Some simple changes to bike lanes and street/lane design in NYC is drastically reducing cycling deaths. It took the city less than a decade to make a big difference.
A lot of change is actually well within reach even in sparsely populated suburbs.
What’s really happening is that cars are subsidized and encouraged. Make people pay the real costs of driving and parking and replacing bad zoning rules and development practices and you’ll see steady progress.
Mandatory parking minimums are effectively a price cap. We don’t even cap the price of healthcare, why are we capping the price of parking?
There is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem though; the infrastructure for cars makes things less dense. Without removing minimum-parking laws (which is what TFA is about), it will be extremely challenging to build walkable areas.
My parents live in a fairly dense part of Northern Virginia, and we walk a lot of places. More than 50% of our walking distance is across or around parking, in some cases much more.
