The stubborn problem of cars killing people

On Labor Day weekend, more people are driving, which means more people are speeding. More people are drinking, too, so more people end up in fatal crashes than on an average day in the United States. In a way, these deaths are strange. Most of the common ways of dying in this country involve the unwelcome degradation of the human body; cars (and trucks and motorcycles), like guns, are a danger we’ve opted into. They kill so many people because so many people want to use them.

In 1895, the year after Labor Day became a national holiday, perhaps 300 cars were registered in the U.S.; 30 years later, the country had more than 17 million vehicles on the road, and The Atlantic was calling attention to “The Motor Menace.” A car crash had gone from being a novelty to a disturbingly frequent event, and public-spirited crusaders had begun trying to reverse that trend with safeguards that largely still govern drivers today.

Roads needed clearer signs, for example. As secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover had convened a national conference on street and highway safety in 1924, which had recommended “a uniform color-scheme for both signs and traffic signals … red for ‘Stop,’ green for ‘Proceed,’ yellow for ‘Caution’ — with a rule that those colors should not be used for any other signs,” Herbert L. Towle reported in this magazine. Roads also needed better engineering and design, including, Towle suggested, “wide, easy bends, banked for the expected speed,” or mountain roads “guarded, on the outside of turns, by strong steel cables.”

But those physical innovations could not reform the minds of drivers. In 1932, Curtis Billings, who worked for the public-safety division of the National Safety Council, wrote in The Atlantic, “It has often been said that the most dangerous thing about the automobile is ‘the nut that holds the wheel,’ and it is undeniable that the human factor is by far the most disturbing and elusive, as well as the one which offers the greatest challenge to traffic engineers.” Put in the stoplights, grade and guard the roads, keep pedestrians on the sidewalks, and drivers would still be more focused on joyfully speeding to their destination than the possibility that they’d kill someone on the way.

Billings was sympathetic: These drivers, he explained, simply didn’t know how dangerous they and their machines were, or how to operate them well. Many of the systems that he and other Atlantic writers argued for were meant to guard drivers against their own inevitable failings. They proposed that drivers should be taught how to drive, and then tested, in any way, before being allowed on the road: Of 48 states (Hawaii and Alaska were still territories), only 24 required licenses, and of those, only 12 had a driving test, Billings reported in 1932. Drivers should have their eyes tested, too, in case they lacked depth perception and didn’t know it. They should be required to have accident insurance to give them some stake in the risks they were taking. And they should know that they could be punished for their actions, which meant that the police would need to investigate car crashes and find out who was to blame. If a driver had been drinking, they should have to submit to a test (urinalysis, at the time) measuring exactly how drunk they might be. Any road-safety rules should be standardized across states, to help people who certainly weren’t going to read up on the laws of other states before their visit.

The country might not yet have managed to align every state’s traffic laws, but many of these early ideas took hold. In the U.S. today, we stop on red and go on green; we take a vision test and a driver’s test proving some level of skill and ability; we buy insurance for when all that fails. And these ideas achieved their goal, to some extent. On a population level, motor-vehicle deaths have declined since the 1970s, even as more people drive more miles.

But that progress has mostly plateaued over the past decade. The Department of Transportation, led by Secretary Pete Buttigieg, is again trying to eke more safety out of road systems by pushing for better-designed roads and vehicles and for ways to nudge people to drive sober, put their kids in car seats, obey the speed limit, stay off their phone. And certainly the roads and what Billings called the “human factor” of driving could be improved. Still, to reach the goal Buttigieg has laid out—“to reduce traffic deaths to the only acceptable number: zero”—will almost certainly require the country to consider more radical ideas. Perhaps more advanced driver-assistance technology could fully correct drivers’ bad judgment; perhaps some places could be redesigned to make cars one of many convenient ways to get around, instead of the only one.