Angie Schmitt has been such a good follow on Twitter for me and I'm so happy I finally got around to reading her book. I was lucky to meet her at CNU Orlando this year and so I had already learned a lot from her, but the book was a good solidification and expansion of that knowledge. I loved it as a quick read that was also super enlightening. I feel like I want to send chapters of it to my friends it's just so persuasive and fact-based.
Schmitt starts the book with "The Geography of Risk" and "The Profile of a Victim," two chapters that lay out where pedestrians get killed and who they are. The worst region of the United States for pedestrians is the Sun Belt, which contains more cities built after cars were invented and started to dominate streets. These cities have fewer crosswalks, wider roads, and incomplete sidewalks. The victims tend to be poorer people, children, and the elderly. 75 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur at night, and 73 percent occur outside of crosswalks, usually in places where there are no crosswalks for long distances, parking lots, or driveways.
Then, Schmitt proceeds to analyze the factors that cause pedestrians to be killed in streets. They involve killer cars, bad incentives for transportation planners, victim-blaming mentalities, and laws that actually criminalize pedestrians. It also doesn't help that more people behind the wheel and on foot are distracted than ever. Owners of smart phones use them on 88 of every 100 trips, and average about 3.5 minutes per hour driving on their phone (only counting physical manipulation, not voice commands). But the size of cars is the worst. With higher hoods and heavier weights than ever before, our cars are deadlier than ever, especially SUVs and pickup trucks, which have become way more popular. Between 2010 and 2016, pedestrian fatalities involving SUVs increased 80 percent. This was largely because they were adopted far more after making up just 3 percent of vehicles sold in the US in 1983. They grew slowly and then suddenly in the 2010s, making up 48 percent of sales by 2018. These cars have much larger blind spots, which put children at the most risk. While Toyota Camry drivers can see a child three feet away, the Dodge Ram needs nine feet. And blind spots are often responsible for "bye-bye" deaths, when children run out to say goodbye to their parent, who doesn't see them and runs them over. Schmitt writes that lots of people prefer sitting up higher, and also like that they are safer in a bigger car; but of course that means that people outside of the car are less safe. Outside this book, I've also read that the increase in SUVs is a result of exceptions for SUVs and pickup trucks in environmental regulations and safety standards that don't take pedestrians into account.
Schmitt did really good analysis of "jaywalking," a term created by drivers in the 1920s to try to stigmatize what had been totally normal behavior before: walking in the street. They were successful in stigmatizing pedestrians and pushing them into small sidewalk spaces and then banning them from entering the street. Now, when pedestrians are killed anywhere outside of crosswalks, they are treated as the culpable party. However, Schmitt points out that in serious crashes, pedestrians are in the crosswalk 25 percent of the time, outside of the roadway 8.6 percent of the time, alongside the road where there is no sidewalk 9 percent of the time, and most of the others in driveways that split the sidewalk (although 25 percent are struck mid-block). While some politicians try to put the blame on pedestrians, those who do cross at the "wrong" places are usually not doing so because they like being in danger. In fact, the pedestrian's thinking has almost nothing to do with it. The Federal Highway Administration can look at environmental factors and determine with 90 percent accuracy whether or not a pedestrian will cross the street mid-block. So if we have these predictive capabilities, why aren't we building for them? In St. Paul, Minnesota, researchers even found success by putting up a sign on a crosswalk, listing the percentage of drivers who yielded in the past week alongside the "record." That increased yielding from 32 percent into the 70s. The reason for a lack of action isn't for want of money, but for want of attention. The people who walk and bike places are usually poorer people without influence. And instead, they are blamed as "jaywalkers" and even ticketed just for walking. In a study of jaywalking tickets in Jacksonville, FL, police officers were discovered to be ticketing people erroneously in half of jaywalking tickets. Officers thought that jaywalking was crossing the street anywhere without a crosswalk. But even in Florida, which has stringent jaywalking laws, Floridians can cross the street anywhere as long as they are yielding to cars, crossing at a right angle, and not crossing between two signalized crosswalks.
I'll just end by saying this is a fantastic book, and it should be required reading for any public city official or person working at a department of transportation.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Police chases kill about 355 Americans annually, and 1/3 of those are innocent bystanders.
- European regulations are requiring speed governors in new cars.
- In 2019, Oslo, a city of 673,000, had only one person killed in traffic in city limits, and he was a driver.
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