Traffic Calming: Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

By Gary Biller, NMA President 

Editor’s Note: This post first appeared in April 2022 as NMA Weekly Newsletter #692.  If you would like to receive the one-topic motorist-related newsletter every Sunday in your inbox, subscribe Here. 

Sudden cardiac arrest is a national public health crisis. In its Heart and Stroke Statistics – 2022 Update, the American Heart Association notes more than 356,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) occur in the United States every year, close to 1,000 per day. The survival rate from onset to hospital discharge hovers around ten percent.

OHCA survivability is greatly influenced by how quickly emergency medical services (EMS) are administered. Researchers used data reported to the Swedish Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation in 2018 to predict the 30-day survival rate of OHCA victims based on EMS response time. They found that the patient’s odds of survival dropped to less than half when the response time increased from within six minutes to ten minutes or more. Obviously, “precious seconds” is not an exaggeration when it comes to EMS response time.

Yet robbing those seconds from OHCA victims is precisely what traffic calming accomplishes. Lane reductions, speed bumps, chicanes, and other devices used to inhibit traffic have been popularized today as the prescription for slowing travel speeds in the name of public safety.

From Problems Associated With Traffic Calming by Kathleen Calongne:

While delay from individual devices is sometimes measured, the cumulative effect of a series of devices is often ignored. Series of devices turn seconds of delay into minutes as vehicles fail to regain cruising speed between the devices. Calming devices impose permanent, 24-hour delays to emergency response, unlike traffic congestion which occurs periodically. A study conducted by the fire department of Austin, Texas, 1997, showed an increase in the travel time of ambulances of up to 100% transporting victims.

The effect is the same when car lanes are eliminated. Traffic is constricted, which can critically impede EMS response at all hours of the day.

When addressing a problem that involves mortalities, it is essential to adopt solutions that save the most lives. Let’s compare the 2019 traffic fatality numbers—the most recent published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its Fatality Analysis Reporting System database—to OHCA deaths:

Even if traffic calming can provide some additional protection to non-motorists, i.e., pedestrians and pedalcyclists, the annual fatalities of higher-risk OHCA victims eclipse non-motorist road deaths by more than 40 to 1. Emergency-response patients—whose numbers grow by tens of thousands more each year when considering victims of fire, violent crimes, and other death-threatening situations—deserve the critical seconds of response time robbed by traffic calming projects. No, they require them.

It is time to take a page out of the anti-driving playbook where the term “traffic accident” has been relabeled as “traffic violence,” ridiculously suggesting a willful intent by drivers to injure others. This, according to the illogic, while being unconcerned about simultaneously putting themselves in harm’s way.

Traffic calming is purposeful traffic disruption, pure and simple, and it dramatically impacts how many people live and how many die in medical distress situations.

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