Sprawl Connected to Traffic Fatalities in Louisville

Branden Klayko makes a case study of Louisville, Kentucky to explore how the city's development patterns contribute to its traffic safety.

On that latter count, Klayko notes that Louisville is below the national average on pedestrian safety: "The city’s pedestrian death rate is above the national average—last year alone, 18 pedestrians died on Louisville streets and another 483 were struck by motorists. The numbers speak for themselves."

To expand the study, Klayko inserted Louisville's traffic fatality rate per 100,000 people into the findings of the "Cities Safer By Design" [pdf] report released by the World Resources Institute earlier this summer. According to Klayko, "It’s not a pretty picture. Louisville ranks worse than sprawling Atlanta in traffic fatality rate. Nearly twice as many are killed in Louisville per 100,000 residents than in Chicago, three times more than New York City, and quadruple the number as in Washington, D.C."

Reaching farther afield for comparison, "Louisville’s safety numbers fall in line with cities like Montevideo, Uruguay; Accra, Ghana; and Kolkata or Delhi, India. We’re significantly more dangerous than places like Jakarta, Indonesia; Beijing or Shanghai, China; and Mumbai, India." Meanwhile, "leaders in traffic safety—places like Stockholm, Sweden; Tokyo, Japan; and Berlin, Germany—experience a mere fraction of the death and injury on their streets as we do at home."

Klayko goes on to address each of the recommendations of the report for how to redesign streets to improve traffic safety, in some cases comparing those recommendations to the current conditions in Louisville.