Pedestrian Safety: Putting the Blame Where It Belongs and Assessing Strategies for Slowing Cars

Brick street in Harmar, Ohio

In a pair of recent posts, I offered perspectives on pedestrian safety.  I wrote first about how the education of drivers isn’t an adequate strategy relative to the high compliance needed for pedestrian safety.  Later, I suggested that the best strategies for pedestrian safety may fall outside the Overton Window for acceptable public discourse.

Although pedestrian safety is never far from the mind of an urbanist, I’ll leave the subject behind for awhile after today, but not before making a couple of final points.

The first point is a distressing perspective on pedestrian safety from a recent story out of New York City.  Some of the details remain unclear, such as whether the police car turn indicator was flashing, whether the officer was talking on a cell phone, and whether the pedestrian was distracted by his own phone, but the facts, and the video, are still startling.

A police officer was stopped at a traffic signal.  Despite the clear visibility of a pedestrian on a far corner, the officer began a left turn upon the signal turning green, striking and killing the pedestrian who was walking with the green light.  And in the court documents submitted in response to the resulting civil suit, the NYPD legal staff made this argument, “Plaintiff’s implied assumption of risk caused or contributed, in whole or in part, to his injuries.”

Really?  Walking on a sunny day in a well-marked crosswalk with a green light is considered to be an “implied assumption of risk”?

Admittedly, it would have been unwise if the victim was being distracted by a cell phone because pedestrians should remain alert to risks.  But describing a pedestrian in full compliance with traffic laws as having “assumed risk” is poor public policy.  And I doubt a car passenger, injured through a mistake by the driver in another car, would be described as having made an “implied assumption of risk.”

I’m suspect that the NYPD legal staff has no real hope of exonerating the officer from her mistake and was only blaming the victim in hopes of reducing the monetary damages.  But this is a case where blaming the victim sends a public message that is both tone-deaf and contrary to the public interest.

As long as we try to define walking in a crosswalk as an inherently dangerous act, we’ll never make progress with pedestrian safety.

Moving onward, one of my earlier posts, in which I wrote about slowing traffic through lane widths and/or strategic location of parking, elicited a question about alternative traffic calming devices such as speed bumps or rumble strips.  It was a question worthy of a response, which I’ll try to provide here.

There can be places for these other types of traffic calming approaches, which are generally described as vertical traffic calming compared to the horizontal traffic calming of lane widths and parking placement.  Personally, I think a well-situated speed table, which is an extended area of raised pavement, can be effective in particular settings, such an intersection where pedestrians are the dominant mode or for pedestrian routes to a shopping center storefront.

But speed tables are an exception.  And most other vertical traffic calming measures, such as speed bumps, are never even offered for public consideration because emergency services departments oppose them as potentially slowing emergency response times.  Personally, I don’t think that assigning infinite weight to one variable, in this case emergency response times, is the right way to build a balanced, well-functioning city, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Even if we set aside the emergency response issue, I think the value of most vertical traffic calming measures is limited.  Rumble strips and speed bumps, much like stop signs, seem often to induce drivers to speed up between installations to make up for lost time.

I spent a recent weekend with a sister and brother-in-law who live in a subdivision protected by steep speed bumps, bumps that if I encounter at a speed above 2 mph will whack my oil pan.  I often note drivers speeding up between bumps in irritation at the time they’re spending traversing the bumps.  I pity pedestrians trying to cross the minefield of drivers distracted by simultaneously trying to travel quickly and to protect their undercarriages.

So I’m mostly dubious about vertical traffic calming measures of limited width.  But there are other options.  A regular reader who lives in a neighborhood with disintegrating pavement has told me, with an apparent straight face, that she has no problem with potholes because they provide traffic calming.

Brick ADA ramp to a brick street in Marietta, Ohio

If waiting for potholes to provide traffic calming seems too passive, David Levinson writing in Streets MN argues that alternative surfaces such as brick can provide traffic calming and a more distinctive streetscape.  However, bricks, and their counterparts in much of the country, cobblestones, are more expensive to install and to maintain than asphalt and also result in more tire noise.

At the bottom line, with the sole exception of speed tables in a few preferred locations, emergency services opposition, driver response, cost, and tire noise undermine every known vertical traffic calming measure.  The horizontal traffic calming measures of lane widths and parking placement remain the preferred alternatives, at least to my sensibilities.

And even those don’t help when a distracted police officer kills a pedestrian with the right-of-way and the police department tries to blame the pedestrian.

When I next write, I’ll finally circle back to the topic of affordable housing and urbanism.  I’m far from an expert on the subject, and fear that expertise is what is needed, but will share what I know and what I believe.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Prying the Overton Window Further Open

An intersection in Calistoga
that lacks pedestrian accommodation

A few weeks back, I noted a Petaluma post on Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social media site, arguing for increased pedestrian awareness by drivers.  It was cleverly written and I agreed with the thrust.  However, I disagreed with the implicit suggestion that awareness/education was the right approach for achieving a goal, pedestrian safety, for which 100 percent compliance should be the target.

So I wrote a post arguing that education isn’t a strong enough tool when universal compliance is needed.  Instead, I suggested alternative thinking about street design, specifically proffering street configurations that would result in lower travel speeds.

It was topic that many people found worthy of further discussion.  Tweets and retweets to over 20,000 followers followed the publishing of the post on my own and the Vibrant Bay Area websites.  Also, a link was included in a national blog on street design.  

But it seems likely that few of the readers I attracted were local.

I posted a link on Nextdoor comment thread that triggered the post.  Before the thread died, there were 42 comments total.  Of those, how many do you think agreed with my suggestion for alternative thinking about street design?  Zero.  How many even acknowledged my contribution to the discussion?  Still zero.  Every other comment remained, in one way or another, on the theme of better educating drivers and/or pedestrians.

I don’t report this to ridicule the other commenters or to complain about the lack of attention.  I’m accustomed to the response.  Silence, followed by a wandering away of the audience, has been the typical reaction to similar calls I’ve made elsewhere for street design changes that would reduce travel speeds and promote pedestrian safety.  The lesson I’ve garnered is that I must be persistent, with the hope that someday folks will begin paying attention.

I’ve now learned that there is a developed philosophy on the subject of acceptable and unacceptable topics for public discourse.  The Overton Window was named after the late Joseph Overton, an official with a public policy think tank.  Initially formulated to describe the rhetorical limits for public officials, the Overton Window has been described as the “range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.” 

The Overton Window models argues that, radiating outward from current policy, are ideas that progress through decreasing levels of public acceptance from popular to sensible to acceptable to radical to unthinkable.

Applying the Overton Window to the current presidential campaign, I think we’ve found that xenophobic police states, as long as described in temperate language, are somewhere between acceptable and radical, as are universal healthcare and reduced costs for secondary education.   But when the last two are described as “socialist” they become unthinkable, an interesting case of a label changing perceptions.

Moving to the world of urbanism, I’d suggest that mixed-use development is in the acceptable range.  Having a mixed-use district, along with transit and other accoutrements, to create walkable urban development is in the radical range.  But alternative street designs to promote pedestrian safety are unthinkable.  I find it an odd place to draw that line, but I’m not a member of the general public, at least on this topic.

So, what can be done to bring some of these ideas inside the Overton Window?  Increasing discourse.  I don’t see an alternative path to making topics become more acceptable than to continually talk about them as being reasonable and appropriate.  By writing this blog, I’m doing what I can, while acknowledging that there is always more that I could be doing, but what is truly needed is for readers to further the spread of urbanist ideas.

Obviously, I hope that readers agree with much of what I write.  But even if they disagree, or have alternative perspectives that differ in the details, they need to be participating in their communities and talking about ideas like walkable neighborhoods and improved pedestrian safety through different road design standards.

And lest someone think that the task is impossible, I’ll point out that Edinburgh recently set the speed limits on 80 percent of its streets at 20 mph, becoming the most recent city in Great Britain to take a similar step.  Ponder that for a moment.  A capital city, a functioning, vibrant city, set the most of its speed limits below the minimum speed limit allowed on California streets.

The problem isn’t that urbanists don’t have good ideas.  It’s that we haven’t been successful at getting those ideas into general circulation on this side of the pond.

Let’s work together to shove the Overton Window further open.

The earlier post on changed street designs also triggered comments on vertical traffic calming.  I have a further insight on the subject to offer in my next post.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Pedestrian Safety: Education Isn’t Enough

B Street in Petaluma

For those who may have been eagerly awaiting my promised thoughts on affordable housing, I must again disappoint.  (I also fear that I may disappoint even when I finally get around to the topic, but that’s another story.)  The topic of affordable housing remains high on my list, but this has become an unexpected well-filled week, largely with interesting urbanist stuff that I’ll share after the dust has settled.

But for now, I’m too booked to do my careful urbanist introduction to the subject of affordable housing.  Instead, I’ll tackle a topic about which I could almost write in my sleep, although my ability to readily discourse doesn’t minimize its importance.  The topic is pedestrian safety.

A Petaluma resident, writing on the website Nextdoor.com, recently posted the following “warning” to his fellow citizens:

“I'm writing to alert you all of a dangerous situation affecting all of us who live in Petaluma: pedestrians in the crosswalks.

“You may not be familiar with crosswalks or what a pedestrian crossing the road might look like, so I've attached a photo of some notorious pedestrians using a crosswalk.  A pedestrian is basically a driver who is not currently in a car.  Believe it or not, at some time you yourself may be a pedestrian.

“You are probably alarmed and asking yourself now, "What can I do?"  The answer is simple: when you are driving and encounter a crosswalk, look to see if there are pedestrians on it.  Looking to the left and right is not enough, you may also have to look in front of you. Important: keep in mind that pedestrians are people who are NOT in cars, so if you look both ways and don't see any cars, that doesn't rule out the presence of pedestrians.

“- Signed, a resident of B Street and frequent pedestrian who takes his life in his hands every time he walks home from the 4th & C bus stop”

I appreciate his concern and his use of humor to express it, but he’s whacking at the problem with the wrong end of the stick.

I have a theory about addressing public problems, which I call the 10-50-90 rule.  To the best of my knowledge, the formulation is strictly mine, but it’s possible that I read it somewhere and am inadvertently borrowing it.

The 10-50-90 rule comes in three parts.  If getting 10 percent of the population to make a change is your goal, education will work just fine.  If the goal is 50 percent, incentives are required.  And if 90 percent is necessary, criminalization or some form of physical prohibition must be undertaken.

I’ll use recycling as example.  In the mid-1980s, as the recycling movement got underway, we didn’t need everyone recycling everything possible and inundating the fledgling recycling centers.  Instead, we needed a few people to do the right thing and to help the recycling centers ramp up.  Public service announcements, i.e., education, worked fine.

As the 1990s progressed, the perception of the social good of recycling and the ability of the recycling industry to handle more material both grew.  So incentives, such as reduced rates for smaller trash cans with no charge for separated recyclables, came into play.  The incentives worked fine, with the volume of recyclables steadily growing.

Today, we have firm goals for reducing the percent of the waste stream heading to landfills, so there is now public discussion of how to punish those who fail to follow the recycling rules.

As the desirable rates of recycling grew, we progressed from education to incentives to criminalization.  It worked well.

Back to the pedestrian safety issue highlighted by the letter writer, perhaps the shortfall of his approach is now evident.  For pedestrian safety, even 90 percent compliance isn’t acceptable.  Having every tenth pedestrian struck in a crosswalk would be a very unfortunate result.  Instead, as the Vision Zero folks correctly argue, our goal for pedestrian safety should be 100 percent.

The letter writer, albeit well-intentioned, is using education, the 10 percent tool, to argue for pedestrian safety, the 100 percent goal.  He has brought a knife to a gunfight.  (Another way to consider this situation to ask if the drivers most likely to put pedestrians at risk are even reading Nextdoor.com, or capable of seeing themselves in Frequent Pedestrian’s letter.)

So what are the appropriate tools?  Where high levels of compliance are needed, criminalization and/or physical prohibition are the choices.  It’s already illegal to strike pedestrians with cars and that didn’t solve the problem, which leaves physical prohibition.  We need to change the design of the streets to make pedestrians safer.

Before anyone starts sketching complicated crosswalk configurations or designing new warning light systems, let me point out that speed is the single biggest predictor of pedestrian deaths.  If we want fewer dead people in walking shoes, what we need is to slow traffic.  Which is exactly the point that the Twenty is Plenty folks have been making for years, with a growing number of successes in Europe and more of than a handful of adherents on this side of the Atlantic.

But simply posting a 20 mph speed limit sign isn’t enough.  Rather than following speed limits, most drivers are accustomed to driving at the speed that feels comfortable for the road, which is how speed limits come to be set.

So what is needed is to make streets feel uncomfortable at higher speeds, effectively forcing drivers to travel more slowly.  And we know how to do that.

Frequent Pedestrian makes a specific reference to B Street in Petaluma.  I know B Street, often driving it.  I find that my comfortable speed on B Street is 28 or 29 mph, validating the 30 mph speed limit.  I also note that it is an uncommonly wide and open street, with 12-foot travel lanes, Class 2 bikes lanes, and room for parallel parking.

What if we reallocate that space?  At a minimum, we reduce the travel lane widths to 10 feet, giving the extra space to the bike lanes.  And perhaps we also convert the parallel parking into diagonal parking on alternating sides of the street, making the travel lanes into chicanes.  The likely result would be slower traffic and improved pedestrian safety.

There are limits to how far we can push this approach.  Under state law, streets can’t be configured for speeds under 25 mph.

(Isn’t it odd how the lowest allowable street speed is also the lowest speed at which pedestrians are more likely than not to die when hit by a car?.  At 20 mph, most pedestrians survive; at 25 mph most die.  The 25 mph minimum speed limit is like a humane hunting rule for drivers.  If you must hit a pedestrian with your car, make sure he’s dies at the first impact and doesn’t suffer.  More proof that the Twenty is Plenty folks are onto something.)

So, while I applaud the initiative and spirit shown by Frequent Pedestrian, I suggest that his efforts and his humor would be better directed at City Hall and at the State Capitol in arguing for street designs that promote better pedestrian safety.

To keep my desk free for other tasks. I think I’ll defer affordable housing for another couple of posts.  Instead, for my next post, I’ll offer a few more thoughts on the question of comfortable driving speeds, which I introduced above.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Stopping for Pedestrians

A reader recently asked for my advice about adding crosswalk markings in his community.  I provided contact information for a key contact in his town.  But I also provided a warning about the response he might receive.

The crosswalk location of interest to him seemed, at first glance, to be a reasonable place for additional street markings.  The street crossing connected a district that is largely residential with a district that is more mixed-use, offering restaurants, niche retail, and office space.  A number of pedestrians already cross at the spot he identified and it seems likely that more would follow if a crosswalk was painted.

But the location was also on a busy arterial, marked for 35 mph and often driven at 40.  The nearest signals were several blocks away in both directions.

I warned my reader that he was likely to get pushback from City Hall about his suggestion.  And the concern from City Hall would be reasonable, because crosswalks often don’t function as we expect, especially as speeds increase.

Although drivers are required under the law to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks and intersections regardless of the speed limit, the rate of compliance drops at speeds above 30 mph.  The cause is probably a combination of the speed at a car approaches an intersection, reducing reaction time, and of the additional stopping distance required at higher speeds.

On the other side of the equation, pedestrians are often emboldened by a crosswalk, stepping confidently into a street and trusting drivers to respect the painted stripes.

As a result and paradoxically, vehicle/pedestrian accidents often increase when a new crosswalk is provided on an arterial.  Because many drivers fail to respect crosswalks, pedestrians are often more safe when they are careful to cross the street in the absence of a crosswalk.  Perhaps elevated levels of stress have unfortunate long-term health implications, but when the immediate goal is reaching the far sidewalk, fear can be a good thing.

I’m eagerly awaiting a report from the reader about his reception at City Hall.

Shortly after this exchange, Smart Growth America released their “Dangerous by Design” report.  The report looks at the conditions and design standards of U.S. roads for use by non-motorists.  I haven’t yet read the entire report and will likely write further after I’ve completed my reading.  But for today, I wanted to note one particular finding from the report.

A study was done on Florida arterials with speed limits of 35 to 40 mph, counting the number of drivers who stopped for crosswalks where pedestrians were waiting to cross.  They found that only 1.1 percent of all drivers stopped.  Perhaps the rate is Florida is lower than the national average, with drivers in other states more respectful of pedestrians, but 1.1 percent is so appallingly low that it remains an embarrassment regardless of the other states.  And, although it’s only one data point, the Florida study fully justifies the warning I gave to the reader to expect City Hall pushback on his crosswalk idea.

Of course, another way to look at the data is to question whether we’ve set speed limits too high when pedestrians are likely to be present.  Which brings us back to the “Twenty is Plenty” argument.  Perhaps 20 mph is too low for arterials, but even 30 mph could have a dramatic impact on pedestrian safety.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)