If You Want to Deathproof Cities, the First Step Is Kicking Out Cars

When we talk about keeping kids safe in 2013, we're usually talking about guns. Reducing gun violence, preventing mass shootings, getting illegal firearms off the streets. All timely, given the tragic, seemingly never-ending spate of gun deaths over the last two years. But if we really wanted to make our cities and suburbs safer, we'd be talking about cars.

'Car violence' doesn't have the same ring, or implied moral imperative, as gun violence. Maybe it should. In the same vein, the notion of 'car control' sounds pretty draconian. But maybe that's what we need. In 2012, there were 8,855 gun deaths. In the same year, there were more than four times as many traffic fatalities. In other words, 2012 saw a nine percent increase in deadly car violence, up from 32,367 in 2011. Cars are the bigger killer, and they do most of it close to home.

They don't have to. I was reminded that a car-controlled future is feasible as I read Fast Company's fine report on the Dutch city of Houten, pop. 45,000. It's a town that was engineered decades ago to absorb population growth while eschewing car culture altogether. To Americans, it's a paradox: a suburb that shuns cars. Residents can walk and bike to school, to work, to the train station, all along the city's main circuit, without ever encountering an automobile. Parents let six-year-olds ride to school alone.

Cars are relegated to the outer rings of the city, and must circumvent the town center. Due to pedestrian-friendly city planning, the reporter notes that even on the outer rail networks, "Where bicycles and cars do share roads, signs, and red asphalt make it clear that cyclists have priority. It is common to see cars inching along behind gaggles of seniors on two wheels."

As a result, there are only a handful of traffic deaths every decade. Between 2001 and 2005, there was a single traffic death. One. As a random point of contrast, eight people died driving around suburb-studded Missouri over the Thanksgiving weekend alone.

Americans, meanwhile, allow mass, wanton car death without ever lending it anywhere near the same gravity as gun death. With gun death, there's a villain, a smoking weapon. Car crashes are elemental, they're unfortunate forces of nature, like a random tornado. Which isn't true at all. Car accidents are the result of bad planning, mostly, with a dash of automaker greed and a culture that glorifies open road recklessness fanning the flames.

If you want to keep your kids safe in a suburb, your time is probably better spent advocating for pedestrian throughways than for gun control. In many urban areas, too. Remember, the DMV says the majority of traffic accidents occur within 25 miles of home; preventing car violence starts at the local level. Here's Fast Company detailing Houten's car-killing layout, reminding us what's possible:

… Houten was designed with two separate transportation networks. The backbone of the community is a network of linear parks and paths for cyclists and pedestrians, all of which converge on that compact town center and train station … Every important building in the city sits along that car-free spine. If you walk or cycle, everything is easy. Everything feels close. Everything feels safe.

The second network, built mostly for cars, does everything it can to stay out of the way. A ring road circles around the edge of town, with access roads twisting inward like broken spokes. You can reach the front door of just about every home in town by car, but if you want to drive there from the train station, you need to wend your way out to the ring road, head all the way around the edge of the city, and drive back in again.

Drivers suffer the inconvenience, not pedestrians. And because of that, teenagers don't die in fiery car crashes multiple times a year. Kids aren't struck by texting drivers.

Of course, automakers don't want this to happen. Car lovers—like gun lovers—don't want this to happen. They'll insist that accidents are the fault of the individuals, bad drivers. That planning, design, or policies that limit driving are assaults on freedom (See: the snafu over New York's congestion pricing that would've limited the number of vehicular commuters). Meanwhile, people are dying in steaming mangled wrecks. Teenagers, seniors, celebrities in films about driving like maniacs.

A lot more Americans are killed in car crashes than are getting shot, which is saying something in a nation that is obsessed with shooting itself to death. Yet there are signs that our arcane car-love is winding down; young people are moving to cities, foregoing driver's licenses for walkable commutes and, maybe, social media.

But it's clearly not happening fast enough to spare tens of thousands of people from a steel-boxed grave; if we honestly cared about building safe communities, we'd eye a future without car violence, too. At least, we'd call it what it is. We don't need gun control nearly as badly as we need car control.