front facing the road, like they are. They should be borderline exclusive to cars, with businesses and residential being off to the side, creating mini communities of business and residential. Once your inside the community, you are physically separated from the faster cars and have little reason to interact with them. Then the paths to cross communities are built with sufficient physical barrier or separation to create a safe walking path.

50mph arterial roads in the UK almost never have pedestrian access because of this. They have paths running beside or below them. There have been a few exceptions in the past I can think of in my council area. They were legacy 40mph roads that had facilities along them, but they’ve all been cut back to 30mph limits where people often cross them because of how dangerous they were.

I love how road design in America sucks for literally every form of transportation. Between the inefficient and dumb (stopping at a red light with no other traffic to be seen is a common part of life here) signalized intersections, to the subsequent widening of the intersection making crossing them on foot impossible, it’s a complete disaster in every part of the country.

Pedestrians aren’t allowed on freeways.

Arterials take up more than 9% of the pedestrian-allowed roadways.

Me and all my hommies hate Stroads.

Are there really no deaths on arterial road crosswalks? I’ve found these quite dangerous, especially in the presence of right turning vehicles.

Misleading. This is based on nominal number of deaths. Doesn’t take into account miles or driven per death.

What percentage of roads are highways? Am I missing something or is that data only shared for the arterial roads?

I ask because although there are way more local roads it is not proportional to the total volume of traffic on each road which should really be accounted for in this data. I imagine similarly highways make up a very small fraction of total road if we are measuring by linear distance such that 14% would be much greater and perhaps even proportionally greater than arterial roads but not able to compare without that info.

Ultimately of course a road that has thousands of cars on it daily is going to have orders of magnitude more collisions than a road that only sees 20 cars per day. It’s unclear whether this is accounted for in the data.

I don’t think using road miles is the right approach here. Using amount of time drivers spend on road types would be a more useful IMO

Where in the world are there 6 lane highways that allow pedestrians to cross them? I’m in PA and I’ve never even heard of something like that.