Making Infrastructure Safer For Drivers
Traffic fatalities are rising. It’s a fact that cannot be denied. The question is, what can we do to make roads safer for drivers? AAA has produced a list of highway infrastructure changes that could save 63,700 lives and avoid over 350,000 injuries over 20 years.
The number one thing to do according to AAA is converting highway intersections to roundabouts. This would cover about 30 percent of fatality and injury reductions. This is because in a roundabout, there are less ways cars can hit other cars, people, etc. With roundabouts instead of intersections T-bone or head-on collisions are unlikely to happen.
The other infrastructure changes that AAA suggests adding roadside barriers and removing roadside objects, adding sidewalks and pedestrian crosswalks with signals, additional median barriers for shoulder and centerline strips on highways and wider highway shoulders.
All these updates are expected to cost about $146 billion, with $134 billion needed up front for the updates. The rest of the money is to maintain these structures for a few years. You can read the whole report here.
