AAA’s study also points out how difficult it will be to fix some of the contributors to this problem. In many places, the built environment needs to be changed, but it’s expensive, and American society is just too accepting of traffic deaths to demand it happen. There are clashes between local and state governments—the latter often owns the arterial roads where these deaths are happening, leaving the cities powerless to take action themselves.

It’s a long slow path back from the car centric cities we’ve built. The time to start is now.