Death by Design
Reading Time: 7 minutesPedestrians Are Dying in Record Numbers. There’s Nothing ‘Accidental’ About It., There’s nothing ‘accidental’ about pedestrian deaths., Why American roads are so dangerous for pedestrians.
If you were to draw a graph of pedestrian deaths in America, you’d see a line that began to dip slowly in the late 1970s. That line would trend downward at a steady pace until roughly 10 years ago, when it would start to go the other way, telling a story about pedestrians and how they died.
That story is shaped by two key factors: Vehicles are getting bigger, and people are becoming more likely to live in places with more dangerous roads. Last year, more than 7,500 pedestrians were killed on our roads—a 40-year-high. On last Sunday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Jessie Singer, author of There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster―Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, about why deaths are on the rise—and our deadly tendency to treat these deaths as individual accidents, when they’re really part of something much larger.
Lizzie O’Leary: How did you get involved in pedestrian and road safety?
Jessie Singer: In 2006 my best friend, a New York City high school math teacher named Eric Ng, was killed while riding his bike on a separated biking and walking path that runs along the west side of Manhattan. He was killed by a driver who mistakenly turned and entered the path. That driver was also drunk and speeding, and he went to prison. And for a long time, that was the end of the story. What happened 11 years later was that a different man rented a truck, and he followed the same route as my best friend’s killer, except this driver intentionally turned onto the path.
I remember being so shocked and devastated that the exact same thing had happened again, the same route, the same location, the same mechanism of harm—but it was an entirely different story, and it pushed me to look deeper into my best friend’s death. And I found that other people had been killed there, before and after, on the same path, by drivers doing the same thing. Every time, the story told was ‘It was an accident.’ And so no problems were solved.
The truth was that drivers ended up on this path prior to the terror attack because it looked like an adjacent road. It had a double yellow line running down the middle, like every road in America. Nothing was preventing a full-sized car or truck from turning right onto it. And it stayed that way until a man with murderous intentions took advantage. And so after the terror attack, after this intentional attack, the city and state got together, and they made the harm impossible. They barricaded every entrance, so you could take a bike down the path, you could walk down the path, but you couldn’t drive a car down it anymore. And for me, it was this realization that looking at these as accidents was a wish fulfillment of willful ignorance in the face of pretty preventable harm.
In the time since your friend’s death, what has happened to pedestrian safety in the U.S.?
Very little. Is that too devastating of an answer? The truth is that we have seen things get much worse. The size of automobiles has grown much, much larger. Those vehicles have gotten heavier. They are more likely to be pickup trucks and SUVs, where their visibility is absolutely terrible. And we’ve seen a total lack of interest from the federal government in addressing the problem and actually looking at why people are buying these big vehicles, why people are dying more, and actually taking on the problem as a regulator.
One thing the data shows is that this is a particularly American problem. In other wealthy places, like Europe and Japan, pedestrian fatalities have fallen dramatically. Even in Canada, which is also big and also relies on cars, the likelihood of dying in a crash is much lower than it is here. Why?
There are a few things going on here. We prize enforcement as a solution to traffic safety compared to other countries, and it is ineffective. We have the biggest cars. We also have the most dangerous streets. And our regulatory agencies are, at best, defanged and defunded by comparison.
So if you go to Europe and Japan, where pedestrian fatalities are in decline the whole time ours have been rising, you see narrow roads, you see low speed limits, you see expansive public transit, so fewer people need to drive. You see vehicles that are tested and rated for pedestrian safety. There are high fuel taxes and high fuel-economy standards, so driving a big car is unaffordable, so they’re simply not made and not sold. And they’re rolling out effective autonomous technology like intelligent speed assist, which automatically governs vehicle speeds to the road limit.
How do electric vehicles fit into this picture?
Electric vehicles are currently and are expected to dramatically exacerbate the problem because electric vehicles are even bigger and heavier than the heaviest vehicles on the road now because their batteries weigh so much.
Wow. It’s counterintuitive. People in the market for an EV might be thinking, ‘I am buying a virtuous car’—but not from this standpoint.
Not from this standpoint. And actually, that gets at a really key part of the problem, which is that our safety ratings for vehicles have nothing to do with safety, and people are totally uninformed as consumers. And this is really where you get the failure of our regulators, of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, to educate people. They’re in the process of updating NCAP, which is the New Car Assessment Program, which is how your car might get that five-star safety rating you hear about in car commercials.
And so, unlike in Europe and Japan, U.S. NCAP never assessed cars for the safety of people outside the vehicle. So you can drive a tank that will kill any pedestrian it encounters and get a five-star safety rating.
NHTSA launched an NCAP update a few years back, and the original thing they published had nothing about pedestrians. People threw a fit, and they were flooded with something like 16,000 comments calling for the inclusion of pedestrian and bicyclist safety testing for these vehicles. And they did add it, but instead of making it a regulatory framework like it is in these other countries, they made it voluntary. So there’s voluntary pedestrian safety testing that will be self-reported by the auto industry. It’s a pass-fail test, and it doesn’t impact the vehicle’s safety rating. So that’s not going to do anything, and it’s going to keep consumers in the dark, which really gets at what you’re pointing at: If they’re trying to buy a virtuous vehicle, there’s no way for them to even have that information.
It’s no secret that Americans love big cars. The top three sellers last year were all pickups: the Ford F-Series, the Chevy Silverado, and the Dodge Ram. Thanks to government tax incentives from the ’60s and ’70s and a little regulatory jujitsu that can classify SUVs as light trucks, automakers earn higher profit margins on trucks compared to cars. What’s the effect of that?
Because SUVs and pickup trucks are so large today, selling one sells more of them in this extremely dark, self-fulfilling prophecy. People are buying giant vehicles because they feel safer next to other giant vehicles. And if the next guy on the highway is in a tank, you’re going to want to put your family in a tank too. You can understand why people make those decisions, at least if they were individuals and our roads were a vacuum. But in reality, our roads are public spaces, and we’ve got drivers in this arms race, and the pedestrians, along with cyclists and anyone who can’t afford a giant new car, we’re all collateral damage.
There’s a long history of automakers showing zero concern for safety in the name of selling more cars. That’s actually why we have an auto regulator. NHTSA was created because Ralph Nader exposed how automakers knew their vehicles were dangerous for stylish reasons.
Let’s talk about the infrastructure and urban design part of this. What are the attributes that make a city—or a suburb, or an exurb—particularly dangerous for pedestrians?
The attributes of a given street that is especially dangerous for pedestrians, it’s straight, it’s wide, it moves at a high rate of speed, and it is full of opportunities for conflict. So, rather than a highway that has no one alongside it, we’re talking about roads that are full of businesses and driveways and intersections but are still designed and moving like highways. And that’s not all. It’s a road that looks like that and is located in a place where the pedestrian is a rarity, and often that is driven by poverty, driven by the fact that you live in a place—and it’s the only place you can afford to live—where cars are the norm and public transit’s not, but you still need to walk to your bus stop.
And that’s where we see these roads designed with a crosswalk that is 10 minutes away from the bus stop and 10 minutes away from the apartment building. And so you’re struck with this decision: Do I walk for 20 minutes to get to the bus, or do I run across the road? Now, if you die on that street running across the road to catch the bus, you’ll be blamed for your death. But really, the design of that road and the conditions that required you to live in that place and near that road—that poverty—directly led to your death. But rarely do we look at these individual deaths from that systemic lens, and from the lens of what we put people up against when they don’t have a car in this country, when they’re forced to walk in this country.
You are describing a story of class and race, just seen through the prism of cars.
Absolutely. And the story of class and race is told statistically too. Pedestrian deaths are dominated in Black, Indigenous, and low-income communities, especially in the Southern United States.
So if you are listening to this and thinking, Oh, my God, this is terrifying … what can you do? What are your options?
There are a lot of options that we could hope to see from the federal government. I mean, starting with NHTSA hinging their NCAP star safety ratings on pedestrian safety, there’s so much technology they could be tapping and regulating on American automakers that they’re not, like intelligence speed assist that limits the vehicle speed to the speed of a roadway, limits on vehicle weight and size, requiring vehicle designs with high visibility for drivers. But I am the first to admit that regulation is good because it benefits everyone, but regulation is also slow. So in the meantime, there’s a ton that municipalities can be doing.
You could create tiered vehicle registration taxes that put a heavy price on the most deadly vehicles. You can expand public transit locally, you can narrow roads and build smaller ones, and you can daylight intersections—that’s when you remove all the parking spaces immediately adjacent to an intersection so that a driver at a stop sign or a stop line has much more visibility of anyone who’s crossing. That’s what Hoboken, New Jersey, did, daylight every intersection in the city—and it’s one of the first U.S. cities to reach zero traffic deaths.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/07/pedestrian-deaths-road-safety-traffic-accidents.html
Ref: slate
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