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Let’s talk about our second guiding principle for transportation investment: Design for safety, not speed. t4america.org/platform 1/10 
When it comes to priorities for designing our streets, transportation agencies—from the feds on down—have largely decided that speed is just more important than safety. 2/10
High-speed roads can be safe! They’re called interstates or limited-access highways. Remove all conflicts, like driveways and cross streets, bikes and people, and build wide, straight lanes. @StrongTowns 3/10
@StrongTowns But instead, we take the same design principles and apply them to every single other type of road, including the streets that are *supposed* to serve local travel, allow people to walk or bike, and create a sense of place and build a local economy. It’s literally killing us. 4/10
@StrongTowns When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal—especially when they involve a person biking or walking. And most of these crashes occur on these high speed, arterial roads, according to @smartgrowthusa’s #DangerousByDesign 5/10 smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-d…
@StrongTowns @SmartGrowthUSA Between 2008 and 2017, drivers in the US struck and killed 49,340 people while walking, reaching levels not seen since 1990. This is unacceptable—but we intentionally design streets that make it happen. Because we prioritize vehicle speed above all else. 6/10
@StrongTowns @SmartGrowthUSA The @NTSB issued a landmark study in 2017 that showed how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, and that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. usa.streetsblog.org/2017/07/27/nts… 7/10
@StrongTowns @SmartGrowthUSA @NTSB We cannot undertake a serious effort to reduce deaths on our roadways without designing for slower speeds on local and arterial roads. The federal program should require designs and approaches that put safety first. 8/10
@StrongTowns @SmartGrowthUSA @NTSB It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make streets appropriate for the surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds. 9/10
@StrongTowns @SmartGrowthUSA @NTSB Protecting the safety of all people who use the street must be a priority reflected in the decisions we make about how to fund, design, operate, maintain, and measure the success of our roads. 10/10 t4america.org/platform
