Bloomberg: How Japan won its "traffic war"

In mid-August, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that the surge in American traffic deaths is continuing: An estimated 9,560 people died on US roadways in the first quarter of 2022, 7% more than a year ago and the highest first quarter total in two decades.

The traffic safety slide is a trend that precedes Covid-19, but the disruptions of the pandemic seemed to exacerbate the issue in the US, a phenomenon that observers like New York Times’ David Leonhardt have attributed to mental health issues and smartphone use: “Many Americans have felt frustrated or unhappy, and it seems to have affected their driving,” he wrote recently, adding in a tweet that “traffic deaths began to rise around 2015…around the same time that smartphones became ubiquitous.”

If stress and cell phones are causing this crisis, it’s curious why so many other countries have avoided it. Almost all developed nations have seen a decline in roadway deaths over the last decade, while the US has endured a 30% rise.

An American is now about 2.5 times as likely as a Canadian to die in a crash and three times as likely as a French citizen, according to Bloomberg.

The contrast is even starker with Japan, a country known for its innovative approach to transportation (where else can you watch a baseball manager enter a stadium on a hovercraft?). Fewer than 3,000 people died in Japanese crashes in 2021, compared to almost 43,000 in the United States. On a per capita basis, Japan had just 2.24 deaths per 100,000 residents, less than a fifth the US rate of 12.7 per 100,000.

And Japanese roads are getting even safer: 2021 saw the fewest road fatalities of any year since record-keeping began in 1948. It’s quite a change from the 1960s, when a booming economy and millions of inexperienced drivers contributed to annual fatality figures six times higher than they are today. So dangerous were the nation’s streets that Japanese observers called the phenomenon the “Traffic War,” noting that annual roadway deaths exceeded those from the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-5.

Japan is now a traffic safety success story — especially when compared to the US. Here are a few lessons from the island nation that could resonate outside its borders.

Since launching the world’s first bullet train, the Shinkansen, in 1964, Japan has been renowned for the frequency, reliability and speed of its rail service. Intercity trains are so fast and frequent that driving often doesn’t make sense: As many as 15 trains per hour leave Tokyo for Osaka, many of them making the 332-mile journey in under two and a half hours. In a car, the trip would take at least six hours.

For comparison, traveling from Philadelphia to Boston on Amtrak’s fastest Acela service will take at least twice as long, with fewer than ten daily departures per weekday. Beyond the Shinkansen, a dense network of additional rail lines provides connections to Japanese cities and towns.