Louisville's Car Violence Crisis
A recent article published by Axios Charlotte discusses the crisis of traffic deaths in their city so far in 2025, with 31 Charlotteans dying from car crashes in the past six months. Of those killed, 9 were pedestrians or cyclists. This is a rising trend for the city, which has pledged to eliminate traffic deaths through its “Vision Zero Program”.
Louisville finds itself in a very similar boat, seeing 36 roadway fatalities so far in 2025 spanned across over 10,000 crashes.This is a number higher than Charlotte (to be fair, our data is about a week newer), despite the city having a population over 200,000 people larger than Louisville in an area of pretty similar size. Both cities also adopted Vision Zero but have not seen significant statistical changes in traffic deaths, although Charlotte has had the program for three years longer than Louisville.
Louisville Metro’s yearly traffic deaths have remained stagnant since 2020, not returning to Pre-COVID levels despite the adoption of Vision Zero and a declining population. The city has seen a wide array of work take place in order to curb traffic violence, but much of this work tends to be the local classic 4-lane to 3-lane conversions. These conversions have been shown to reduce collisions [2] [3] but they are not the be-all-end-all of traffic safety. One of the most straightforward ways to reduce traffic deaths is to shift rideshare away from private vehicles and towards biking, walking, and public transportation. These typical conversions often feature what are essentially “bike gutters”, unprotected bike lanes that meet the legal minimum size, fill with clutter, and are right up against car traffic that moves pretty fast as the roads themselves are still the same size. Throw that in with the fact that TARC is facing a fiscal cliff and cutting service back dramatically, it makes it clear the city is still incentivizing car travel above all else. This is reflected by the fact that almost everyone in Louisville commutes by private vehicle, with other commuting methods becoming less common or remaining relatively stagnant.
Our most dangerous roadways are the same every year practically: Dixie Highway, Preston Highway, Broadway, etc., and yet political willpower to make them safer is barely there. When major road redesigns occur, they are often underbaked and take decades to progress. We also only tend to address the direct harm of cars (crashes), and not the many indirect harms they bring, but that's a whole other can of worms.
Broadway is currently in the midst of a redesign; much of it is incredibly wide and the most-used TARC route by far is on that street. This creates a clear need for some kind of dedicated bike infrastructure and general traffic calming. I understand this is a vital roadway that intersects much of the city, but the current estimate for breaking ground on this project is 2035, and who knows how long it will take to complete construction? Or if funding will even be there in the next few years? East Market is another embarrassing example of Louisville’s break-neck pace with needed infrastructure, with the redesign for that originally being proposed in 2011 but not breaking ground until 2024. To put that into perspective and make some of you feel old: I was in elementary school when it was proposed and in graduate school when construction actually began.
When road redesigns take this long, how many people are seriously injured or killed while the government overpays some contractor to go through a labyrinthian development, community engagement, and construction process? This isn’t a Louisville-specific problem, obviously, as Charlotte is going through a similar car violence crisis as are most American cities; regardless it is worth asking why this violence is so accepted and not fought with the same veracity of other causes of mass death? Executive Director of Sustain Charlotte, Susan Binn, puts it pretty aptly in the article that inspired this piece:
“If there was anything else happening in Charlotte that had caused 30 people to die, everybody would be talking about it”
Passive acceptance of violent crime and murder would sink any local government, but this is standard practice for many municipal governments when it comes to the harm caused by cars. The traffic death and injury that has become commonplace in Louisville is a crisis, and our elected officials should act accordingly. The lack of change in crash data over the past years is an indictment of the extent to which we allow death to rule our lives when it comes to automobiles.