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6 GROUNDCOVER NEWS TRANSPORTATION Walking isn't dangerous, cars are! GREGG SALDUTTI Groundcover contributor Caution, cars may not stop. It is not the kind of advice you want when crossing the road with a marked crosswalk, but it is the only advice offered at the crosswalks on Stadium Blvd. Local law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians at marked crosswalks in Ann Arbor. But should we really expect drivers to follow it? According to the City of Ann Arbor, no. This warning might strike some as just common sense in the interest of pedestrian safety. After all, the number of pedestrians being killed by drivers has been rising since 2019 — up 17% in Michigan since that year. Even through the pandemic, when fewer people were driving, more people on foot were dying. There are many factors at play, including more reckless driving; less traffic enforcement; larger, heavier cars; and more built-in distraction to newer cars. These statistics highlight the importance of doing more to ensure road safety. However, in the case of many crosswalks around the city, this doing more comes in the form of not actually doing anything, but rather, warning people on foot that they are not safe there. Importantly, these messages recognize the fact that it doesn’t matter if walkers are following the law or not — the roads were not designed to make them safe, and we are okay with that. The implied message could be read as: Hey, drivers won’t follow the law here, and we know that, so you are on your own. Motonormative Many would fall back on the "common sense" argument to pedestrian safety: wait for the road to clear. Following two incidents in March — one that involved a high school student — these usual sentiments were echoed in calls for pedestrians to be less distracted when walking, and that people need to be taught more "defensive" pedestrianism. The issue of distraction is surely at play as sources of distraction on the roads are rising — most notably in ever-larger infotainment screens on car dashboards. However, we never seem to hear any news about an epidemic of pedestrian-on-pedestrian crashes that distracted walking would surely spur. After all, being on the phone while walking carries zero risk to anyone else. But, what gets completely lost in this discussion about pedestrian "responsibility" is that both walkers were in a crosswalk when they were hit by a driver. Beyond the issue of blaming people for being hit in a crosswalk, there is another problem regarding the legal and moral double standards surrounding cars (a concept known as motonormativity). We would never give jaywalkers the same leeway to break the law as we grant cars with our crosswalk warnings. However, we would surely blame them if they were hit or killed while jaywalking. In fact, in Ann Arbor, the fine for jaywalking is virtually the same as the fine for drivers failing to yield to someone in a crosswalk. Arguments for enforcement of jaywalking routinely cite safety as a concern. While jaywalking laws are veiled in the notion of protecting pedestrians, in practice the enforcement of jaywalking laws seems to be more focused on harassing low-income communities and removing people from public space in the name of free-flowing traffic, a fact that is illustrated by the history of how jaywalking came to be. A jaywalk through history Urban roads used to be shared public spaces without priority given to any type of user. For example, the L.A. municipal code of 1925 explicitly acknowledged that all street users share equal priority when using public space. That changed around 100 years ago when auto lobbies began investing in campaigns to criminalize jaywalking and influence media coverage of events where pedestrians were killed or injured by drivers. This coverage often painted pedestrians as irresponsible and, implicitly, at fault. The auto lobbies also sponsored campaigns that presented police and hired actors to publicly shame jaywalkers, rather than simply issue tickets or warnings. In fact, the term "jay" used to be a derogatory term used for someone from the country — unaccustomed to the fast pace of city life. The end goal was to recast the shared public spaces of streets to the sole dominion of cars, and more importantly to open up urban spaces for unfettered car travel. But this came with costs. Like many social costs incurred by our social systems, it is often low income communities and communities of color that bear both physical and legal costs of our social prioritization of cars. These communities see disproportionate levels of people on foot being hit and killed by drivers. People from these same communities receive a disproportionate amount of jaywalking citations. If we think about how our metro systems are designed with cars as a priority, this outcome seems preordained. Places built for cars are inherently hostile to people on foot, and people that have no other means of transit must go on foot. Read it in the news Likewise, our moral double standards can still be seen today in discussions about "pedestrian responsibility" or other dehumanizing news headlines surrounding driver-related killings. In many cases, headlines use written cues to focus on the behavior of people on foot, implicitly blaming them while downplaying the agency and, therefore, responsibility of drivers, even when drivers are at fault. One egregious example comes from a recent ABC News article with a headline that read: "Dog walks itself home after visually impaired owner killed in hit-and-run, police say." Not only is the main focus of the headline on the dog, the person who was killed becomes the object of the sentence — the thing having something done to it — while the person responsible — the driver — is not even mentioned. This headline is qualitatively different than, "Driver kills visually impaired person and flees the scene." Good luck, and God bless Already this year, Ann Arbor has seen several people on foot seriously injured, including the death of a man who was killed by a driver plowing snow. It also isn't hard to imagine a visually impaired person being killed in one of our negligently designed It is often low income communities and communities of color that bear both physical and legal costs of our social prioritization of cars. "warning" crosswalks. Ironically, crosswalks often use voice prompts or other sounds to aid visually impaired people in navigating traffic. In our case, the voice feature is as useful to the visually impaired as a shrug of the shoulders. While roads are becoming more deadly for people on foot, years of evidence showing how dangerous our urban and suburban road design is, can we really say that a pedestrian being killed by a driver is an accident? The fact is, our public spaces only account for the safety of drivers in their design, which, unsurprisingly, means roads are less safe for the rest of us. Rather than designing less hostile spaces for pedestrians, we fall back on laws that leave far too much discretion for street level harassment and far too little effect on safety. In addition to criminalizing public space use, we continue to implicitly and explicitly defend drivers in how we talk about traffic safety. We continue to insist that people outside of cars be more responsible, and demand that everyone else be safe so that drivers don’t have to be. None of this changes the basic fact that walking isn’t dangerous — cars are. APRIL 21, 2023 "

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