Why did the pedestrian not cross the road?

New approaches promise safer streets for walkers

DYSPEPSIANA | James Krohe Jr.

Most unexpected turns to the right put someone in jeopardy – the Republicans’ insistence on spending cuts for federal health research is but one example – and that is as true on the streets as in Congress. Merchants and property owners in downtown Springfield have been fretting out loud about automobile drivers – most of whom are speeding through the center of Old Springfield to get somewhere else – who have become a menace to pedestrians. This has not been a problem for many years, there being no one on the streets to hit, but these days rubbernecking tourists and state workers confused by finding Korean tacos on a lunch menu are not always going to look twice for cars whose drivers don’t bother to look even once.

Springfield is hardly alone in suffering this problem; most pedestrian injuries and deaths in America occur when the walker is in a crosswalk. Perhaps you’ve heard that Illinois law now requires that drivers stop whenever a pedestrian enters a marked crossroad, even in midblock and even if no sign to that effect is visible. Most Illinoisans don’t, or drive like they don’t. Some localities have installed signs in the right-of-way that suggest in the nicest way possible that drivers must stop but they get hit more often than pedestrians. The Tribune’s John Hilkevitch recently reported that some 268 of the 344 signs the City of Chicago installed have had to be replaced. No doubt some fell to accidents but many, maybe most, were picked off by aggrieved drivers resentful at having to share their sacred space with pedestrians.

More signs probably won’t help. As I noted in one of my previous screeds, the conventionally engineered street forces drivers to pay attention to the wrong things. Instead of watching and taking account of other road users (including pedestrians and cyclists) drivers are watching for (and being distracted by) flashing lights, pavement markings and signs. Reading a sign warning of children at play, perversely, makes running into a child more likely.

There are better ways to do things, and several of them were discussed recently over at The Atlantic’s CityLab website, where Sarah Goodyear interviewed Matts-Åke Belin, traffic safety strategist with the Swedish Transport Administration. Belin recounted how Swedish road safety activists had long assumed that making people safer drivers meant making them better people. Belin advocates a different approach: Accept that people make mistakes behind the wheel (like talking on their phones) and create a traffic system for the fallible drivers instead of trying to adjust the humans to the system.

A good example is the right-on-red law.

It was adopted to expedite traffic flow, and is universally popular for having allowed Illinoisans to add whole minutes to their productive day. But Belin states – without quite saying so in so many words – that any country that allows the driver to make a turn at the same time a green light is given to a pedestrian entering the same space is nuts.

Here’s another example. A traffic system dedicated to making cars move faster makes it more dangerous. That’s physics talking, not me. If you get hit by a car going 30 miles per hour, your risk of dying is four chances in five. If you want a traffic system that leaves fewer people on foot killed or maimed by cars, you make drivers go slower – way slower. If you get hit by a car going 19 miles per hour, you have a nine in ten chance of living. That lower speed, by the way, is the default speed for residential streets and shopping districts in Sweden, whose pedestrian fatality rate is a little more than a quarter that in this country.

New York’s new mayor recently announced that his administration plans to start treating traffic fatalities as a public health problem and ordered city government agencies to figure out how to reduce those deaths to zero. In Chicago, the goal of the city transportation department’s new “action agenda” is to “eliminate traffic crash fatalities of all kinds within 10 years using approaches pioneered by the Swedes, among others.

Yeah, I know – Sweden is Sweden, and the U.S. is the U.S., and it will be a hot day in Kiruna before Americans start driving like Swedes. A disbelieving reader from the southwest suburbs responded to the Hilkevitch report by sneering, “We could very well have a full generation expecting to just step into one of these areas and traffic will miraculously come to a halt just for them.” It’s already happened. I lived 12 years on the West Coast, which is still part of the U.S. until the Republicans elect a president, and there traffic does miraculously come to a halt just for pedestrians. The California version of the crosswalk law was adopted back in 2001, and even Americans learn. The American Podiatric Medical Association ranked San Francisco as the safest U.S. city for pedestrians – and would podiatrists ever lie?

Contact James Krohe Jr. at [email protected].

Editor’s note

It seems downtown Springfi eld has been discovered by billionaires, and that’s a good thing. Bruce Rauner, who says he’ll fi x up the governor’s mansion and move in, was spotted relaxing at the Brewhaus Tuesday afternoon. That’s about the time we broke the news that Dubai billionaire Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor is buying the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel (see p. 8). Ald. Cory Jobe, who heads the committee looking for a developer for the YWCA block across the street from the mansion, wants to make sure the newcomers know downtown offers other investment opportunities as well. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher

Cover photo by Dan Williams, Treetop Productions, Inc