KOZMA: To confront traffic deaths, look to Netherlands

Erik Eidner, 20 years old. Susie Maluya, 56. Elaine Lyons, 79. Israel Olushola Adebayo, 56. Lucas Bandachowicz, 19.

They are just a handful of the New Jerseyans struck dead by car crashes in recent weeks.

There are many more whose names we may never learn, but all of their deaths and lives matter. Maybe one of your friends or family members is among them.

After a century of cities prioritizing the needs of motorists over those of pedestrians and cyclists, we have grown numb to the immense collateral damage.

Motorists kill someone every 15 minutes, according to the most recent data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which only covers the first three months of 2021.

A number of people have died in traffic accidents this year, according to the New Jersey State Police. The death toll has surged since the pandemic, as has the share of pedestrians among the fallen.

It may seem unfair to use the active voice — after all, motorists (typically) do not set out to kill people on purpose. Media reports tend to prefer obfuscating euphemisms like "traffic accident," as if nobody was truly responsible.

That is a comforting lie. Regardless of intent, when we operate a two-ton hunk of metal moving orders of magnitude faster than humans were ever meant to move, we assume an incredibly high risk.

If a pedestrian hits a car, the car may suffer a scratch or two at worst. If a car hits a pedestrian, the worst-case scenario is death. Not to belabor the obvious, but they do not face equal risks nor should they be considered equally responsible.

Last year, while downplaying the threat of the coronavirus, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) argued, "we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about."

As his critics noted at the time, car crashes are not contagious. The senator nonetheless stumbled upon an important question, even if he pretended the answer was settled. Should we accept nearly 40,000 deaths every year as the price of a modern economy? Are those our only options — mass death or poverty?

Thankfully, the Netherlands shows us that a third way exists. During the post-World War II economic boom, both the U.S. and the Netherlands followed the same basic development strategy: build up sprawling suburbs for the growing middle class, tear down inner-city neighborhoods and plop down brand new highways and parking lots amidst the ruins to make motorists' commutes as convenient as possible.

But unlike in America, the Dutch started growing wary of the mounting body count. In 1971 alone, motorists killed more than 3,000 people, including more than 400 children.

An outraged coalition of cyclists, environmentalists, urbanists, concerned parents and pedestrian safety advocates started the campaign Stop De Kindermoord, which literally translates to "stop the child murder."

They helped persuade Dutch society to view the motorist as a mere guest of the street, not its owner.

Their campaign was ultimately a smashing success.

Today, Amsterdam is the cycling capital of the world. Dutch motorists killed 610 people last year, 17 of them children, representing decades of improvement from their 1970s peak despite major population growth.

As for Johnson's hyperbole, far from "shutting down the economy," the Netherlands maintains one of the highest standards of living in the world.

Regrettably, most of America is not densely populated enough to make alternatives to cars viable. New Jersey is almost as dense as the Netherlands — but with nearly twice the traffic deaths per capita in 2019.

Currently, even basic policies are off-limits. Take illegal speeding, which accounts for nearly 10,000 traffic deaths each year.

New Jersey is one of the few states which prohibits automated traffic enforcement through speed cameras, leaving traffic enforcement to police patrols with uneven and arbitrary enforcement.

Installing automated speed cameras in New York City along high-crash streets reduced traffic deaths by 55 percent, prompting Philadelphia to adopt them soon after. What will it take for New Jersey to adopt this extremely basic idea?

Gov. Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) recently signed a law requiring drivers to move over one lane when passing cyclists and pedestrians. This is welcome news for reducing traffic deaths, but we must also invest more in the infrastructure available for non-motorists.

For example, many towns around the state still have "bike lanes" that amount to just a white line painted on the side of the road. This is scarcely better than nothing at all.

To be truly protected, cyclists need to have some physical barrier between the bike lane and the cars. The cost of building and maintaining these barriers pales in comparison to the benefits of improved safety and fewer deaths.

As the Stop De Kindermoord activists understood, just because there is no magic bullet to eliminate all traffic deaths does not mean we should not try. We can no longer accept these deaths as the price of modern civilization.

Thomas Kozma is an Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy junior majoring in planning and public policy. His column, “With Liberty and Justice for All,” runs on alternate Thursdays.

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