This week, Kansas Secretary of Transportation Calvin Reed kicked off KDOT’s annual Transportation Safety Conference in Wichita by emphasizing the key components of decreasing fatalities on Kansas’s streets and highways: safer drivers, safer vehicles, safer speeds, and safer roads.
He was followed by the conference’s keynote speaker, Charles Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns, an organization dedicated to helping America’s cities manage their finances and built environments better.
Marohn made the case that, practically speaking, Kansas’s cities should ignore KDOT’s first three suggestions and focus on the last.
Like the rest of the country, Kansas mostly saw traffic-related fatalities increase throughout the 2010s and the first part of this decade.
Over the past two years, things have improved; 2024 saw the fewest number of Kansans killed in car crashes — 344 — in nearly 80 years. Still, Kansas remains above the national average of fatal accidents per population, and so it’s reasonable that KDOT has made reducing traffic deaths — through their “Drive to Zero” initiative — a key priority.
For a variety of reasons, though, most of the actual work that’s been done has been focused on educating (or shaming) drivers — for speeding, or being distracted, or failing to follow every traffic rule — and on inducing (or requiring) municipalities to lower the speeds on their arterial roads and streets.
When asked about the Drive to Zero plan, Marohn applauded it — but also argued that 98% of the problem is road design, with driver responsibility, vehicle quality, and speed calculations taking up a tiny remainder.
Marohn’s argument builds upon the basic idea that human beings will always make mistakes, always be distracted, etc., and thus one ought to focus on fixing the conditions humans operate in, rather than fixing humans themselves.
In the design of highways, this principle took the form of “forgiving design” — wider roads that encourage faster speeds as well as channeled in the same direction.
When imposed on city streets we have what Marohn calls “stroads”: neighborhood streets lined with sidewalks and schools and businesses and houses, but designed in ways that encourage unsafe speeds and are pedestrian-unfriendly.
This, obviously, discourages pedestrian use, which not only has negative economic, civic, and public health consequences, but also implicitly encourages drivers to drive even faster and more poorly.
Marohn wants to see cities focus on changing these design assumptions, rather than chastising drivers for acting in exactly the way the conditions they encounter on the road encourage them to do. Makes sense to me.
And fortunately, it makes sense to many city leaders and planners across Kansas as well.
In Wichita, Kansas City, Salina, and elsewhere, municipalities are making changes.
One-way streets are being converted to two-way; unnecessary lanes are being shrunk and made safer; designers are thinking more about traffic calming (putting in meridians, for example) and less about draconian speed reductions. Zero traffic fatalities may be a distant goal, but we’ll get closer to it by fixing the streets that carry traffic, rather than the drivers negotiating it.
