Traffic deaths are often dismissed as “negligible” because they are rare per trip, but that framing ignores that risk is concentrated on the most vulnerable and that fatalities repeat in the same high-speed designs.
After recent pedestrian deaths in Richmond Hill, we drew attention to a hard truth: poorly designed streets predictably lead to the deaths of innocent pedestrians and cyclists. In response, some readers pushed back, arguing that driver fatalities outnumber pedestrian deaths and that focusing on pedestrian safety is therefore misplaced. That reaction, however, misunderstands both the nature of the problem and the path to a real solution.
This is not a contest over who dies more. From a Strong Towns perspective, higher driver fatalities are not a rebuttal to pedestrian safety measures—they are further proof that our street system is fundamentally broken.
A street designed to move vehicles quickly through a community at high speeds is a street that amplifies the consequences of human error. When something goes wrong—and it always does—the result is not a scrape or a scare, but a death. Sometimes the victim is a pedestrian or cyclist. Sometimes it is a driver. Often, it is both. The common factor is not who was using the road, but how the road was designed.
Modern suburban arterials like many found in Richmond Hill are built for speed and volume, not safety. Wide lanes, long crossing distances, slip lanes, and highway-style geometry encourage drivers to move faster than human environments can safely support. Speed is the real killer. It turns minor mistakes into irreversible tragedies. At higher speeds, pedestrians have little chance of survival—but drivers, too, face sharply increased risk of fatal crashes.
Those who argue that driver deaths are higher often rely on raw numbers without context. Drivers spend vastly more time on the road, travel much greater distances, and make far more trips than pedestrians. When risk is measured per trip or per kilometre, pedestrians and cyclists are exposed to disproportionately higher danger. More importantly, raw statistics miss the ethical core of the issue: pedestrians and cyclists are exposed to harm without the protection of a multi-ton vehicle, airbags, or steel frames. They absorb the full force of a system designed around speed.
Strong Towns emphasizes a basic principle of risk management: systems should be designed to protect the most vulnerable users first. This is not anti-driver ideology; it is common sense. When streets are designed so that a child, a senior, or someone walking to a bus stop can survive a mistake—by themselves or by a driver—everyone benefits.
The evidence from safer cities is clear. Narrower lanes, lower speeds, shorter crossing distances, protected intersections, and traffic-calming measures reduce fatalities across the board. Driver deaths decline alongside pedestrian deaths. Emergency response improves. Crash severity drops. Communities become safer not because people suddenly behave better, but because the system no longer sets them up for failure.
There is also an uncomfortable but necessary distinction to make. Pedestrians and cyclists are victims of a system imposed upon them. Drivers, while often victims too, are participants in that same system—one that pressures them to move fast, take risks, and navigate streets that forgive speed but punish mistakes. This is not about blaming individuals. It is about acknowledging that design choices shape outcomes.
Framing the discussion as “drivers versus pedestrians” serves only one purpose: preserving the status quo. It delays change while deaths continue to accumulate—quietly, routinely, and predictably. If the true goal is fewer fatalities, the path forward is not to argue over categories, but to redesign our streets so that mistakes no longer carry a death sentence.
Protecting pedestrians is not a niche concern. It is the clearest, most effective way to make our streets safer for everyone who uses them—including drivers.
One of the most common responses to calls for safer streets is a familiar refrain: compared to the sheer number of daily trips, traffic fatalities are statistically negligible. On the surface, the argument sounds rational—almost mathematical. But when examined closely, it reveals a flawed way of thinking about public safety, responsibility, and design.
Low probability is not the same as acceptable risk.
Public systems are not judged by averages alone; they are judged by consequences. We do not excuse structural failures in bridges, elevators, or drinking water systems because “most people make it through safely.” If a system predictably kills a small number of people every year, that is not bad luck—it is a design failure. Streets should be held to the same standard as other critical public infrastructure.
Risk on our streets is not evenly shared.
The “per trip” argument assumes that everyone faces roughly the same danger. That is demonstrably untrue. Pedestrians, cyclists, seniors, children, and people with disabilities face far higher risk per trip than drivers inside vehicles. Many of those harmed were not behaving unusually or recklessly; they were simply present in a system that exposes them to danger without protection. A design that concentrates risk on the most vulnerable is not neutral—it is unjust by design.
Fatal crashes are not random events.
Traffic deaths cluster in predictable places: wide arterials, high-speed intersections, long crossings, slip lanes, and highway-style road geometry. When fatalities occur again and again in the same locations, dismissing them as “statistically insignificant” ignores the obvious truth that the system reliably produces casualties. Randomness does not repeat with such consistency; bad design does.
Calling deaths negligible only works if nothing can be done.
If traffic fatalities were unavoidable, the argument might hold some weight. But they are not. Decades of evidence show that lower speeds, tighter geometry, shorter crossings, protected intersections, and traffic-calming measures dramatically reduce deaths for all road users. When effective, affordable solutions exist, continued fatalities are no longer accidents—they are the result of deliberate policy choices.
Each death carries costs far beyond a statistic.
Strong Towns emphasizes the full cost of harm, not just what appears in a spreadsheet. A single traffic death leaves families with lifelong trauma, burdens emergency and healthcare systems, reduces economic productivity, and erodes trust in public space. Communities become quieter, more fearful, and less connected. Even “a few deaths a year” exact a heavy and lasting toll.
The right standard is avoidable deaths, not acceptable losses.
Framing fatalities as negligible normalizes loss as the price of mobility. Strong Towns rejects this thinking outright. The critical question is not whether the number is small, but whether the deaths were preventable through better design. When the answer is yes—and too often it is—accepting those deaths is neither pragmatic nor responsible.
When we stop hiding behind probabilities and start looking honestly at outcomes, the conclusion becomes unavoidable. Streets that regularly kill people, however infrequently, are not functioning as they should. A community serious about safety does not ask how many deaths it can tolerate—it asks how many it can prevent.