Why
America's longstanding traffic violence problem touches every community, and yet is so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible to everyday drivers. In the past decade, US traffic death rates largely stagnated, even though many other high-income countries over the same time period realized substantial improvements in traffic safety, and despite experiencing far lower death rates to start with. Vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, have long borne the disproportional burden of traffic-related fatalities; and the trend lines are looking no better.
Emergency Streets inculcates a sense of urgency requiring a response by every driver on the
road. Reframing the problem as a public health matter has potential to shock the system and foment change.
Emergency Streets can help sidestep some of the existing bureaucratic and cultural barriers to slower, safer driving, without compromising other public priorities.
Traffic Fatalities: US vs. Peer Countries
Source: OECD
The United States is an outlier. While peer nations have steadily reduced traffic deaths, US fatalities per million remain more than double countries like Norway and the UK. This isn’t normal—it’s the result of dangerous street design and a lack of urgency. Emergency Streets helps close that gap by treating traffic deaths as the public health crisis they are.
This graph highlights a grim and overlooked reality: most pedestrian deaths in the U.S. happen in the dark—and those numbers are rising fast. From 2010 to 2022, nighttime pedestrian fatalities surged by over 90%, while daytime deaths remained largely unchanged. This isn’t about distracted walkers or personal choices. It’s about speed, visibility, and environments that fail to protect the most vulnerable. Emergency Streets targets the conditions of these crashes—low light, wide roads, fast cars—with quick, highly visible street interventions. Because if we know when and how people are dying, we have no excuse not to act.
Pedestrian Deaths at Night
5 Leading Causes of Death
United States 2020-2023
Unintentional Injuries
Source: CDC WISQARS
Unintentional injuries represent an underacknowledged public health crisis, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives across all age groups in the United States from 2020 to 2023. The chart underscores how traffic violence persists as a leading cause of death, particularly among young people, while falls and poisonings dominate later stages of life. These outcomes are not “accidents” but predictable consequences of systemic design choices and social neglect. Just as with other epidemics—whether drug overdoses or gun suicides—the persistence of these numbers demands coordinated, systemic responses that move beyond fragmented, reactive measures