by Gregg Easterbrook
My kids attend public school in the suburbs, so, like any other parent, I cringed upon hearing of the two high school murders recently in Santee, California. But though school shootings are a shock and an outrage, I don't stay up at night worried that they endanger my kids: overall, school violence has been declining for a decade, and homicide by adolescents has been falling for nearly as long. When I worry about my kids' safety, I think about far more likely threats: drugs, driving young--or getting hit by a car while crossing the street.
In 1999, the year of the Columbine massacre, 28 students nationwide were killed by violence in schools, while 840 kids under age 20 were killed by cars as they walked, often to school. But, although school shootings spark a national outcry and huge government spending, street-crossing deaths draw no notice and no action. Pedestrian deaths are deemed, well, pedestrian.
For the past two years, Montgomery County, Maryland, the Washington suburb where I live, has seen more people killed by cars than by guns, knives, or beatings combined. Nationally, cars and trucks kill about 5,000 American pedestrians per year--about one-quarter the number of murders. Pedestrian deaths, though not intentional, have much in common with homicides: an innocent person is suddenly cut down by someone wielding a dangerous weapon. But, while Americans devote enormous attention to murder (as we should), our 5,000 dead pedestrians largely escape public consciousness. And government consciousness: the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a nonpartisan group, estimates that the government spends roughly 150 times as much on highways as on pedestrian safety.
Could it be that we hear so little about pedestrian deaths because many of the victims are poor or immigrants? In the "safe" suburbs--where pedestrian deaths increasingly occur--the affluent typically move exclusively in cars, and the only ones trying to cross busy streets are students or the poor. In Fairfax County, Virginia, another Washington suburb, 23 percent of pedestrians killed between 1993 and 1998 were Hispanics, though Hispanics constituted just eight percent of the county's population. Studies in California and other states have also shown that pedestrian deaths occur disproportionately among Hispanics and the poor.
Another reason we ignore these deaths is that it's easy to blame the victim. Two-thirds of pedestrian fatalities happen in darkness, and those struck are often wearing dark garments. Many others occur when someone tries to dash across a busy boulevard rather than cross at a traffic light. Dashing across is a particular problem among immigrants, who often come from small villages where everyone dashes across the street but where there aren't anywhere near as many vehicles moving anywhere near as fast.
But pedestrian deaths aren't mostly the fault of pedestrians; they're mostly the fault of drivers. One major factor is speed--the result of our infatuation with hurry. According to a Department of Transportation study, raising average traffic speed limits from 35 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour doubled the pedestrian death rate. As anyone who regularly drives in the suburbs knows, traffic increasingly moves at breakneck speed even on residential streets, partly because traffic backups cause frustrated drivers to nail the throttle whenever the road is clear, and partly because those enormous SUVs make people feel invincible. So even if you're wearing hot pink and dutifully cross at a stoplight, you're still taking your life into your hands.
My local menace is Montgomery County's eight-lane, car-clogged Rockville Pike, which bisects a ten-mile shopping colossus. It contains lengthy stretches where no one can cross safely because continuous torrents of priority-left or right-on-red traffic are surging into the crosswalk even when the "walk" light is illuminated. One person was killed this year at the intersection of Rockville Pike and Tuckerman Lane. The victim had been crossing with the right-of-way and was mowed down by a driver madly gunning to beat the light.
As ever more drivers gun ever-higher-horsepower engines, this sort of thing is also likely to happen more. Everyone enrolled at Seven Locks Elementary, the wonderful neighborhood school that two of my children attend, is classified by the county as a bus kid--even those who live within view of it--because it is so dangerous to cross the suburban boulevard near the school. Placing a crossing guard at the intersection would be cheaper than busing everyone, but the county won't do it, reasoning that, with so many suburbanites speeding in SUVs while yakking on the phone, even the guard wouldn't be safe.
Threats to pedestrian safety do not just imperil school kids, the poor, and immigrants. They diminish a sense of community: Adults can't go on strolls and kids can't walk to school because people become predatory behind the wheel. And not being able to walk is also, not surprisingly, bad for public health: studies show that during the last generation the trend line for obesity has risen at almost exactly the same rate that the trend line for "percentage of trips made on foot" has gone down. Still, the car-commuter lobby is so strong that many local governments don't even try to restrain speeding and hostile driving. Pedestrian deaths have been much discussed in Montgomery County political circles in recent years, and so far the county council and police are planning to do…nothing.
National policymakers endlessly focus on new safety devices for drivers and passengers. But, measured by collision deaths per mile traveled, it is 36 times more dangerous to walk than to be in a car, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project. What about heading off pedestrian deaths? Intersections can be engineered to make walking safer; speed bumps and traffic circles can force traffic to slow down. Local governments can increase fines for violating pedestrians' right-of-way and make it more likely that killing a pedestrian will result in a charge of manslaughter, bringing this offense in line with most unintentional killing with a weapon. (Amazingly, in many cases there is no legal penalty at all for running someone down.)
We'll never stop the random homicides by people who go berserk. We could stop most pedestrian deaths if only we tried.
Gregg Easterbrook
This article originally published in The National Review
