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The built environment and the determination of fault in urban pedestrian crashes

• dredmorbius 3y ago
  A possible tie-in to this topic is this 1968 interview with Ralph Nader, discussing Unsafe at Any Speed, by Studs Terkel: <https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-his-book-unsafe-any-speed https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...> (Audio, 32:31). Direct audio link: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.mp3 https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3). Nader covers a number of topics, including auto safety. Among the key points he makes is that (as of 1968), the contribution of the automobile itself to accidents was simply not legible, in the James C. Scott sense (Seeing Like a State), to the point that police accident report forms had no options for noting the contribution of the vehicle to the accident. Built environment and highway design are another factor, of course, but the Nader interview came immediately to mind. I've listened to it several times, and it bears a few more listens as well. (The Studs Terkel Archive itself is a true gem and recommended for those who enjoy podcasts.)
  • devilbunny 3y ago
    > Studs Terkel Archive I had never heard of this, but I've read his Working, which was an impressive tome. I'll be checking it out. Unusually enough, I found out about it while reading a book I had bought at City Lights Bookstore (Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge), which cited it as a major inspiration.
    • dredmorbius 3y ago
      The interview archive is immense and diverse. It spans 45 years, from 1952--1997, ran 1 hour each weekday, and the interview guests range from the highly famous to street and school interviews. I've hit on a few gems in particular. The AWS back-end could be browsed or downloaded directly via AWS tools a ways back, and was about 600 GB last I'd checked. You'll have to sort out your own directory of content, however. Much of what's in there still isn't included in the official directory, again, at last check, though that includes numerous fragments and partial-tape interviews. <https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/ https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/> I strongly suspect that Working leveraged Studs's interviews, though all but certainly went beyond them as well.
      • devilbunny 3y ago
        Thank you very much for informing me of this. It's also excellently curated. The transcripts are a plus that is often missing and the cross-linkage between transcript and audio is a wonderful gift to the listener.
• hettygreen 3y ago
  I was waiting for Chinese food and watched as a Left-Turn light went green for cars at the same time the Pedestrian crossing light turned "OK to cross". The waiting car sped up, made it's left turn right into the crossing pedestrian. Pedestrian died in the hospital and I never ate my Chinese food. How can that sequence of traffic lights even happen? For the pedestrian to get the OK, she must have hit the crossing button - system knows a person is there, why give cars the OK to turn right into her, leaving the responsibility on the driver to see and yield?
  • ghaff 3y ago
    That is extremely common at city intersections. The pedestrian has priority but the car also has a green light for a turn. I don't know about the exact timing of the sequence but there are many intersections where the pedestrian has a right to cross and a car has a right to turn (but must yield). The same city (like many places) also has pedestrian crosswalks that aren't light controlled at all. The cars need to watch for pedestrians. Lights don't necessarily means that cars obeying the lights never ever have to watch for pedestrians also crossing with the lights.
    • mindslight 3y ago
      The problem is that people tend to interpret a green light to mean "you can go" rather than "this specific light isn't telling you to stop". Hence all those signs that say something to the effect "turning cars yield to oncoming traffic on green" as a reminder. And the effect is likely worse for a green arrow, which implies having the right of way.
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      IME, the pedestrian has a Don't Walk sign if the car has a green left turn arrow. If the car has a plain green light and is turning left, then they need to watch for pedestrians and for oncoming traffic.
      • ses1984 3y ago
        There’s an intersection like this down the street from my house. The left arrow is barely long enough for three cars to go and it’s often backed up. Drivers are habituated to take the turn as fast as possible because the green arrow is so short. I’ve seen people almost get hit pretty often. I’ve seen drivers who yield get raged on because the green arrow expires before any cars get a chance to go.
• throw0101d 3y ago
  For the history in the US of how streets when from being 'mixed use' pre-automobiles to being basically only about automobiles see Fighting Traffic by Peter D. Norton: > Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2924825 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2924825 * https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
  • skhunted 3y ago
    What’s disheartening is how ingrained car prioritization has become in the U.S. Our communities are largely un walkable and consist of large underused concrete parking lots. Everything is spread out. It is abnormal to see kids playing in the streets now and most people seem to be O.K. with this. We’ve become a people who rarely go outside other than to drive from one building to another. And when we do go outside we end having to drive to a place where one can be in a location away from cars.
• bedobi 3y ago
  Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place. It's disturbing how common it is for people's default assumption to be that it's the pedestrian/person on the bike/scooter/what have you 's fault that they got hit by a car. Rarely the driver's fault, and NEVER the urban designer's fault. Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them. We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc. The ONLY conclusion is it's the built environment that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place. Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars. But don't think there wouldn't be economic impact if far fewer people commute in, come in for the evening, or decide to move out because visiting the suburbs or the mountains is too much hassle. But maybe it's a worthwhile experiment.
    • Panzer04 3y ago
      The misunderstanding here is that cars are the primary way people commute into the city. This might be true in some places, but for most cities PT and residents make up the bulk of commercial traffic in a city - it makes sense when you consider that most roads only let a few dozen cars a minute through, vs a few hundred people per train (and way more during peak hours). However, you look at the built environment in a city and the pedestrians often only get 20% of the road area between buildings, while cars get 80%.
      • ghaff 3y ago
        I can't speak to averages but I'll say car traffic into Boston is at least as bad as ever and commuter rail is still way down relative to pre-pandemic. So, yes, people take train but a huge number of people drive. (I try to take train the rare times I go into the office although it takes about the same 2 hours as driving.) And the commuter rail is totally impractical to use for an evening event.
• itronitron 3y ago
  Considering the topic of the paper it would have been nice if the authors provided a less useless Abstract.
• bombcar 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • michael1999 3y ago
    Nobody is every hit by a turning train.
• wolverine876 3y ago
  > The conclusion argues that the designation of individual responsibility for crashes preempts collective responsibility, preventing wider adoption of design interventions as well as systemic changes to the processes that determine the built environment of US roadways. I don't quite understand (based only on the abstract): Are they suggesting that we alter the data (re: who is responsible) to achieve a certain outcome? Do they want to 'prevent wider adoption of design interventions'? I expect the answer to those questions is 'no', of course, but I don't understand their argument or conclusion. @luu: as submitter, what did you see in this paper?
  • sonofhans 3y ago
    Here’s how I read it: in pedestrian conflicts with cars, we tend to over-assign responsibility to the individual pedestrian (“they should have been more careful”) and under-weight larger-scale cultural issues, like building unwalkable suburbs.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
      A long time ago, we decided that the city is for cars, not people. It makes sense that it's the pedestrian's fault when the city is for the car, not the person. Until the thinking changes, nothing else will. It's working as intended.
      • rickydroll 3y ago
        Also, changing that will require major cultural and infrastructure changes. Cities need to be gutted and rebuilt to the urban ideal of walkable space. Socially, you will need to convince people to swap their 2000 sq ft on a 5000+ sq ft lot for a 1200 sq ft flat with no land, backyard, gardens, or privacy. Urbanites must accept that many of us truly detest cities and want to live semi-independently. Urban and non-urban people can't be genuinely independent of each other, but we need to respect each other's choices of how we want to live.
        • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
• woodruffw 3y ago
  Something that stood out to me in the Discussion: > Yet notably, speeding as a behavior surprisingly did not show any effect on fault outcomes in our models. The only effects related to driver behavior to decrease the likelihood of a pedestrian being found at fault were driver distraction and vehicle turning. In other words: speeding by drivers is normalized to the extent that it doesn't appear to factor into the likelihood of being found at fault for an accident. This is a distressing finding, but not a surprising one given the urban environment surveyed (pictures in Figure 2): wide, straight streets with ample spacing between lights mean that drivers drive at an "intuitive safe" speed, not the speed that is actually marked (much less the speed that is actually safe for pedestrians moving through crosswalks).
  • strogonoff 3y ago
    I’ve observed time and again how street width affects walkability and safety. You’d think a wider street means more leeway to notice a pedestrian, but it also works the other way: drivers assume that pedestrians will see them earlier, and assume priority. (Compare to narrow streets in a dense city, where busy pedestrian can suddenly quickly cross from around a corner, requiring awareness.) More often, though, stroads with many lanes that take a while to cross get traffic lights, and intuitively drivers consider traffic lights “enough”, so unless there is a speed camera & automated ticketing then between traffic lights anything goes speed-wise, especially on lanes further away from the sidewalk, and on straight roads that “anything” is sometimes a drag race, and once you’re going fast it’s so frustrating to stop so red lights are being violated frequently, etc. It’s amazing how a strategic mess of narrower, often one-way streets can result in similar overall throughput to support denser population, require less car traffic due to better use of public transport and foot traffic, while being more safe and satisfying to navigate.
    • rickydroll 3y ago
      I have two additional thoughts. The first is blindspots. Car manufacturers must be held responsible for blindspots built into cars that keep drivers from seeing pedestrians, and cities must be held accountable for not creating crosswalks with enough clear sightlines appropriate to the vehicle speed of that road. The faster the road, the more space is required around the crosswalk. My second thought is lighting. Nighttime lighting can create blindspots via veiling glare. It is frightening when a pedestrian pops into view as they move out of a glare spot or a glare-induced shadow. Some of the worst offenders of glare are unregulated "security" lighting. I know I'm an unusual driver, but I'll take being accused of driving like an old man and avoiding cities over putting others at risk.
• BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 3y ago
  After several near death experiences in daylight crossing with a green light in a crosswalk from left turning cars and a city bus across four lane arterial roads, I now have a high intensity blinking flashlight that I aim at the driver. I suspect that these drivers are NOT looking across the entire crosswalk and are focusing their attention on oncoming traffic. In the case of North American city buses, the low mounted side mirrors block view of pedestrians and pedestrian fatalities are frequent because of this. In Europe the side mirrors are mounted from the roof allowing visibility of pedestrians.
  • porkbeer 3y ago
    Blinding oncoming traffic endangers everyone around you. That is not ok.
    • sagarm 3y ago
      Large vehicles endanger everyone around you, but here we are.
    • BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 3y ago
      So what are your suggestions for staying alive when you are about to be hit?