“It also absolves traffic engineers, planners and policymakers of blame for creating a transportation system where for most Americans, the only rational choice for getting around is a car.”
NHTSA blames road user error for 94% of crashes, a number built from police reports that look for which driver or pedestrian to fault. An overly wide street that invites speeding never shows up as the cause. Marshall estimates the U.S. passed 4 million road deaths this spring. The data was built to find a culprit, and it never picks the engineer.