Wes Marshall

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regularly points to traffic deathse as the number one cause of unintentional injury death for all Americans aged 4 through 34.2 This isn’t new. I found a 2002 paper saying that “in the US, injury, both intentional and unintentional, is the leading cause of death from age 1 to age 45. Because it so disproportionately strikes the young, it is also the leading cause of lost years prior to age 75, more than either cancer or heart disease. Motor vehicle injury is the largest single component of these losses.”3 I also found a 1983 paper lamenting that “automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for all persons between the ages of six months and age 47.”4 And a 1965 paper warned us that “traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among all persons from age 5 to 31!”5 The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that each traffic death equates to an average of 30 lost years of life expectancy.6 With 1.35 million road deaths worldwide each year, more than 2 percent of all deaths from all causes, this adds up to 40 million years of life lost annually on our streets.f WHO also estimates that for every road death, there are at least 10 to 15 people hospitalized due to road crashes.7 This means 13 million to 20 million hospitalizations and millions more that probably should’ve gone to the hospital.”
― Wes Marshall, Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System

“After the oil embargo in the 1970s, safety researchers fretted that fuel-efficient “minicars” would “capture 40% of the automobile market by the year 2000” and devastate the US road safety recorde (whereas by 1990, they predicted it would approach 70,000 fatalities each year) while bankrupting US auto manufacturers due to liability claims.2 Reports like this habitually fail to point out that heavier vehicles are less safe for everybody else on the street. That includes pedestrians or bicyclists as well as those in other cars.f So, the question is, safe for whom?”
― Wes Marshall, Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System