The Missouri DOT has put together this snappy little moving picture show, explaining how and why highways fall apart. As the years go by at super-duper fast forward speed, watch the surface cracks develop and water speeds into the underlaying rock and soil layers, turning them to “mush.” You can repave, of course, but the film explains why that only kinda works. Thirty or so years on, the $1 billion highway is a bumpy mess, and you’re left clutching a $300 million repair bill.

According to research in Britain, 50 percent of drivers between the ages of 18 and 24 send text messages while they’re behind the wheel. For anyone who’s seen the studies showing that texting drivers are about as safe as those who’ve just lost (or won) a Wild Turkey drink-off, that’s fairly terrifying.

So, authorities in a town in Wales decided to commission a film showing just how terrifying the results can be. Four teenage girls are riding in a car, the driver is texting, and–it just gets bloody and disturbing from there. Out of curiosity, we asked a sometimes offender in that demographic for an opinion on the film. After the first 30 seconds our focusee looked pale and shaken and said, “I’m never going to do that again.”

The buzz around the Welsh short just adds more momentum to the international movement to crack down on the practice. In the US, Congress is considering the ALERT Drivers Act, which would cut transportation funding to states that don’t outlaw it. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is also convening a “distracted driving” summit next month to examine the problem and consider what measures to take against it.

Meanwhile, YouTube has deemed this film so graphic that you need to be at least 18 in order to watch it… this in a country where millions of 16 and 17 year-old drive and text each year and untold numbers of them pay for it with their lives. Smart stuff, fellas.

That’s the underlying suggestion of a recent post at the Project for Public Spaces blog, anyway, which compares Dutch and American road design strategies.

By and large, the US has taken the freeway as a model for all it’s roads, favoring big, straight thoroughfares with wide lanes and shoulders. In short, the kind of road that allows you to go fast and drift around a bit without slamming into an embankment or a parked car or something. The philosophy came out of freeway design and strategies for making high-speed driving safer. By the late 60s, there was plenty of evidence this “forgiving” approach was working on the Interstates, so traffic engineers sensibly decided that the principles should be applied to all our roads. With everything from suburban boulevards to city streets, we’ve essentially been creating mini-freeways. And our road fatality numbers have fallen 15 percent in the last 35 years — so what’s anybody complaining about, you might ask. After all, whatever we’ve done is making drivers safer.

Well, around the time we were embracing the “forgiving highway” model for all our roads, the Dutch–who also agree that freeways should be structurally forgiving of drivers–had a 20 percent higher overall fatality rate on their roads than than US did. But they opted for a different design principle for city streets. Urban roadways were made narrower and less hand-holdy for drivers and more accommodative of cyclists and those weirdos who for some reason like to walk. They set up a system where highways were for going fast, but city streets were different–they would get you to and from the highways and they would get you around town, but they were not mini Interstates. They frequently became stripped down affairs, without all the bright yellow markings and massive concrete dividers and towering stoplights that we USAers are used to. The philosophy is sometimes known as “naked” or “self-explaining” roads. In essence, a range of users are pretty much left to figure out the specifics of getting around according to their own good sense. As one author describes it, the purpose “is to make the street legible so users understand that it is a shared environment and behave accordingly.”

A fascinating example is a major–20,000 cars a day!–intersection in the Dutch city of Drachten that used to look a lot a typical American intersection, with lots of bright paint and traffic signals and enormous signs telling you what and what not to do. Traffic planners tore that stuff out and went naked, just putting down a roundabout in the center. The sidewalks even disappeared as distinct structures. Everyone figured it out though. Fatalities at the intersection dropped markedly, as did travel times.

That was just one data point in the larger national trend. While the US traffic fatalities have fallen by 15 percent, Holland’s have fallen by 75 percent. And, thus, the headline assertion: If America had matched Dutch fatality rates, we would have had only 15,000 deaths on our roads last year instead of 37,000.

Eric Dunbaugh of the Texas Transportation Institute has looked at the fatality rates on “livable streets”–broadly speaking, those that aren’t mini freeways–in the US and found that they are considerably lower (pdf). Apparently, using street design to wean drivers from highway-style driving habits really does save lives.

The rub, however, is that involves slower diving speeds. As Dunbaugh puts it: “The more basic problem appears to be that safety and livability objectives are often in direct conflict with the overarching objective of mobility, and its proxy—speed.”

We Americans do love our speed. Saying, “We’re going to take this wide smooth inky-black four-lane street with bright painted lines you’re used to–where you’re functionally encouraged to go 15 mph over the speed limit and all you have to worry about is staying in your wide well-marked lane and do what the traffic lights tell you–and replace it with a ‘naked’ street, where you’ll be jumbling around with everybody and just have to be a grownup and go slower and be considerate and observant,” will not necessarily be the beginning of an easy conversation. But it’s certainly an important one.