The Bottom Up Response Is Not Enough

Every hour, four people are killed in a car crash. Over a year, this totals up to about 40,000 people. 

“It’s an astounding number,” says Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn. 

In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks about his experience serving for nine years in the National Guard. He covers some sensitive topics, relaying what he’s learned from how people respond to military deaths, and what that can tell us about how we respond to traffic deaths.  

“I bring this up, because I want to talk a little bit about the way we respond to tragedy, the way we respond to hardship,” says Chuck. 

If 40,000 people suddenly died in a massive car crash, we’d notice. We’d all turn our heads and as a collective of officials and citizens, we would mourn and strive for change so as to prevent that sort of catastrophic event from happening again. The reality is, about 40,000 people die in car crashes every year in the United States. But we don’t respond with the same sense of urgency the way we would respond to a large, very noticeable, tragic accident. Chuck explains why this is, how our society functions, and how it needs to change to solve this ongoing tragedy of needless traffic deaths.

We can solve this problem. We can apply bottom-up processes to quickly make our streets safer for everyone. We can end the drip, drip, drip of traffic deaths. 

• “Here’s Why We Respond in Force to One Amtrak Crash While Ignoring Thousands of Daily Car Crashes,” by Charles Marohn, Strong Towns (July 2022).

• Charles Marohn (Twitter).