We like to think of car crashes as the fault of individual drivers. Someone was distracted, drunk, careless, or reckless. But I don’t think that’s the full story. I think the real blame belongs to the people who designed the cities that make driving the only option in the first place.
City planners and traffic engineers know that not everyone is good at driving. They know that some people have medical conditions, slower reflexes, or just aren’t equipped to operate heavy machinery safely. They know this, and yet they’ve built entire societies around the assumption that everyone can and must drive a car.
So when someone who’s not a great driver gets into a car and causes an accident, who is really at fault? Is it the person who made a mistake, or the people who designed a city where that person had no choice but to drive?
If you’ve created a system where the only way to get to work, school, or the grocery store is to operate a two-ton machine at highway speeds, knowing full well that not everyone can do that safely, then you are responsible for what happens next. You can’t act surprised when the predictable becomes reality.
Even “safe” roads in America are not truly safe. Engineers brag about wide lanes, big medians, guardrails, and bright signage. They call it “forgiving design.” But you can’t “forgive” the fact that every trip still requires people to pilot deadly machinery at lethal speeds.
Every hour of every day, someone dies in a car crash. And we call them “accidents,” as if they were random or unavoidable. But they’re not random. They’re built into the design. The engineers who made these roads could tell you exactly how many people will die on them each year. They run those models. They know the numbers. And they build them anyway.
Drunk driving is the perfect example of how our urban design fails us. Nobody is saying people should drink and drive. But when it’s common, that’s a symptom of terrible planning.
If someone wants to have a few drinks, they should be able to do that without risking their life or anyone else’s. In most American cities, that’s not possible. You drive to the bar because there’s no other option. You can’t walk because there’s no sidewalk. You can’t take a bus because it either doesn’t exist or stops running early in the evening. You could take an Uber, but that’s expensive. So people rationalize. “I’ve only had one or two. I’ll be fine.”
And here’s the kicker: cities require bars to have parking lots. They literally make it illegal to open a bar without providing a place for people to park their cars. They are mandating a system that encourages drinking and driving. Then they turn around and lecture us not to do it. It’s absurd.
Meanwhile, in Europe, you can walk to a bar. You can take a tram home. You can go out, drink, and get home safely. The safe option is also the convenient one. In America, the safe option barely exists.
Here, if you don’t want to drive, you’re out of luck. You either pay for expensive rideshares or risk walking along a strode with no sidewalk. So people drive, even when they shouldn’t. And when something goes wrong, we blame them.
But the truth is, most of these “bad drivers” are just doing what the system forces them to do. They’re acting rationally inside a setup that makes the rational thing dangerous.
Traffic engineers like to say they’re just following orders. “The city told us to widen the road, so we widened it.” But that’s not good enough. If someone told them to build a bridge they knew would collapse, would they do it? Would they sign off on something they knew would get people killed?
Of course not. Yet they do it all the time with roads. They sign off on stroads that they know will lead to hundreds of deaths a year. They approve designs that make walking, biking, and transit impossible. They don’t want to kill anyone, but they don’t care enough to stop. And that indifference is deadly.
When someone dies in a car crash, we talk about personal responsibility. But we almost never talk about the people who built the environment that made that crash inevitable.
Drivers might hold the steering wheel, but it’s the planners and engineers who paved the road, set the speed limits, banned mixed-use zoning, and made driving mandatory. The blood isn’t only on the drivers’ hands. It’s on the people who built a system that forces everyone to do something dangerous just to live their lives.
If we actually want to stop the death and destruction, that’s where we need to start looking.
Kyle Piira 