Free Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes

pedestrians. This is when the term “jaywalkers” came into prominence with public and press, often accompanied by cartoon images of fools and bumpkins wandering cluelessly into traffic. Crashes began to be referred to less as innately reckless and more as blamelessly accidental—or due to the recklessness of pedestrians for failing to look both ways before daring to walk near moving vehicles. Next the idea that pedestrians were impediments to progress, travel, and commerce—and therefore should be confined to crosswalks and punished for crossing “against traffic”—came into vogue. Cityscapes were reengineered and traffic signals installed to manage rising car traffic, but the moves also had the effect of corralling pedestrians. 21
    This reframing of the relative rights of drivers and pedestrians began before the Great Depression and continues to dominate current law, street behavior, and thinking. Drivers today have little patience for pedestrians who “impede” them, and rules that allow right turns on red lights have forced pedestrians at crosswalks to hesitate before stepping from the curb because of the risk of being run down by heedless or distracted drivers, despite the fact that pedestrians have the right of way. Speeding is a principal factor in car-pedestrian crashes, yet a majority of drivers routinely exceed posted speed limits, 22 with many reporting that they find it impossible to keep up with traffic flow without speeding. 23 Engineers routinely create streets and roads that encourage this with designs appropriate for speeds far in excess of posted limits. When a child runs into thestreet and is struck by a car, the prevailing sentiment today, unlike sixty years ago, often places blame on the child’s parents for negligent supervision. In Denver, there was widespread uncertainty over whether to view four-year-old Austin Strasser’s death while legally crossing a street with his mother a crime or an unfortunate accident that could have happened to anyone. This confusion lingered even after the driver admitted to driving so carelessly it killed a boy. The antipathy is understandable: the driver who plowed into a mother pushing a stroller in a Denver crosswalk did something terrible, but did she do anything unusual? What driver hasn’t turned the wheel and pushed the accelerator in a moment of inattention or impatience or bad decision-making? The explanation for little Austin’s death, that the driver was blinded by glaring sunshine, is no excuse. The proper response when visibility is poor at an intersection where pedestrians are present is for the driver to stop until certain the way is clear, not to plunge blindly into a crosswalk. But other drivers make bad choices all the time in all sorts of circumstances. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, nothing bad happens. The driver—and the Strassers—were just the unlucky exceptions. Harsh jail sentences for doing something everybody else does daily seem hypocritical to many. But trivializing the carelessness that killed a child is no solution, either. So far this conflict between rules, practice, and decency has yielded a moral paralysis—and decades of a deadly status quo.
    Some high-profile programs in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles seek to shake society free of this torpor, to make the world safer for pedestrians with lower speed limits in select areas where walkers and cyclists abound. The slogan “Vision Zero” 24 is often used to describe such efforts, which aspire to create a human environment in which there are zero traffic deaths. So far, the U.S. efforts on this score, and on traffic safety in general, seem to lag far behind the European programs theyemulate—and have been plagued by pitched political battles and mixed messages as well. Drivers simply don’t want to slow down, and all too often, they are enabled rather than discouraged, even in