By RUSSSELL ARBEN FOX
Insight Kansas
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 immediately 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. Chuck made the case that, practically speaking, Kansas’s cities should just ignore the first three factors and focus on the last. He’s right.
Kansas’s traffic statistics aren’t terrible, but they aren’t good. Like the rest of the country, Kansas mostly saw fatalities from road accidents increase throughout the 2010s and the first part of this decade.
There have been some dramatic improvements over the past two years; 2024 saw the lowest 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 in support of that initiative 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 after his presentation about the Drive to Zero plan, Marohn applauded it—but also argued that 98% of the problem here is road design, with driver responsibility, vehicle quality, and speed calculations taking up the tiny remainder.
Marohn’s argument builds upon the basic idea the human beings, being human, 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”—these roads needed to be wide, and the drivers speeding on them needed to be channeled in the same direction, all to minimize the deadly costs of mistakes.
But over the decades these lessons were taken from high-speed, cross-country roads and imposed on city streets.
Thus we have what Marohn calls “stroads”: neighborhood streets lined with sidewalks and schools and businesses and houses, but designed in ways that assume everyone will drive fast and poorly, requiring them to be huge and thus 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.
The characteristics of such design assumptions are dangerous one-way streets, drivers gunning at intersections, near-unusable cross-walks, and more.
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 (Marohn likely wouldn’t have been KDOT’s guest of honor otherwise).
In Wichita, Kansas City, Salina, and elsewhere, Kansas municipalities are slowly but surely 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.
Dr. Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.