Thomas Jefferson once said, “Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.”
And further back, Hippocrates noted that “Walking is man’s best medicine.”
But, oh, how far we’ve regressed. About 100 years ago, when cars started populating city streets, people strolling along all of a sudden started getting stressed, watching where they wandered, and even having their daydreaming interrupted by police arrests for this new thing called “jaywalking.”
It got way worse. A recent article in The New Republic noted how the simple, human, and decent act of walking is more available for some people than for others.
Sacramento’s black residents are five times more likely to receive a jaywalking citation than their non-black neighbors. Seattle police handed out 28 percent of jaywalking citations from 2010 to 2016 to black pedestrians, who only make up 7 percent of the city’s population. other types of pedestrian traffic violations also tend to be enforced more heavily against black residents.
The very act of walking has become a major equity issue. And the connections between police racism and unsafe streets for pedestrians because of bad planning are very clear in a report released today by Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition. Our spaces are not planned properly, and, if they were, people could roam them more happily and healthily.
The report’s authors note: “Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people while they were walking throughout the United States. That’s more than 13 people per day, or one person every hour and 46 minutes. It’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people dying every single month. Unlike traffic fatalities for motor vehicle occupants, which decreased by 6.1 percent from 2008 to 2017, pedestrian deaths have been steadily rising since 2009.”
Dangerous by Design 2019 includes a map of the top 20 most dangerous areas for pedestrians, based on 2008 to 2017 data. The map is littered with places you wouldn’t be caught dead walking throughout Florida and the South region. The only metro listed in the top 20 in the northern half of the U.S. is Detroit-Warren-Dearborn.
The report’s authors call on the U.S. Congress to lead an effort on safer streets, since “federal
dollars and policies helped create these unsafe streets in the first place.”
Recommendations for states include:
- Set performance targets that will improve safety, with penalties for states that fail to meet those targets.
- Prioritize safety over vehicle movement, which currently tends to be the highest priority. One way to make safety a higher priority is to get rid of the “level of service” metric.
- Provide state transportation officials and engineers with the most up-to-date training and
education on implementing Complete Streets.
And recommendations for state or local action include:
- Prioritize projects that will benefit those who suffer disproportionately. For example, the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, when deciding which projects to fund in their selection process, awards extra points to projects that will improve safety for people walking or biking in certain disadvantaged areas.
- Embrace the Federal Highway Administration’s new design guidelines that thankfully rolled back old regulations that treated all streets and roads like highways. This can help places test out bold, creative approaches to safer street design.
- Design roads to reduce speeds wherever possible. For people on foot, the likelihood of surviving a crash decreases rapidly as speeds increase past 30 mph.
- Pass actionable Complete Streets policies.
- Stop referring to pedestrian fatalities as unavoidable “accidents” and call them “crashes” – preventable deaths.
These and many other efforts can make a difference. For example, in Milwaukee, the Sojourn Theatre staged a performance to highlight insufficient signal timings at crosswalks. As a result, the city adjusted countdown clocks to give pedestrians more time to make it safely across the street. There are all kinds of pilots cities can try to calm driver behavior in pedestrian zones, and anyone can take steps to remind drivers to be safer in their own neighborhoods.
Dangerous by Design 2019 is an important addition to the research in showing us what a big problem walking safety has become, especially in terms of equal rights. Now the question is: how can a stronger coalition across the country make large-scale action happen?