That question was asked in a post by Angie Schmitt on Streetsblog.
In this cogent article the author suggests if traffic engineers were held to the same standards as major car manufacturers are for defects and deaths, that thousands of deaths every year could be avoided by designing better streets that are also designed from a pedestrian and bicyclist perspective. The author discusses the fact that in the U.S. 33,000 people are annually killed on streets, noting that street design is a major factor. But no one sues the street designers, or the municipality.
In particular Schmitt references a high speed arterial street located in Tampa Florida in front of a secondary school. In a four year time period motorists struck and injured 21 walkers and bicyclists in an eight block stretch. Two people were also killed, and one seriously injured. It was the public response that garnered design changes, not the city street design department.
The Volkswagen brand suffered when it became public that some of their cars claimed to be emitting less into the environment apparently were emitting more. As a brand, they will face lawsuits, and have to build public trust.
Why does design change not happen more spontaneously in response to major accidents?
Jerry Dobrovolny Director of Engineering for the City of Vancouver has introduced a new crossing beacon for pedestrians, and also described that it is half the price of a “normal” pedestrian crossing, at $50,000 instead of $100,000. But we know it is not just about lights enabling pedestrians to cross, it is about street design to make it safe. And that is where better street design standards reflective of ALL road users, and a true costing to society for pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and deaths comes in.
As Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns says, “There is really no mechanism for holding designers of public roads responsible when their product kills people…as long as they are abiding by local design standards (or if no local standard has been established, national standards like the Manual of Traffic Control Devices) engineers generally don’t worry about being held responsible. In fact, may engineers worry that if they deviate from American standards and design streets in accordance with standards that have proven successful in other countries, that they will risk getting sued”.
There are instances of cities getting sued https://www.google.ca/search?q=city+road+death+lawsuit&rlz=1C1LENN_enCA516CA516&oq=city+road+death+lawsuit&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.6568j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8 … all the first google links are good examples …
I think the thing with this in many ways is that a road can be de-jure ‘safe’ but not de-facto safe, and until the factual presence of an unsafe road is used as evidence against its design, you’re right, the de-jure wins every time. In the USA recently, there was a court case that ruled that de-facto segregation was just as illegal as de-jure segregation (in fact, this is another in a line of similar cases, Plessy v Ferguson is the famous one) … so by that logic a de facto unsafe road is wrong also.
Most of the lawsuits that have been lodged against cities have to do with negligence (or so it seems), when there is a clearly unsafe issue which is allowed to persist, and it causes an injury or death, then the city quite certainly liable.
If we can consider de facto negligence (which could be also a situation similar to one which has caused injury) as the rationale for lawsuit, there would be a host of places we could probably all identify that haven’t had a deadly crash yet, but certainly will … what is needed is a way to identify these, so that this identification becomes tacit proof of negligence later (as in, the dangerous situation was identified, and a solution was not created).
In the netherlands, for instance, when designing infrastructure, where there are 2 options, they generally always must build the safer option of the two, there isn’t simply a minimum set of standards, there is an evolving set of evidence about what is better than what. We seem here to build the minimum we can get away with, not the best we can afford. Maybe this needs to change.
Issues around the world are far worse.
The basic issue is education of traffic engineers and professionals’ neglect for their continous self-improvement and professional development.
Speaking from experience working in other regions, engineers rarely adopt new ways of designing things and innovate how they do things. Keep in mind that engineering is generally based on sciences like math where 1+1=2 and there is no other answer.
I have encountered engineers with PhDs from third world countries whose attitude is “What I learned 30 years ago was correct. No one challenged me in the way that I have worked for 30 years, so what I am doing still must be correct.”
A lot of the stuff that planners do requires common sense and constant rethinking based on changing world. Planning for people walking around texting on their mobile phones should also be accounted for in street design in some way?
It’s the only branch of engineering I can think of where practitioners have not been compelled to improve upon common practice of the 1950’s. Maybe also Systems Engineering?
In some cases it is the designers fault, but in many cases the cause of all these deaths and injuries is political decisions. When a politician decides to increase the amount of road space for general purpose traffic rather than investing an equivalent amount in transit , they are deciding that people should die. No, other than knowing that these will likely be the most vulnerable road users (seniors, children and people with disabilities) they don’t know who will die or suffer life-changing injuries. But unless they are grossly incompetent, they know that they are making decisions that will result in deaths.
So when a very intelligent politician, like our Premier, decides to spend billions on a 10-lane freeway bridge (like the MasseyTunnel Replacement Project), they should be held accountable for the resulting deaths and injuries.
It is obvious that a former A.M. talk show host would ultimately be the smartest person in the room, just brimming with factoids, anecdotes and one-line analysis. She has her finger on the pulse of the people, at least the ones who live so far away that they consider transit a joke, or who are so wealthy they couldn’t conceive of mixing with the plebes on a bus.
Its sad that my first response for so many things is to wonder when the lawsuit/fear of lawsuit will have a chance of instigating change … as a designer, who knows that there is always a better design, to feel somewhat helpless that the better design, in general, isn’t the one chosen (because of cost/expediency/etc…) is to feel a bit wistful for the kind of authority that designers once seemed to have, and which now only lawyers/politicians seem to.
The holistic public good is never, it seems, sufficient.
No wonder people like Caleb Bene are taking the legal path … the ‘good’ is too often co-opted by the potentially sufficient.
Engineers always include a factor of safety in their designs, maybe the public realm needs an additional layer of pedestrian factor of safety?