Vox - A crisis on America’s roadshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2024-02-22T07:00:00-05:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/232605032024-02-22T07:00:00-05:002024-02-22T07:00:00-05:00American drivers are now even more distracted by their phones. Pedestrian deaths are soaring.
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<figcaption>A driver is captured using a phone behind the wheel in New York in this 2016 in photo. The problem of distracted drivers has only gotten worse, one set of data from millions of drivers shows. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>During the pandemic, distracted driving increased, and it hasn’t gone down since.</p> <p id="8NCXzL">Until relatively recently, good data on the problem of distracted driving has been hard to find. The government estimates that 3,522 people <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving#:~:text=Distracted%20driving%20is%20dangerous%2C%20claiming,us%20keep%20America's%20roads%20safe.">died because of it</a> in 2021, but experts say the official number probably majorly undercounts the number of deaths, in part because police are rarely able to definitively prove that a driver was distracted right before a crash. </p>
<p id="nT3FU6">In the last few years, though, the data on distracted driving has gotten better. <a href="https://www.cmtelematics.com/">Cambridge Mobile Telematics</a> is a company that partners with major insurance companies to offer downloadable apps that drivers can use to save money on their rates. Via the apps, Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) uses mobile phone sensors to measure driving behavior, including whether a person is speeding, holding their phone, or interacting with an unlocked screen while driving (the company says it doesn’t collect information on what the drivers are doing on their phones). Its work gives the company insight into the driving behaviors of more than 10 million people.</p>
<p id="f0fAj8">CMT recently analyzed driver behavior during millions of car trips. What it found should be troubling to anyone who uses a road in the US: During the pandemic, American drivers got even more distracted by their phones while driving. The amount of distracted driving hasn’t receded, even as life has mostly stabilized. </p>
<p id="wEV8YU">The company found that both phone motion and screen interaction while driving went up roughly 20 percent between 2020-2022. “By almost every metric CMT measures, distracted driving is more present than ever on US roadways. Drivers are spending more time using their phones while driving and doing it on more trips. Drivers interacted with their phones on nearly 58% of trips in 2022,” a recent <a href="https://www.cmtelematics.com/distracted-driving-report-2023/">report by the company concludes</a>. More than a third of that phone motion distraction happens at over 50 mph. </p>
<p id="2dpgd9">We’re also spending nearly three times more time distracted by our phones than drivers in the United Kingdom and several other European countries. US drivers spent an average of 2 minutes 11 seconds on their phones per hour while driving, compared to 44 seconds per hour for UK drivers, <a href="https://www.cmtelematics.com/distracted-driving/drivers-are-nearly-3x-less-distracted-in-the-uk-why/">CMT found</a>. The company compared the driving behaviors of US and European drivers because road fatalities in the United States surged during the pandemic and European fatalities did not. In 2020, <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data-fatalities">38,824 people died on US roads</a>. In 2021, that number rose to <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities">42,915 people,</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis">the highest number of pedestrians were killed in 40 years</a>. In 2022, the overall deaths stayed high, around 42,795, among them <a href="https://www.vox.com/23784549/pedestrian-deaths-traffic-safety-fatalities-governors-association">7,508 pedestrians</a>. </p>
<p id="x5a4Pm">The United States is increasingly an outlier when it comes to <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23496462/crisis-american-roads-pedestrian-traffic-deaths-safety" data-source="encore">traffic fatalities</a>, with rates 50 percent higher than its peers. The CMT findings suggest that the way Americans use their phones while driving could be one important reason why, <a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis">along with road</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/23462548/allison-hart-pedestrian-deaths-suvs-deadliest-roads">vehicle design</a> and a lack of <a href="https://www.vox.com/23880418/traffic-safety-enforcement-tickets-rock-creek-crash">consistent traffic safety enforcement</a>.</p>
<p id="ARf5ES">“The way individuals are driving their vehicles in the US is distinct from the way they’re driving in Europe,” says Ryan McMahon, senior vice president of strategy for Cambridge Mobile Telematics. That extra time Americans are spending on their phones while driving increases risk: In more than a third of crashes the company analyzed, McMahon says, the driver had their phone in their hand a minute prior to collision. </p>
<p id="dsbmON">The large increase in risky driving behaviors in the US started basically as soon as the pandemic began. “We saw this incredible increase in distracted driving. You could almost track it by the day schools started to shut down,” McMahon says. “When mobility changed, risk increased dramatically.” </p>
<p id="yMk7qq">The individual and collective consequences of our cellphone compulsions are stark: The most distracted drivers are over 240 percent more likely to crash than the safest drivers, according to the report. </p>
<p id="CEP3nT">The report also notes how the rise of smartphone use roughly corresponds to the rise in pedestrian fatalities: About 4,600 people were killed while walking in 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced. By 2021, with 85 percent of Americans owning smartphones, the number rose to 7,485. </p>
<h3 id="yBOv8K">Why American drivers got more distracted during the pandemic</h3>
<p id="BrlirI">McMahon and other experts on distracted driving have some theories. Culture may play a role: The shift to working from home, the fact that Americans <a href="https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/americans-do-work-more-europeans-please-dont-think-europeans-are-lazy">work longer hours</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/25/66percent-of-americans-say-they-want-extended-european-style-vacation-policies-at-work.html#:~:text=While%20the%20average%20American%20is,passed%20in%20the%20early%201990s.">vacation less</a>, and the expectation that they need to be available to their colleagues even while driving is a notion many Europeans would scoff at. (As someone currently living in Europe after a lifetime in the United States, my highly subjective observation is that people really do seem less work-crazed in Europe. And while phone-checking while driving definitely happens, I see it a lot less than I do in the US.) </p>
<p id="Zh61kr">“I do think this notion of work in our country, and [the idea that] you have to be available 24-7 has also exacerbated it,” says Pam Shadel Fischer, a senior director at the Governors Highway Safety Association, who’s been working for decades to reduce risky and impaired driving. “It’s absolutely a cultural issue.”</p>
<p id="3GKlKm">The most compelling theories, though, are structural and psychological. In the United States, infrastructure is built around cars, and Americans generally have <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9118199/public-transportation-subway-buses">fewer public transportation options</a> than Europeans do. They <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-04/9-reasons-the-u-s-ended-up-so-much-more-car-dependent-than-europe?sref=qYiz2hd0">spend more time in their cars</a>, commuting, doing chores, and taking children to school than people in European countries, and they are far more likely to make these daily trips on roads that are straight, flat, and built for easy car travel: a perfect recipe for boredom. </p>
<p id="bBC5Bt">While it’s difficult to generalize too much about Europe, anyone who’s lived or visited there can attest to the differences inherent in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27traffic.html">roads built before the age of the auto</a>, where pedestrians are considered important road users. The road design, the topography, and the presence of people on foot demand drivers’ attention. “You see more distraction happening when people are more familiar with roads,” McMahon says. </p>
<p id="wIVatW">The type of car also may matter a lot. In the US, the CMT analysis <a href="https://www.cmtelematics.com/distracted-driving/drivers-are-nearly-3x-less-distracted-in-the-uk-why/">notes</a>, 94 percent of car drivers said they were driving cars with automatic transmissions. Only 33 percent of UK drivers answered the same. Manual shifting requires more active engagement with the vehicle.</p>
<p id="LpwZoi">It’s also possible that Americans are getting more comfortable with risk precisely because their vehicles keep getting safer for the people driving them (if not for <a href="https://www.vox.com/23462548/allison-hart-pedestrian-deaths-suvs-deadliest-roads">people outside of them</a>). “We’ve got all these safety features,” Shadel Fischer says. They convince drivers that “‘everything is fine! The car will take care of me, no big deal.’ They overestimate what those safety features are designed to do.” </p>
<p id="PzRNHC">Another challenge is that there are frequently no negative consequences for using your phone while driving. It’s easy for people to do because they’ve done it before with no problem — until it causes a crash.</p>
<h3 id="JK2Ar7">What could make drivers put down their phones?</h3>
<p id="lRMGBT">A tech industry giant genuinely interested in improving lives and mitigating the harm and disruption caused by its products could find a way to disable distracting devices, leaving them available only for, say, GPS and emergency calls. “I’m convinced that the solution is the technology,” Shadel Fischer says. “We shouldn’t have to do anything.” </p>
<p id="oKNxuS"><a href="https://www.vox.com/apple" data-source="encore">Apple</a> introduced a feature to the iPhone <a href="https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/iphone-will-soon-have-do-not-disturb-while-driving-mode/">in 2017 that automatically puts the phone in “do not disturb” mode while driving,</a> but it’s extremely easy to turn off. So we are left mostly with interventions into individual behavior. </p>
<p id="A8Rpd5">On the policy front, activists like Jennifer Smith, whose <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/19distracted.html">mother was killed in Oklahoma in 2008</a> by a driver talking on his cellphone, have been working with states to pass laws to end distracted driving. <a href="https://stopdistractions.org/">Forty-four states</a> have some sort of distracted driving laws on the books, and <a href="https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/distracted-driving-cellphone-use#:~:text=NCSL's%20Power%20BI%20Distracted%20Driving,hand%2Dheld%20cellphones%20while%20driving.">27 states</a> have bans on hand-held cellphone use.</p>
<p id="NVOqFW">In the distracted driving report, Cambridge Mobile Telematics looked at how driver behavior changed after a state passed a “hands-free” law and found that it led to a 13 percent reduction in phone motion while driving in the first three months after a law took effect. But those changes tended to diminish over time, and there’s wide variation among the states both in terms of public awareness of the laws and traffic enforcement, which <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/19SNqGnqdF3aXbu26MGvm8">declined in some states</a> during the <a href="https://www.vox.com/23880418/traffic-safety-enforcement-tickets-rock-creek-crash">pandemic</a>. Without high public awareness or enforcement — which is difficult to do well because it relies on law enforcement officers witnessing the distracted driving and <a href="https://www.vox.com/23735896/racism-car-ownership-driving-violence-traffic-violations">enforcing the laws equitably</a> — getting good compliance can be difficult. </p>
<p id="otG3rN">That’s why policymakers are taking a multi-pronged approach to the issue, trying to find ways to educate the public and make the laws enforceable. “It will take a long, sustained effort to change driver behavior if we want to have fewer deaths in this country,” says Michelle May, manager of the Highway Safety Program at Ohio’s Department of Transportation. </p>
<p id="2UBQTF">Ohio’s <a href="https://www.transportation.ohio.gov/phonesdown#:~:text=In%20Ohio%2C%20it%20is%20illegal,Speakerphone">“hands-free” law</a> went into effect last year; since then, May says, the state has used telematics data and tracked an 8.1 percent decline in driver distractions. But May expects the effort to reduce phone use while driving will be a long-term effort, akin to the effort to reduce drunk driving and getting people to wear seatbelts.</p>
<p id="wVNeXG">Financial incentives can also help. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2024/2/21/24078362/inflation-car-insurance-distracted-driving-costs">Car insurance rates</a> have skyrocketed in recent years, becoming a leading cause of inflation and contributing to the <a href="https://www.vox.com/23753949/cars-cost-ownership-economy-repossession">financial burdens associated with car ownership</a>, which disproportionately affects low-income and working-class Americans. The use of telematics-based apps by insurance companies offers drivers an opportunity to save money on their insurance rates. Research into the use of the apps <a href="https://m.cmtelematics.com/hubfs/CMT%20Study%20-%20UBI%20Engagement%20Impact.pdf">suggests</a> that drivers who regularly receive feedback on their driving habits tend to use their phones less while driving. The data can also help state departments of <a href="https://www.vox.com/transportation" data-source="encore">transportation</a> better locate areas with more distracted driving, which could in turn help influence road design. “We’ve found that simple things like using paint to narrow the lanes gives people the illusion that they’ve got to slow down,” Shadel Fischer says. “The road design does play a role in how we act.” </p>
<p id="SDhfDo">In other words, there are ways to address the problem but they rely heavily on a bunch of solutions working with one another, at a time when our road safety system appears to be breaking down. “Every single piece has to work in concert with the other or it won’t be successful because we’re up against such a huge scale of a behavioral problem,” Smith says. </p>
<p id="NE1J98">The stakes couldn’t be higher, though, and getting this right will undoubtedly take some combination of policy intervention, industry investment, and a willingness among drivers to put their phones down and pay attention. </p>
<p id="1vFJA7">Until then, the status quo is an advanced country with incredibly high rates of road death, where, over time, almost everyone will know someone who lost their life in a car crash. “Somehow, we’re just accepting 42-45,000 people in the US dying in this manner every year,” McMahon says. “It’s preventable.”</p>
https://www.vox.com/24078289/us-drivers-distracted-driving-cellphone-road-deaths-pedestriansMarin Cogan2023-09-21T06:00:00-04:002023-09-21T06:00:00-04:00A fatal crash shows us everything that’s wrong with traffic enforcement
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<figcaption>Police gather at the scene of a crash in Washington DC in March that left a Lyft driver and his two passengers dead. The other vehicle involved had 49 outstanding citations, leading to public outcry that not enough had been done to keep the driver off the roads. | Robert Devaney/The Georgetowner Newspaper</figcaption>
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<p>Amid rising traffic deaths, legal mechanisms designed to keep streets safe are breaking down. Is there a better way?</p> <p id="F5AR3S">“Is there a reason we’re driving, like, 80 mph, blowing red lights?” the police officer asked the driver of the black Lexus SUV, <a href="https://wtop.com/dc/2023/06/court-sees-body-camera-footage-from-officer-who-pulled-over-drunken-driver-charged-in-rock-creek-parkway-crash/">according to his body camera footage</a>. It was just after 1 am on a March night in Washington, DC, and there were two people in the car he had just pulled over. The officer noticed a cup of what appeared to be liquor in the passenger’s hand and informed them that having an open container of alcohol was illegal. He asked to see their IDs. Moments later, the driver sped off. </p>
<p id="nWrW1a">The officer didn’t chase the Lexus. Like the guidelines of <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/08/us/police-restricting-pursuits/index.html">many other police</a> organizations across the United States, his department’s rules dictated that officers give chase only when they believed a felony was being committed or a driver was a “<a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/369919683/US-Park-Police-General-Order-on-Vehicular-Pursuits#">clear and immediate</a>” threat to the public. </p>
<p id="NDwrbQ">Less than two minutes passed before emergency responders received their first call reporting a crash involving the Lexus. Multiple witnesses on Rock Creek Parkway — a wide, winding road at the city’s western edge — told police what they saw. The Lexus, driving at a high rate of speed after fleeing the police stop, crossed into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a Honda sedan, killing <a href="https://www.vox.com/lyft" data-source="encore">Lyft</a> driver Mohamed Kamara, 42, and his passengers Olvin Torres Velasquez, 22, and Jonathan Cabrera Mendez, 23. The driver of the Lexus and her passenger survived.</p>
<p id="uoBvwh">In the aftermath of the crash, disturbing details emerged about the driver and her car. According to a police detective investigating the crash, the Lexus was traveling 100 mph in the moments before it collided with Kamara’s car. (Vox contacted Park Police multiple times with requests for comment, but a spokesperson declined to comment while the investigation was ongoing; details about the crash were obtained via court records, testimony, and news reports.) The driver’s blood alcohol level was 0.10, according to reporting from the Washington Post, above the legal limit. Records of previous infractions caught on traffic cameras showed that the Lexus had 49 outstanding citations, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/07/10/dc-driving-safety-enforcement/">and owed $17,280 in fines</a>. Nearly all of them were for speeding, according to a Vox search of the car’s <a href="https://prodpci.etimspayments.com/pbw/inputAction.doh">DMV records</a>, and many occurred in the months before the crash. In May, when police charged the driver with second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of the three men, court records revealed that she had <a href="https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/driver-charged-murder-crashing-lyft-had-3-previous-dui-charges/65-694641fa-764b-445e-a2ff-37b72344d23f#:~:text=In%20D.C.%2C%20Walker%20has%20been,DUI%20charges%20filed%20in%20Virginia.">three prior DUI convictions</a> in DC, in 2015, 2018, and 2020, and two more in Virginia. The driver technically shouldn’t have had a valid license at all; a driver with three DUI convictions within 15 years is supposed to have her license revoked for at least three years. However, <a href="https://dcist.com/story/23/06/06/error-on-dc-dmv-driver-previous-dui-convictions-rock-creek-crash/">because of a failure in communication between the courts and the DMV,</a> the agency received the notifications of her convictions but never revoked her license. The case against the driver is now pending. </p>
<p id="XxyUHE">In a city already experiencing a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/02/23/dc-traffic-deaths-highest-record/">sharp increase</a> in road fatalities since 2019, the crash sparked “outrage over whether city officials were doing enough to keep bad drivers off the road,” the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/06/06/rock-creek-parkway-fatal-crash-driver-valid-license/">noted</a>. DC’s specific challenges with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/05/11/dc-unpaid-traffic-tickets/">enforcing traffic safety may be unique</a>, but the broader problem is not: Across the country, the legal mechanisms intended to keep roads safe are failing. In 2021, <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities">42,939 people died in traffic crashes</a>, the highest number recorded since 2005. In 2022, <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crash-death-estimates-2022">another estimated 42,795</a> people were killed. During the same period, police in several jurisdictions across the country significantly limited the number of traffic stops they performed. </p>
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<p id="OpWezl">According to a 2021 survey of over 1,000 police officers, <a href="https://www.police1.com/traffic-patrol/articles/police-research-1000-cops-address-non-compliance-during-traffic-stops-C3mPToqhCR2O4Dxu/#form-success-message">nearly 60 percent</a> said they were less likely to stop a vehicle for violating traffic laws than they were prior to 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired nationwide protests over police brutality, and the pandemic disrupted usual enforcement practices. The survey results line up with data from cities and states: In San Diego, police stops <a href="https://voiceofsandiego.org/2023/04/24/police-stops-have-fallen-dramatically-in-the-last-three-years/">dropped</a> by roughly 50 percent between 2019 and 2022. In Vermont, they <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/sites/default/files/Department-of-Economics/seguino%20studies/Autilio_Brooks_and_Seguino_2020_traffic_stop_data_final.pdf">fell 40 percent</a> in 2020. In Seattle, the number of traffic citations issued dropped 86 percent <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/06/1167980495/americas-roads-are-more-dangerous-as-police-pull-over-fewer-drivers">between 2019 and 2023</a>. In St. Louis, Missouri, the police issued about half as many traffic tickets in 2021 than they did in 2009; traffic deaths, meanwhile, <a href="https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/accident-and-incident/traffic-stops-and-tickets-have-plummeted-in-st-louis-traffic-deaths-have-gone-up/article_7d7844fc-73ae-5574-8cdc-f4571b4429ac.html">doubled</a> during that time, from 39 in 2009 to 81 in 2020. In Austin, the number of traffic citations issued by police dropped 90 percent between 2017 and 2021. At the same time, Austin’s <a href="https://www.kut.org/transportation/2022-06-03/txdot-wants-cops-to-crack-down-on-speeders-but-apds-traffic-enforcement-units-are-understaffed">traffic deaths reached record highs</a>.</p>
<p id="EabEEn">The reasons behind the decline in traffic stops are complex. Police departments <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-officer-staffing-shortages-law-enforcement-agencies-nationwide/">across the country</a> are experiencing staffing shortages. In DC, police are experiencing the worst <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/15/dc-police-staffing-crime/">such shortage in 50 years</a>. An investigation by an NBC affiliate found that DUI arrests in DC and Virginia had fallen dramatically between 2010 and 2021, while DUI-related deaths <a href="https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/not-enough-officers-to-catch-the-ones-we-dont-get-dui-arrests-down-as-deaths-rise/3414906/">had risen 33 percent</a>. Officials also are citing the pandemic and protests over the murder of Floyd as reasons for pulling back on enforcement, and meanwhile, in response to public outcry over <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy" data-source="encore">policies</a> that have <a href="https://www.vox.com/23735896/racism-car-ownership-driving-violence-traffic-violations">unfairly targeted Black drivers</a>, lawmakers in cities across the country have passed new legislation <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/police-traffic-stops.html">limiting what police can pull drivers over for</a>.</p>
<p id="c5W2xj">The fact that traffic stops are decreasing while deaths are rising doesn’t necessarily mean that one is causing the other, because <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/5/13/5710874/the-best-illustration-youll-see-that-correlation-doesnt-equal">correlation does not equal causation</a>, as any good statistics teacher will tell you. Urban planners and safety advocates say that addressing <a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis">deadly road</a> design and <a href="https://www.vox.com/23462548/allison-hart-pedestrian-deaths-suvs-deadliest-roads">vehicle size</a> is ultimately the best way to ensure road safety, while noting that police traffic stops are at best imperfect, and at worst <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23614082/sarah-seo-traffic-police-tyre-nichols">a dangerous method of enforcement</a>. Some experts, however, think there’s an obvious link. Enforcement efforts that are high-visibility and <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/NCREP-enforcement22">focused on safety</a> are shown to reduce risky driving. Experts believe the opposite might also be true. </p>
<p id="JnE7Rz">“Why do many of us drive dangerously on the roads? Because we think we can get away with it,” Jonathan Adkins, CEO of the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), which tracks <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23496462/crisis-american-roads-pedestrian-traffic-deaths-safety" data-source="encore">traffic fatalities</a> across the country, told <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/06/1167980495/americas-roads-are-more-dangerous-as-police-pull-over-fewer-drivers">NPR</a> earlier this year. “And guess what — we probably can right now in many places in the country. There’s not enforcement out there, they’re hesitant to write tickets. And we’re seeing the results of that.”</p>
<p id="dX3XXW">Safety advocates note that while efforts to reform discriminatory, outdated traffic enforcement practices are important, most cities and states haven’t replaced it with a better system. An improved one would take equity and safety into account, recognizing that <a href="https://www.vox.com/23735896/racism-car-ownership-driving-violence-traffic-violations">Black,</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/26/opinion/road-deaths-racial-gap.html#:~:text=It%20found%20that%20Black%20people,as%20that%20for%20white%20cyclists.">Indigenous, and people of color are disproportionately more likely</a> to be killed in traffic crashes than white people. </p>
<p id="YepLeO">“We’re at a pivot point from the way it was to the way it will be in the future. We, as a community, are trying to figure out what we need to change in order to preserve the benefits from traffic enforcement but to correct systemic problems we see,” Russ Martin, GHSA’s senior director of policy and government relations, told Vox. </p>
<p id="S4Kxx7">That’s what <a href="https://publichealth.vt.edu/content/publichealth_vt_edu/en/research-engagement/research/mehp/people.html">Ryan Calder</a>, a professor of environmental health and policy at Virginia Tech, found when he started looking into the crash in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Calder, a DC resident, said he was outraged by the clear evidence that the Lexus driver was a public safety risk, that nothing had been done to get her off the road, and that lives were lost as a result. Calder found that the city had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/05/11/dc-unpaid-traffic-tickets/">extremely limited capacity</a> to go after people who were repeatedly caught driving dangerously, but also that legislation considered by DC’s leaders that would have made it harder for a repeat offender to renew a license was rejected because of <a href="https://dcist.com/story/22/07/11/dc-end-debt-drivers-license-denial/">concerns</a> that it might disproportionately impact low-income people or people of color — like other policies that lawmakers and activists have been <a href="https://www.vox.com/21312191/police-reform-defunding-abolition-black-lives-matter-protests">working to reform</a>. In progressive communities, Calder says, the enforcement element of road safety tends to get overlooked or treated with skepticism, which he understands, to a point. “People don’t talk about it because it’s taboo,” he says. “You don’t want to ruin people’s livelihoods because they owe $50 in parking tickets. I completely agree.” But a driver with repeated speeding and drunk-driving violations, he says, “is a whole other magnitude — you should use their history to go after these drivers.” </p>
<p id="8W6Paq">Calder <a href="https://dcfamiliesforsafestreets.org/2023/05/09/letter-to-urge-action-needed-on-reckless-driving/">wrote about his findings, and the research backing it, to DC Council members and other leaders in an open letter</a> co-signed by nine local organizations including local chapters of <a href="https://www.familiesforsafestreets.org/">Families for Safe Streets</a>, and 650 individuals. (Disclosure: One of the signees is an employee of <a href="https://corp.voxmedia.com/" data-source="encore">Vox Media</a>.) He wrote that the city, by failing to prioritize enforcement effectively, was “exacerbating the grievous injustices of traffic violence; lower income and racialized individuals are at vastly higher risk of fatality and injury as compared to the population as a whole.” </p>
<p id="FFrnvN">Calder’s findings were specific to DC, but they offer a picture of what a more just enforcement system focused on safety could look like in other cities and states contending with dangerous drivers. They urge leaders to use the data gathered from traffic cameras to target repeat offenders. In New York, after a driver with eight prior violations for speeding and running red lights <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/nyregion/de-blasio-brooklyn-crash.html">struck and killed two children</a> in 2018, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/nyregion/driving-reckless-nyc.html">the city passed a law</a> that would require any driver whose vehicle is caught multiple times on camera speeding or running red lights to take a traffic safety course or risk having their car impounded. The three-year program, the first of its kind in the country, attempts to target drivers who repeatedly engage in risky behavior and change their behavior without leveraging fines. If successful, it could become permanent. In DC this summer, the city experimented with sending <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/06/23/dc-begin-sending-targeted-messages-high-risk-drivers/">text messages</a> and mailers to what they deem are “high risk” drivers, warning them that they are in danger of a crash. “If we find that they were successful, the District may choose to continue them in subsequent years,” Sam Quinney, the director of The Lab, a research team within DC’s government that spearheaded the program, told Vox in a statement. Critics argue that the proposal isn’t drastic <a href="https://slate.com/business/2023/03/dc-car-crash-tickets-rock-creek-parkway-speeding.html">enough</a> given the scale of the problem and that the city should boot cars with repeated violations caught on camera — an idea <a href="https://www.christinahendersondc.com/press-releases/councilmember-christina-henderson-introduces-legislation-to-reduce-the-number-of-dangerous-drivers-on-dc-streets">one City Council member</a> has advocated for in proposed legislation, along with suggesting that drivers charged with drunk driving, negligent homicide, or leaving the scene of a crash have their licenses suspended while awaiting adjudication in the courts.</p>
<p id="EXhQLE">Calder’s letter also proposes that local agencies crack down on the use of fake temporary license plates, <a href="https://tomlee.wtf/2023/02/03/fake-tags-are-a-real-problem/">or temporary tags</a>, which have proliferated on the streets of <a href="https://www.streetsblogprojects.org/ghost-tags-part-1-the-dealers">New York, DC, and other major cities</a> in the last few years. Available <a href="https://wtop.com/dc/2023/07/dc-bill-aims-to-crack-down-on-fake-temporary-vehicle-tags/">for sale</a> on Craigslist and other online marketplaces, they allow drivers to evade getting caught for speeding because they aren’t officially registered to a vehicle, and are therefore untraceable to the drivers. Eliminating them could ensure that drivers are able to be held accountable for being reckless behind the wheel.</p>
<p id="Z7tvsy">In theory, traffic cameras should be a major asset in helping enforce safe streets — <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/calculator/factsheet/speed.html">research shows</a> that drivers slow down, and have fewer crashes, when they’re present. Crucially, they don’t involve police officers, eliminating the potential for risky interactions between drivers and law enforcement. In European countries where <a href="https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2013/06/what-happened-when-france-went-big-with-speed-cameras-000000">automated enforcement</a> is widespread and penalties are enforced, the road fatality rates <a href="https://www.europeandatajournalism.eu/cp_data_news/more-speed-cameras-lead-to-fewer-accidents-europe-already-knows-this/">are far lower</a> than they are in the United States. But in the US, traffic cameras have <a href="https://www.vox.com/a/red-light-speed-cameras">sparse coverage</a> and are <a href="https://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147213437/whats-driving-the-backlash-against-traffic-cameras">controversial</a>, and can, in some cases, end up <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most">disproportionately ticketing Black and brown drivers</a>. Getting more of them on the streets, in different neighborhoods, could help reduce those concerns, and using the money generated by cameras to fund safer streets in those communities would help, too. Fines could be based on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine">a person’s daily wages</a>, rather than flat fees, to make them more equitable, as is the case in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/">several Scandinavian countries</a> — and penalties could involve more booting and towing vehicles.</p>
<p id="0NTZMw">Those changes wouldn’t bring back Kamora, Velasquez, and Mendez, the victims of the crash in Rock Creek Park. Nor would they bring back the countless other people killed on US roadways in 2023. But targeting the deadliest drivers, and getting them off the road, experts say, should be a goal shared by government leaders and road users alike. Caring about <a href="https://www.vox.com/23462548/allison-hart-pedestrian-deaths-suvs-deadliest-roads">the victims of our deadly roads</a> is just the first step.</p>
https://www.vox.com/23880418/traffic-safety-enforcement-tickets-rock-creek-crashMarin Cogan2023-07-06T06:00:00-04:002023-07-06T06:00:00-04:00Why pedestrian deaths in the US are at a 40-year high
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<img alt="A photo of an In memory sign on the roadside" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WIHB-927JEbkMQ7UA-5t2jM_WaE=/0x0:4000x3000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72429099/GettyImages_168264633.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Cristian Lazzari/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>How many fatalities will it take to get officials to take the problem seriously? </p> <p id="k5rJss">How many deaths does it take to get the government to take a crisis seriously?</p>
<p id="WgHGFS">That’s the question raised by the Governors Highway Safety Association’s <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/GHSA%20-%20Pedestrian%20Traffic%20Fatalities%20by%20State%2C%202022%20Preliminary%20Data%20%28January-December%29.pdf">latest preliminary report</a> on pedestrian deaths in 2022. The annual overview of state data on <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23496462/crisis-american-roads-pedestrian-traffic-deaths-safety" data-source="encore">pedestrian fatalities</a> helps the public and policymakers get a better understanding of the overall picture of road safety in the US. </p>
<p id="iTarow">This year’s report makes clear how dangerous it is to walk in America: The GHSA projects that 7,508 people were killed while walking in 2022, the most pedestrians killed since 1981, when <a href="https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians">7,837 pedestrians were killed</a>. </p>
<p id="GPSWKq">The roads were already getting deadlier for pedestrians before 2020, but the pandemic turbocharged the trend. In 2021, 7,624 pedestrians were killed in the United States, a 13 percent increase from the year before, when <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians21">6,721 pedestrians were killed</a>. Between 2010 and 2021, the new GHSA report says, pedestrian fatalities <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/GHSA%20-%20Pedestrian%20Traffic%20Fatalities%20by%20State%2C%202022%20Preliminary%20Data%20%28January-December%29.pdf">increased 77 percent</a>.</p>
<p id="LLrIRm">There’s no single explanation for why it’s getting more dangerous to walk on US roads, but there are a few major contributing factors. <a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis">One is deadly road design</a>. In the decades after World War II, new communities emerged, centered on the premise that inhabitants would drive everywhere. Governments and regional planners designed wide, multi-lane arterial roads for high-speed travel. In the years since, traffic engineers and planners continued to widen those roads and add lanes, ostensibly to address congestion, while local officials approved commercial development alongside them. It led to what former traffic engineer and <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/contributors-journal/charles-marohn">Strong Towns founder </a><a href="mailto:marohn@strongtowns.org">Charles Marohn</a> calls “stroads.” </p>
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<p id="8b0rEY">In Marohn’s parlance, a street is a gathering place, where people can shop, dine, and live. It needs to be designed for pedestrians to be able to safely access the businesses around it, while a road is designed to move cars efficiently from point A to point B. A stroad is the worst of both worlds, and is incredibly dangerous to pedestrians. The data bears this out: In 2021, the latest GHSA report says, 60.4 percent of pedestrian fatalities happened on such roads, which often lack infrastructure that would make it safe for pedestrians, such as good lighting and frequent crosswalks. As a consequence, many of the people killed last year were struck at night.</p>
<p id="KN7EqZ">Another major factor contributing to climbing pedestrian fatalities is the American love affair with big vehicles. Over the last 20-plus years, US consumers have turned away from the small cars that used to dominate our roadways in favor of increasingly larger SUVs and light trucks. These larger, heavier vehicles create big blind spots and are <a href="https://www.vox.com/23462548/allison-hart-pedestrian-deaths-suvs-deadliest-roads">more deadly to pedestrians when they strike them — especially children</a>. From 2000 to 2019, smaller vehicles such as sedans dropped from <a href="https://www.justintyndall.com/uploads/2/8/5/5/28559839/tyndall_pedestrian.pdf">60 percent of all vehicles to around 40 percent</a>, while the number of SUVs surged, from 10 percent to over 30 percent. In 2021, trucks and SUVs made up <a href="https://jalopnik.com/trucks-and-suvs-are-now-over-80-percent-of-new-car-sale-1848427797">more than 80 percent of new vehicle sales</a>, and there’s little sign of that trend abating, now that auto manufacturers are increasingly turning their production efforts <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/07/new-car-market-high-interest-rates/">toward more profitable luxury vehicles</a>. Electric vehicles, being boosted by manufacturers and policymakers as the environmentally friendly future of automotive travel, are also <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/1/12/23550948/acceleration-cold-weather-tesla-ford-150-electric-vehicle-transition">significantly heavier than their gas-powered counterparts</a>. </p>
<p id="ESHduR">Other potential factors are harder to prove but would probably make sense to anyone who’s almost been run over in a crosswalk the last few years: One theory is that the pandemic, which saw more people staying at home and upended the usual traffic patterns, encouraged drivers to behave more recklessly because the roads were emptier. Another is that the turmoil of the pandemic, plus political and social unrest in 2020, led to a fraying of the social contract, with people — including drivers — acting more aggressive and unpredictable in public settings. A third is that the police, in response to the <a href="https://www.vox.com/race" data-source="encore">Black Lives Matter</a> protests and other critiques of law enforcement, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/why-pedestrian-deaths-are-skyrocketing-in-america.html">have largely given up on enforcing road safety</a>, leading drivers to reasonably assume that they can drive dangerously without facing consequences. </p>
<p id="C47LNs">In a society where the car is so central that most Americans get behind the wheel every day without thinking about the broader consequences of auto dependency, it’s easy to view pedestrian deaths as an unfortunate but unavoidable reality. In fact, the United States has a uniquely terrible track record on pedestrian fatalities, which are continuing to increase here <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists.html">while they decline in many other countries</a>. </p>
<p id="tfHpnW">There are a multitude of reasons peer countries are getting safer for pedestrians while the US gets deadlier. They include better regulation of vehicle design and size, the adoption of safe technology requirements for vehicles that take into account both vehicle occupants and pedestrians and cyclists, and more aggressive street-calming measures including narrower lanes, slower speed limits, protected bike lanes, and even car-free streets. Maybe most importantly, other developed nations have political leaders who move aggressively and unapologetically toward making streets safer. </p>
<p id="QaXHhs">The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has significantly <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-25/paris-car-ban-court-upholds-mayor-anne-hidalgo-s-plan">limited cars on streets in the city’s core</a>, added scores of bike trails, and articulated a vision of safety culture that puts pedestrians first. Leaders in <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90294948/what-happened-when-oslo-decided-to-make-its-downtown-basically-car-free">Oslo, Norway</a>, and <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/pontevedra-city-pioneer-europe-car-free-future/">several other cities</a> have made similar moves. </p>
<p id="jo2y4p">In the United States, <a href="https://www.curbed.com/2022/06/hoboken-traffic-deaths-none-vision-zero-streets.html">with a few notable exceptions</a>, political leaders have paid lip service to the goal of reducing pedestrian deaths <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-11/-vision-zero-at-a-crossroads-as-u-s-traffic-death-rise">without committing to the necessary policy changes that would save lives</a>. The federal government, meanwhile, has<a href="https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/06/04/regulators-arent-taming-u-s-megacar-crisis"> failed to address the problem of SUVs and trucks getting bigger</a>, even though researchers have known for decades that large vehicles are deadlier to pedestrians. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, after intense campaigning from safety advocates, finally announced in late May that it would begin considering the safety of vehicles for people outside of them — something European regulators have long done — but those safety considerations<a href="https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2023/05/nhtsa-proposes-pass-fail-pedestrian-safety-rating-vehicles/386710/"> won’t be included in the government’s five-star safety rating system</a> for new vehicles, meaning people can still buy cars that are deadly to pedestrians but rated five stars for safety. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, when asked about vehicle size and pedestrian fatalities in a<a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90841997/this-is-a-preventable-crisis-pete-buttigieg-on-spending-800-million-to-eliminate-traffic-deaths"> recent interview</a>, said more research needs to be done before introducing new regulations — even though <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/bigger-vehicles-are-directly-resulting-in-more-deaths-of-people-walking/">the research is clear</a>.</p>
<p id="u0jdGe">In the Netherlands in 1970, the country was overrun by cars, and pedestrian fatality rates were soaring. In 1971, 3,300 people were killed, more than 400 of them children. The Dutch public was incensed. They started a movement, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord">Stop de Kindermoord </a>— “Stop the Child Murder” — and staged large protests in Amsterdam. Government officials took notice. They instituted car-free days, added bike lanes, and put the country on the path to being <a href="https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-02/erso-country-overview-2023-netherlands_0.pdf">one of the safest countries</a> for pedestrians on earth. </p>
<p id="od3eFj">For the Dutch, the limit was 400 children in one year. How many deaths will it take to make US officials prioritize pedestrian safety? We apparently haven’t reached the limit yet.</p>
https://www.vox.com/23784549/pedestrian-deaths-traffic-safety-fatalities-governors-associationMarin Cogan2023-07-05T06:00:00-04:002023-07-05T06:00:00-04:00The impossible paradox of car ownership
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<img alt="A woman sitting in the driver’s seat of a silver sedan parked beside a chainlink fence." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/khGqc5_-USP6WOk6W1S6xB4Ht40=/0x48:1920x1488/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72426340/JohnFrancisPeters_05.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Shala Waines uses her 2015 Hyundai Elantra to run her small business, to supplement her income making UberEats and DoorDash deliveries, and to get herself and her daughter to school, the store, and appointments. “It’s everything,” she says.</figcaption>
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<p>For many working-class Americans, cars are a burden and a necessity.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="u2pES9"></p>
<p id="8obRQx">It was the third Saturday of the month, which meant that Shala Waines was up early. In a few hours, she had to set up for the <a href="https://sdsoulswapmeet.com/">Soul Swapmeet</a>, a monthly open-air market she founded in 2018 for Black entrepreneurs. To get to the swap meet that morning, Shala had to transport herself, her 17-year-old daughter, Damiyah, and Damiyah’s two friends, plus a large, A-frame plastic sign advertising the event, and a tent for her DJs. Shala drives a silver 2015 Hyundai Elantra, and fitting the kids and supplies in a compact four-door requires some creativity. She made it work by asking the teens to hold the tent in their laps. </p>
<p id="prnuI6">To look at Shala’s car is to get a sense of the woman who drives it: a small business owner, a single mom, and the type of person who volunteers to bring all of the food for a friend’s lakeside birthday bash. There are the empty cups her teenager and friends left in the back seat right after she cleaned it; boxes and bags rolling around in the trunk. There’s a “minding my Black-owned business” sticker, and some scrapes and dents on the driver’s side doors and bumper that Shala hates but can’t afford to fix right now.</p>
<p id="w4A8LS">The Elantra has meant a lot to her. It’s how she’s built her business, driving around San Diego to meet with potential vendors and city officials, scouting locations for the swap meet, loading it up with supplies. It’s how she makes UberEats and DoorDash deliveries to supplement her income, making food deliveries and supermarket runs for other people. It’s how she transports her daughter to school, gets her groceries, and makes it to doctor’s appointments. It’s her constant companion as she hustles, creates opportunities for herself and her clients, and cares for her daughter. In other words, her car is her ticket to participating in American life. “It’s everything,” Shala says.</p>
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<img alt="Shala Waines opens the trunk of her car. Behind her on a grassy expanse are tents with merchandise." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1jZYJDldpp10WOqHDFtCVgb181U=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759419/JohnFrancisPeters_07.jpg">
<figcaption>Shala is pictured with her car at the Soul Swapmeet in San Diego in May 2023. She founded the event five years ago.</figcaption>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="EtdiHD">It feels almost too obvious to say that for most people living in the United States, owning a car or having access to one is a necessity. Even after the pandemic <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/people-working-from-home.html">tripled the number of Americans who primarily work from home</a>, the vast majority of American workers — 68 percent — still drive to their <a href="https://www.vox.com/labor-jobs" data-source="encore">jobs</a>. Eighty-eight percent of households <a href="https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/what-if-more-people-bought-groceries-online-instead-driving-store">use cars to shop for food</a>, according to one survey, and having a car or a ride can factor significantly into whether someone is able to get <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4265215/">health care</a>.</p>
<p id="zUZlWf">For people who don’t need a car to get around, the convenience of owning one is so overwhelming that few who can afford to have a vehicle — outside of transit-rich cities like New York and Washington, DC — choose to go without. As of 2021, <a href="https://data.census.gov/table?tid=ACSDP5Y2021.DP04&hidePreview=true">91.7 percent of American households had at least one car</a>, according to Census data, and only 8.3 percent had none. In ways large and small, the ability to drive dictates how adults in the US earn a living, see friends, care for family, and visit the world outside their neighborhoods. </p>
<p id="JXHwe4">Anyone who has ever struggled to afford a car, or lived without one, knows how complicated life can get without access to a vehicle. Car ownership has always been expensive, but recent trends suggest that it is getting worse. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/07/new-car-market-high-interest-rates/">New car prices have risen so much</a> that purchasing one is quickly becoming out of reach for many buyers: A new car cost about $48,000 in May 2023, <a href="https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/when-will-car-prices-drop/">roughly 25 percent more</a> than one cost in May 2020. Because of a microchip shortage and auto manufacturers <a href="https://apnews.com/article/used-cars-prices-new-vehicles-supply-522266dc94e089859f6eb393a4a786e1">using their limited supply on luxury vehicles</a> that cost more money, consumers are increasingly turning to the used car market, driving up those prices, too. Over almost the same time period, the price of an average used car <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/buying-a-car/when-to-buy-a-used-car-a6584238157/">rose about 50 percent</a>. Plus, there’s the cost of gas, emergency repair, regular maintenance, and insurance, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/your-money/car-insurance-rates.html">which also has been rising</a>.</p>
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<img alt="Shala Waines walks along a row of tents selling merchandise on a grassy field." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0qSd2YFp1-JqdbQJK2LgLdNvVzw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759404/JohnFrancisPeters_02.jpg">
<figcaption>Shala walks the grounds of the Soul Swapmeet in May.</figcaption>
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<img alt="A photo showing a dent on the rear quarter panel of a silver Hyundai Elantra." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vJK4R8iX1ZS1XpI5IpPkw6cUCwE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759402/JohnFrancisPeters_01.jpg">
<figcaption>The 2015 silver Hyundai Elantra that Shala has owned since 2018 has some scratches and dents.</figcaption>
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<p id="4rYYds">The burdens of vehicle dependency fall disproportionately on marginalized people, especially those who are low-income and those who are Black. Car insurance costs more for people <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/minority-neighborhoods-higher-car-insurance-premiums-white-areas-same-risk">living in majority-minority zip codes</a>. Minorities are <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_mayer_racial-discrimination-in-the-auto-loan-market.pdf">more likely to be denied car loans</a> than white people with the same credit scores and incomes, and pay higher interest rates when they’re approved. People with low credit scores are vulnerable <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/money/car-financing/the-big-business-of-bad-car-loans-a2181686536/">to predatory lenders</a> who can trap them further in debt. Those living in low-income communities <a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis">are more likely to live near dangerous roads</a>, putting them at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/26/opinion/road-deaths-racial-gap.html">increased risk of death</a>. And Black drivers are more likely to <a href="https://www.vox.com/23735896/racism-car-ownership-driving-violence-traffic-violations">be pulled over by the police</a>, an experience with a range of possible negative outcomes, including ticketing, arrest, and violence. </p>
<p id="Ejv5yy">There is also the major toll cars take on the environment. Researchers calculated gas consumption from vehicles from 1949 to present and found that if American-owned vehicles were their own country, they’d be the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/climate/car-emissions.html">sixth largest emitter of carbon dioxide on Earth</a>. For all of these reasons, environmentalists and urban planning experts and advocates focus on reducing auto dependency, highlighting the importance of providing more equitable and environmentally sustainable alternatives, like public transit.</p>
<p id="I2M6Si">At the same time, a small but growing body of research shows that while reducing car use overall ought to remain a priority for policymakers, there’s a segment of the population that would benefit greatly by increasing access to and ownership of cars: low-income people, especially working-class mothers. They argue that increasing vehicle availability is an important step toward reducing economic inequality. </p>
<p id="BRVmEx">Arizona State University Professor David King and two colleagues, Michael Manville at UCLA and Michael Smart at Rutgers, decided to <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0739456X18823252">look at the falling socioeconomic status of carless people</a> in the United States. In a paper published in 2019, they found that the poverty rate among carless families rose between 1960 and 2014, at the same time the number of poor people with a car increased 20 percent. The way a car unlocks access to almost everything ensures that most people will, despite the costs, do whatever they can to obtain one. </p>
<p id="Tfeywp">What surprised King was how pronounced the income gap between car owners and the carless was in much of the country. The disparity between an auto-owning household and a carless household was about as large as it is between a homeowner and renter. “We were really surprised that the relationship is as stark as it is,” King said.</p>
<p id="mHSDeF">Another study in <a href="https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/22461/413078-Driving-to-Opportunity-Understanding-the-Links-among-Transportation-Access-Residential-Outcomes-and-Economic-Opportunity-for-Housing-Voucher-Recipients.PDF">2014</a> of low-income families who received housing vouchers through the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that recipients who had cars fared better than those who did not. “Housing voucher recipients with cars tended to live and remain in higher-opportunity neighborhoods — places with lower poverty rates, higher social status, stronger housing markets, and lower health risks,” wrote Rolf Pendall, <a href="https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/many-low-income-families-cars-may-be-key-greater-opportunity">one of the study’s authors</a> and a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.</p>
<p id="JrVVdd">Among one group of voucher recipients, “those with cars were twice as likely to find a job and four times as likely to remain employed,” he wrote. “The importance of automobiles arises not due to the inherent superiority of driving, but because public transit systems in most metropolitan areas are slow, inconvenient, and lack sufficient metropolitan-wide coverage to rival the automobile.”</p>
<p id="N0cJXt">In 2018, Cornell University professor Nicholas Klein <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0739456X20950428">interviewed 30 people who</a> received cars through a program called <a href="https://www.vehiclesforchange.org/">Vehicles For Change</a>, which provides automobiles to people who need them in Maryland and northern Virginia. Klein was looking for specific examples hidden in the data indicating that car access improves job opportunities and can have other benefits for families.</p>
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<img alt="Shala Waines watches the display of a gas pumping station, leaning against her Elantra." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/p8_t1ni1DNZuvh3hWl54WmLBViU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759426/JohnFrancisPeters_11.jpg">
<figcaption>Shala fills up her tank at a San Diego-area gas station. Owning a car costs far more than its purchase price — insurance, interest rates, maintenance, and gas all make the expense more burdensome, particularly for those with lower incomes.</figcaption>
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<p id="SsgCNV">“The part I didn’t expect, that came up organically in interviews, was that low-income people were already buying cars and struggling to own and maintain cars. I think many people, including myself, had naively assumed that subsidizing a car for someone meant that they’d go from taking the bus or biking or walking to all of a sudden driving,” he says. “It’s not that most lower-income people are not able to own a car. It’s that they’re not able to hold onto those cars, and the used car market is incredibly fraught.”</p>
<p id="o3Qjhb">Klein also realized that conversations about cars, and the struggles of getting, keeping, and maintaining them, were often much deeper and more emotionally weighted than they initially seemed. As he spoke with recipients, Klein started to understand why. “Losing a car is often caught up with another crisis or challenge,” he says. “It can be caught up in housing insecurity, or losing a job. Sometimes, it’s people talking about domestic abuse or addiction or incarceration.”</p>
<p id="uu4x7Y">The conversations were, on the surface, about getting a car. In reality, they were about so much more than that. They were stories about what it means to survive in the United States.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="bWdve0">Shala knows how hard it can be to hold on to a car. Growing up in Southern California, she had memories of family road trips to Disneyland, Las Vegas, and the beach. “I had an amazing upbringing until I turned 17,” she says. “From there, everything went downhill.” </p>
<p id="mx43QB">In 2001, Shala’s mom broke her ankle. Soon after, she developed a blood clot and died suddenly. Shala was just on the cusp of adulthood; her mom was 35. “It hit us really hard,” Shala says. A few months later, Shala and her siblings moved across the country with their stepdad, to Virginia to be closer to his relatives. Shala struggled with her grief. By 17, she was pregnant with her first child.</p>
<p id="mPwyD6">She stayed in Roanoke after high school, raising her son and working, and by 31, she was a mother of two employed by a large insurance agency. She hated the way her work dictated the time she was able to spend with her children, and felt that there weren’t good opportunities for her if she stayed in Virginia. She dreamed of returning to California and someday starting her own business. So she made contact with her biological dad, who was still living in California. He offered to help her find a job and a place to live if she came home.</p>
<p id="yqoHos">Shala took the Chevrolet Impala she’d been paying off and drove it from Roanoke to San Diego over the course of a weekend. When she got there, she realized that her dad wasn’t actually in a position to help. First, he put her up in the house of a relative who wasn’t able to accommodate her and her daughter. Then, he paid for a night in a motel room where the front door didn’t lock and everything was so unclean that Shala didn’t want to lie down on the bed. Her daughter Damiyah, then 7 years old, was with her at the time (her son stayed with his father in Virginia). The two of them felt so afraid of staying the night that they fled the room and slept in their car.</p>
<p id="VAKd7N">After several weeks, Shala got a job and secured an apartment. They didn’t have any furniture, so each night Shala inflated a twin-sized mattress for her and Damiyah to sleep on. “In the morning it was flat,” she says. She made omelets for every breakfast, trying to keep grocery costs low and save as much as she could. </p>
<p id="asxwFF">While she was struggling to get back on her feet, she fell behind on the payments for the Impala. Soon, she started worrying that it would be repossessed. She stayed up late at night, listening to the sounds of traffic, fearing a tow truck would come and take the car. “One night, it really was the truck,” she says, starting to cry at the memory. “They took my car, and I was all alone. I didn’t have anybody. I was like, what am I going to do?” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="PkcpxO">“Getting a car is a great step toward independence, but it’s not the final step. We need to do better as a society to provide a better standard of living,” says Marla Stuart, director of the Contra Costa County Employment and Human Services Department. The county’s <a href="https://ehsd.org/benefits/calworks-welfare-to-work-program/transportation/">KEYS Auto Loan program</a> provides affordable, low-interest car loans to qualified participants in CalWORKs, a California public assistance program.</p>
<p id="wxFDuN">KEYS and other loan programs can help people who might otherwise be subject to predatory lenders pushing deals they know recipients can’t afford to pay. But they also help address the inequity <a href="https://www.vox.com/23735896/racism-car-ownership-driving-violence-traffic-violations">applicants face on the market</a>. Minority applicants, according to research by Southern Methodist University professor Erik Mayer and colleagues, are 1.5 percentage points less likely to get a loan compared to their white peers, even after factoring in income and credit scores. Those who receive loans are charged interest rates that are 0.7 percent APR higher than similar white buyers. “Minorities are treated as if their credit score is roughly 30 points lower than it actually is. But then when we look at default rates on auto loans, we do not find any evidence that this is justified in economic terms,” Mayer tells Vox.</p>
<p id="KTF1kr">Across the United States, there are more than 120 nonprofit organizations that help provide cars to people who need them, according to <a href="https://www.workingcarsforworkingfamilies.org/">Working Cars for Working Families</a>, a program run by the National Consumer Law Center. Some operate as offshoots of county or state social services departments, others as charities. Freddy Pacheco, who helps run the loan program <a href="https://www.peninsulafamilyservice.org/our-programs/financial-empowerment/">DriveForward for the Peninsula Family Service</a>, in San Mateo, California, sees a range of people with moderate and low incomes, but, he says, “I would say around 80 percent of them are single mothers and minorities. A lot of them are people that came from domestic violence relationships or they’re not getting support with their kids.” </p>
<p id="CBFupB">Davine Snead is the vice president of development at Vehicles For Change, the organization that connected Klein to car recipients for his research. But 15 years ago, she was a mother of three young kids, going through a divorce. Her sister told her about Vehicles For Change, and Snead made a connection with the organization through a referral agency. Vehicles for Change got her a minivan. In turn, Snead was able to take a job that required her to commute a little farther each day, but which put her on the path to financial sustainability. It also allowed her to give her kids the experiences she’d always wanted them to have — regular trips to museums and the public library, and family days at the beach. “I get choked up, because that minivan was literally the keys to my independence and my freedom that I needed to restart my life,” Snead says. “It was just a real game changer.”</p>
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<img alt="A closeup of Shala Waines’s keys, with include a Soul Swapmeet lanyard and a cat keychain." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dMB5Jbz3_uxLiYKRJee0VWMWbNw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759434/JohnFrancisPeters_06.jpg">
<figcaption>Shala shows off her keys.</figcaption>
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<p id="KTHdKY">Because car access programs are limited, and the number of people who need cars and struggle to afford them is immense, people who struggle to afford a car often end up with bad loans or unreliable vehicles. Others make arrangements with family and friends, doing whatever they can to get by. </p>
<p id="nkopRY">While Shala was trying to figure out how she was going to get to work without the Impala, her neighbor’s mom made an offer: The woman would pay to get Shala’s car out of the lot, but she’d keep it for herself. In return, the woman would let Shala rent the Toyota Prius she owned, while Shala saved money to buy another car. Shala accepted the offer because she needed to get to work to keep her job, and taking the bus would add hours to her commute. But she later came to regret the terms of the deal. “I was paying her $200 a week for that car,” she says — far more than the average used car loan, <a href="https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/average-monthly-car-payment/#:~:text=the%20best%20deal.-,Car%20payment%20statistics,for%20used%20cars%20is%20%24526">which is currently around $526 a month</a>. At the time, she felt like she had no other choice. “When your back is against the wall, you have to say yes.”</p>
<p id="BEY2Om">Eventually, she saved up enough money to get a used Volkswagen Jetta, but the car started malfunctioning shortly after she bought it, and soon it was in the shop more than on the street. She found a lawyer and successfully sued the dealership that sold it to her. In 2016, she was hired to be the office manager at a fledgling insurance company for $25 an hour and bought a 2015 Kia Optima. The new business struggled, and she soon was laid off. She started falling behind on payments for the Kia, too. She needed to figure something out before the car was repossessed. </p>
<p id="x2NEUJ">Both Shala’s and Snead’s experiences echo what Evelyn Blumenberg, a professor at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, found when reviewing data about what car access means for women — especially working-class mothers. In a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308665756_Why_low-income_women_in_the_US_still_need_automobiles">2016 piece</a> in <em>The Town Planning Review</em>, Blumenberg demonstrated the increasing importance of cars for women with limited means, due to the <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/book/confronting-suburban-poverty-in-america/">suburbanization of poverty</a>, women’s participation in the workforce, and their unique household responsibilities. After reviewing the wide range of positive outcomes associated with cars, Blumenberg wrote: “If automobiles are essential to women’s livelihoods, policies ought to balance the need for automobiles with broader efforts to reduce their negative environmental impacts.” </p>
<p id="erLUSh">King also feels strongly about increasing car availability for low-income people. Cars are harmful to the environment, expensive, and loaded with negative externalities. But the individual benefits to low-income people are too great to ignore. “Just because too much driving is bad,” he says, “doesn’t mean we should punish people who’d be better off by driving more.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ZGWorn">In 2018, Shala discovered Hand Up Cars. A program offered by the <a href="https://www.jfssd.org/our-services/loans-scholarships/hand-up-cars/">Jewish Family Service of San Diego</a>, Hand Up Cars provides financing for working parents with low-to-moderate incomes and challenged credit histories, and it comes with required financial workshops and coaching. Shala applied to be a part of the program, attended financial literacy classes, and qualified for a loan. She picked out the Elantra. It wasn’t her dream car, but it had almost everything she was looking for.</p>
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<img alt="Shala Waines leans on the open driver’s side door of her Elantra, smiling. " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/r_mb8UTjX3Rxu6sfJ2lodLEN1wc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759428/JohnFrancisPeters_09.jpg">
<figcaption>Shala bought her car after struggling to maintain payments on previous vehicles. Hand Up Cars, a program run by San Diego’s Jewish Family Service, helped her purchase the Elantra, and also offered financial coaching. She now feels more stable than she has in years.</figcaption>
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<p id="NQolXu">Her Kia was eventually repossessed, but this time, she wasn’t stuck without a vehicle. The relief, she says, was immeasurable. “Helpful is not even the word — it’s been a lifesaver,” she says. The program’s coordinator, Nina Vaysburd, kept in touch with her, checking in to make sure she was keeping up with her payments and dropping off gift cards for Shala and her daughter at Christmas. In Vaysburd, Shala felt like she’d found someone who was on her side. </p>
<p id="XxVsop">When her transmission died in 2020, Hand Up Cars helped pay for it to be replaced. Five years after getting her car, Shala is almost done paying off the loan. She still thinks of herself as working her way toward the middle class, but she’s in a much more stable situation, and she knows the car played a major part. She feels much closer to making it than she did 10 years ago, when she and her daughter sometimes had to sleep in the Impala.</p>
<p id="BcJmSE">The Elantra is still her ticket to everything: On the Thursday after the meet, she drove with her daughter Damiyah to the bank to cash a check, then turned on the UberEats app and made a few deliveries.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yIYXBI2kX-xhnekqdNP0LXGdY4Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759406/JohnFrancisPeters_04.jpg">
<figcaption>Shala and her 17-year-old daughter, Damiyah, left, shop for groceries for an UberEats delivery run.</figcaption>
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<img alt="Shala in the driver’s seat looks at her phone, which shows a map for grocery delivery. Her daughter, Damiyah, is in the passenger seat." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/AFZmXIbJBh6sUZmV8cItXk8PIFY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759410/JohnFrancisPeters_03.jpg">
<figcaption>Having the Elantra has allowed Shala to take on extra work delivering for UberEats and Doordash.</figcaption>
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<p id="NzYOvX">Damiyah is now the same age Shala was when she lost her mom. It’s something Shala thinks about a lot. Because of what happened, Shala worries about what would happen to Damiyah if Shala died at a young age. It’s important to her to do everything she can to prepare her daughter for being an adult. “I don’t want my baby to be without what she needs when I’m gone,” she says.</p>
<p id="0vX20M">When she pays off the Elantra, Shala hopes to get another car so she can give this one to Damiyah. Shala’s mom never got a chance to give her driving lessons; for her own daughter, it’s different. Shala and Damiyah have just switched seats. Shala is teaching her daughter how to drive.</p>
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<img alt="Damiyah is in the driver’s seat, smiling at her mother, who is in the passenger’s seat making a driving motion with her hands." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/T45U4aYZQBlK4VVkCikYICb1s5Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24759437/JohnFrancisPeters_10.jpg">
<figcaption>Shala is also using the Elantra for one special task: teaching Damiyah to drive.</figcaption>
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https://www.vox.com/23753949/cars-cost-ownership-economy-repossessionMarin Cogan2023-06-13T06:37:04-04:002023-06-13T06:37:04-04:00How cars fuel racial inequality
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<img alt="The shadow of a mysterious figure appears on the side of a car. Police car lights can be seen in the reflection of the car window." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FYKdv-TTAp4eUAu_gDcZ-s9e7aM=/240x0:1680x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72341900/XiaGordon_Lede2.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://xiagordon.com/" target="_blank">Xia Gordon</a> for Vox and <a class="ql-link" href="https://capitalbnews.org/" target="_blank">Capital B</a></figcaption>
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<p>Cars can be a source of freedom. They also drive discrimination.</p> <div class="c-float-left"> <figure class="e-image">
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<p id="l3IQje"><em>Part of the </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/race/23745799/discrimination-racism-university-chicago-studies"><em>discrimination issue</em></a><em> of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight"><em>The Highlight</em></a><em>. This story was produced in partnership with </em><a href="https://capitalbnews.org/"><em>Capital B</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="9528Mf">When a Nevada police officer pulled over Leisa Moseley-Sayles in 2010, she was new to Las Vegas. She was getting a divorce and going through a custody battle, raising four young children, and working on a political campaign. Money was tight. So when the officer issued a ticket for $299 because her California license plate had expired, it couldn’t have come at a worse time: Moseley-Sayles didn’t have the money to pay. She signed up for a payment plan, not anticipating how that traffic ticket would haunt her for the next several years of her life. </p>
<p id="Y1sKbf">For the first few months, she made her payments on time. Then, one month, she was short on cash. She wasn’t sure what missing a payment would mean, but when Moseley-Sayles called the court to ask if she could resume payments the next month, she learned that because she’d missed one, there was now a warrant out for her arrest. In order to get out of warrant status, she’d have to pay the warrant fees, which in Nevada can be $150 or more. She didn’t have the money to pay, so Moseley-Sayles was stuck, unable to afford the fine necessary to get back on the original payment plan.</p>
<p id="0wDHaw">The late fees accumulated and then multiplied. In 2011, she was pulled over again and informed that because she hadn’t paid her fines, her license had been suspended. She was issued another ticket. She tried to stay on top of payments, but in 2014, the worst happened: She was dropping her kids off at school and an officer pulled her over and informed her that she had an outstanding warrant for unpaid fees and was under arrest. Moseley-Sayles had to call a friend to pick up her kids while she waited to be released from jail later that night.</p>
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<p id="DDBnL1">Her story isn’t unique. As of 2021, about <a href="https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjlr/vol54/iss4/5/">11 million Americans had their driver’s licenses suspended</a> due to nonpayment of fines and fees. It took Moseley-Sayles nearly a decade — by which time she’d paid off her initial ticket plus an additional $5,000 in warrant fees and other fines — to get her license reinstated. In the interim, she faced a conundrum that millions who have suspended licenses must contend with each year: Taking away a license doesn’t take away a person’s need to drive. Moseley-Sayles had to keep using her car and hope that she wasn’t pulled over and arrested for it.</p>
<p id="2oZAkR">“I cannot even tell you my emotional trauma. I always got nervous if I saw an officer, or if I passed one by and wasn’t sure if they’d get behind me,” she says. “I’m African American.” The knowledge that, as a Black driver, <a href="https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/findings/">she was more likely to be pulled over</a> contributed to her sense of unease. What was particularly nerve-wracking for her was her sense that it didn’t matter how carefully she drove: Her trouble with the law began not because she’d driven dangerously, but because of expired license plates.</p>
<p id="mXkomJ">“I’m a safe driver,” she says. “I’ve never in my life had a speeding ticket.” </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="XsJlSN">
<p id="bpDZ0x">In <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631495694"><em>Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights</em></a>, historian and professor Gretchen Sorin writes<em> </em>about the ways cars opened new possibilities for freedom of movement to <a href="https://www.vox.com/race" data-source="encore">Black Americans</a>, offering refuge from the segregation that defined <a href="https://www.vox.com/transportation" data-source="encore">mass transit</a> in the Jim Crow South. </p>
<p id="Y0MHi6">“This freedom meant something different — and often, simply more — to Blacks than to whites,” Sorin writes. Those new freedoms brought new perils, though. Black drivers “encountered racist law-enforcement officers and gas-station attendants, bigoted auto-repairmen, threatening road signs,” and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/2/22/18235335/green-book-guide-to-freedom-documentary-oscars">sundown towns</a>: communities where Black people were expected to vacate by nightfall, under threat of violence. “Black drivers took many precautions to protect themselves and their families from these dangers,” Sorin explains.</p>
<p id="IuCq5m">While much has changed since the civil rights movement fought for better protections for Black Americans, car-based transportation — now the dominant mode of American travel — continues to drive racial discrimination and inequality today. Majority-Black neighborhoods are still dealing with the consequences of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-cities-history">plowed interstates </a>through predominantly African American neighborhoods, displacing more than a million people and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/america-highways-inequality/">cutting off those who remained from the rest of their communities</a>, resulting in their disinvestment and economic decline. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="nuLOMX"><q>“To function almost everywhere in this country, you must have a car, but it can also make you incredibly vulnerable”</q></aside></div>
<p id="hATjgl">Black drivers also face financial burdens that white drivers don’t. In 2019, Erik Mayer, an assistant professor of <a href="https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance" data-source="encore">finance</a> at Southern Methodist University, and two of his colleagues looked into racial discrimination in auto lending. They found ample evidence that <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_mayer_racial-discrimination-in-the-auto-loan-market.pdf">Black and Hispanic people are discriminated against when buying cars</a>.</p>
<p id="yB4vaY">Even accounting for income and credit scores, Mayer and his colleagues found, minority applicants were 1.5 percentage points less likely to receive a loan than their white counterparts, and 80,000 minority applicants were denied loans each year. Those who got loans were charged interest rates that were 0.7 percent APR higher than white buyers. “This costs the average minority borrower the equivalent of about $400 upfront. In aggregate, interest rate discrimination costs minority borrowers in the US about $1.7 billion per year,” Mayer says. “Another way to think about our findings is that minorities are treated as if their credit score is roughly 30 points lower than it actually is. But then when we look at default rates on auto loans, we do not find any evidence that this is justified in economic terms.”</p>
<p id="OxGnFO">Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to live in low-income communities with more dangerous roads and infrastructure, too. The consequences are deadly: Black pedestrians are <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/racial-disparities-traffic-fatalities/">more than two times more likely to be killed while walking</a> than white pedestrians. While cycling, their fatality rate is 4.5 times that of white cyclists. Overall, Black people — including those behind the wheel — are about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2021/06/22/black-traffic-deaths-pandemic/">25 percent more likely</a> to be killed in a car crash than white people. Those inequalities were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/26/opinion/road-deaths-racial-gap.html#:~:text=It%20found%20that%20Black%20people,as%20that%20for%20white%20cyclists.">exacerbated during the pandemic</a>.</p>
<p id="no8kYi">Black drivers are <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/black-drivers-more-likely-to-be-stopped-by-police.html">more likely to be pulled over by police than white drivers</a>, and once pulled over, they are <a href="https://crimeandjusticeresearchalliance.org/rsrch/racial-disparities-in-traffic-ticketing/">more likely to be ticketed</a>, <a href="https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/06/racial_disparities_traffic_stops.php#.ZEldDnbMKUk">searched</a>, and <a href="https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/ascii/cpp05.txt#:~:text=Black%20drivers%20(4.5%25)%20were,drivers%20to%20receive%20a%20ticket.">arrested</a>. High-profile killings of unarmed Black drivers like <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23614082/sarah-seo-traffic-police-tyre-nichols">Tyre Nichols</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12119344/philando-castile-mother-valerie-castile">Philando Castile</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/4/10/8382037/walter-scott-shooting-south-carolina-police-murder">Walter Scott</a> periodically draw attention to the fact that police traffic stops can be deadly, a mode of harassment, and an easy way to search a vehicle. But, perhaps more often, they can result in tickets that escalate if drivers are unable to pay, resulting in mounting debt, suspension of licenses, and even jail time. </p>
<p id="IipJcR">Part of what makes auto-based discrimination so insidious is how difficult it is to avoid. “Cars are a basic necessity to life in virtually every place in the United States,” says Joanna Weiss, co-executive director of Fines and Fees Justice Center, a national organization dedicated to ending <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy" data-source="encore">policies</a> that place undue financial and legal burdens on low-income people. “To function almost everywhere in this country, you must have a car,” she says, “but it can also make you incredibly vulnerable.”</p>
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<p id="x7tH0p">In 2018, NYU professors Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross began the early stages of a research project with students in the school’s <a href="https://www.pepresearchlab.com/">Prison Education Program Research Lab</a>. The students, who were formerly incarcerated, trained as peer researchers and interviewed others who’d been in the prison system about their debts and financial burdens. As the researchers conducted their first sets of interviews, one theme kept coming up again and again. “Even though we hadn’t talked about cars or named them as a source of debt, they started appearing,” Livingston says. “We started to realize that many of the people in our world had been arrested while driving.”</p>
<p id="k10CCq">Livingston, Ross, and the researchers saw how central cars were in the arrests of the people they interviewed. In early 2023, they published the results of their study in <a href="https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cars-and-jails/"><em>Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality</em></a>. The book explores how cars can be both an instrument of freedom and entrapment, exposing low-income and Black and brown Americans to discriminatory policing and predatory lending.</p>
<p id="Iw6QJ9">One of the most striking aspects of the interviews was the extent to which cars loomed large in many of the incarcerated subjects’ memories of life on the outside: They recalled with fondness the vehicles they used to drive, or talked about what cars they planned to buy when they got out. “We did not want to deny the positive features of automobility, and what that has meant to people and indeed to many of our interviewees, who dreamed about getting back on the road,” Ross says.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="aEnXMh"><q>“People held in a cage dream of motion, mobility, and the ability to move at will”</q></aside></div>
<p id="qdm97h">Livingston agreed. “The carceral system works by denying freedom of mobility to people — that’s at the very core of it. So of course, people held in a cage dream of motion, mobility, and the ability to move at will,” she says. “They dream of privacy, something that is profoundly denied to them.”</p>
<p id="FsG0ps">After getting out of prison, getting a car was often a top priority for those reentering society, especially if they were reentering in a place where one was required to drive to work or meetings with probation officers. But several of the formerly incarcerated people interviewed, having limited credit because of their years behind bars, found it difficult to access car loans at reasonable interest rates — making them susceptible to predatory lenders who would charge exorbitant interest rates on vehicles they couldn’t afford. </p>
<p id="NnCiiU">“A lot of people we were interviewing were driving pretty fancy cars. We were stroking our chins, going: How did you afford that? It turned out that some of them were walking into dealerships and being told they couldn’t get financing for the Hondas they wanted, but could for a top-of-the-line Mercedes,” Ross says. “Why would a lender and dealer do that? Because they know they’re going to be able to repossess the car quickly.” </p>
<p id="RqF4T7">It wasn’t the only way formerly incarcerated people were targeted. For those who were Black, the heightened risk of being pulled over meant they were vulnerable to being reincarcerated for a minor traffic violation if an officer found out they had a prior felony conviction and were on parole. “Coming out of prison, when you get behind the wheel of a car, it puts you in the spotlight,” Ross says. While working with their formerly incarcerated peer researchers on the project, Ross noted, three of them were pulled over for minor traffic violations and ended up being incarcerated again.</p>
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<p id="9VdD4f">Moseley-Sayles soon learned that her difficulty climbing out of the debt caused by her initial traffic ticket was a common experience in her community. Through her work with the <a href="https://www.ccblackcaucus.com/about-us.html">Clark County Black Caucus</a>, she heard from several people who were experiencing similar difficulties navigating the system. She and others in the Black Caucus began raising awareness about the issue and advocating for changes to be made to the law. In 2011, Moseley-Sayles and other activists in the state worked on a campaign to get rid of automatic warrants for failure to pay traffic fines, but the bill failed. </p>
<p id="osXizF">Then, in 2014, a police officer <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/5/31/17937818/michael-brown-police-shooting-darren-wilson">shot and killed Michael Brown</a>, an unarmed Black teenager, on a street in Ferguson, Missouri. In the days following his killing, protesters took to the streets across the United States to protest <a href="https://www.vox.com/police-violence" data-source="encore">police violence</a> against Black civilians. </p>
<p id="105nS5">In the wake of that unrest, the Justice Department announced a report into the policing practices of law enforcement officers in Ferguson. The report, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf">released in 2015</a>, confirmed what residents of overpoliced communities already knew to be true: that the Ferguson police were using pretextual police stops that violated citizens’ constitutional rights, and were issuing traffic tickets and fines at the direction of city government as a means of generating revenue for the city’s budget. The practice, the DOJ found, was discriminatory against Ferguson’s predominantly Black residents, and it was undermining public safety and trust. </p>
<p id="RXM8yI">The Ferguson report brought new attention to the issue of predatory fines and fees, which activists seized on in order to help spark reform. Because each community has its own rules for how fines and fees are administered, getting a comprehensive picture of the problem was difficult. The Fines and Fees Justice Center, which was founded in 2018, picked up the fight and began compiling research and data from disparate municipalities across the country, trying to get a sense of the scale of the problem. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="2AuQJ9"><q>While 76 percent of drivers in New York City are white, 80 percent of those arrested for driving with a suspended license are Black or Latino</q></aside></div>
<p id="pJ1TUM">The DOJ’s findings in Ferguson pointed to a common pattern. “Tens of millions of tickets are issued every year in the United States, and they’re extracting wealth — particularly among communities that are heavily policed and therefore heavily stopped,” Weiss says. “They are low-income communities and especially communities of color.” </p>
<p id="tYCuWa">The racial disparities are evident in who gets charged for driving with a suspended license: According to an analysis by the New York City Council data team, driving with a suspended license is the fourth most common charge in the city. While 76 percent of drivers in the city are white, <a href="https://council.nyc.gov/data/fix-the-system/">80 percent</a> of those arrested for driving with a suspended license are Black or Latino. </p>
<p id="WGhz2W">The irony, Weiss points out, is that the rules end up punishing people not based on public safety — because wealthier people who receive speeding tickets can often just pay their fines and get back on the road — but rather on whether the person can pay. “What we end up doing is taking our public safety resources, our police, and courts, and using them as armed debt collectors, rather than protecting public safety,” she says. “We punish people more severely for being poor than for being dangerous to other people.”</p>
<p id="HL2vqE">As Moseley-Sayles discovered in conversations with others who were in debt, part of the problem is that many people who were caught up in the system didn’t want to speak publicly about it. “There is some shame around it. Anyone who gets a traffic ticket — people want to pay,” she says. “No one wants to be known for being poor.”</p>
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<p id="doL06r">In 2016, the DOJ <a href="https://www.courts.wa.gov/subsite/mjc/docs/DOJDearColleague.pdf">issued a letter</a> to presiding court judges and administrators across the country, warning them that issuing tickets that citizens couldn’t afford to pay could be a violation of their constitutional rights.</p>
<p id="3CMXtl">“Individuals may confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community; lose their <a href="https://www.vox.com/labor-jobs" data-source="encore">jobs</a>; and become trapped in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape,” Vanita Gupta, then-head of the DOJ’s civil rights division, and Lisa Foster, director of the Office for Access to Justice, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-warns-local-courts-about-unlawful-fines-and-fees/2016/03/13/c475df18-e939-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html">wrote</a>. “Furthermore, in addition to being unlawful, to the extent that these practices are geared not toward addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue, they can cast doubt on the impartiality of the tribunal and erode trust between local governments and their constituents.” </p>
<p id="kIFjUY">The letter wasn’t binding, but indicated that courts imposing harsh fines and fees might find themselves open to legal challenges and under scrutiny from the Department of Justice. The DOJ followed up on the letter in April 2023, further signifying its commitment to ending the practice. “The unfettered imposition of fines and fees across the country has entrapped poor people, too many of whom are people of color, in a cycle of escalating debt, unnecessary incarceration, and debilitating entanglement in our justice system,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s civil rights division <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-issues-dear-colleague-letter-courts-regarding-fines-and-fees-youth-and">wrote in the updated guidance</a>. </p>
<p id="wbVUVP">At the same time, a coalition of organizations got to work lobbying state lawmakers around the country about the policies and practices in their states. One campaign, called <a href="https://www.freetodrive.org/">Free to Drive</a>, is aimed at ending debt-based driver’s license suspensions. Since 2017, the organization says, 24 states and DC have ended the practice or reformed the way they do it. In New Mexico, where lawmakers voted this year to reinstate the licenses of people who couldn’t afford to pay or didn’t appear in court for the hearing, 300,000 people — <a href="https://www.kunm.org/local-news/2023-04-21/new-laws-to-eliminate-court-fees-and-reinstate-nearly-300-000-drivers-licenses">one in five adults in the state</a> — will get back their licenses next year.</p>
<p id="TKQQDz">In 2021, with the help of advocates including Moseley-Sayles, who became the Nevada state director for the Fines and Fees Justice Center, Nevada legislators <a href="https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/81st2021/Bill/7690/Text">passed a law</a> banning courts from suspending someone’s driver’s license because of an inability to pay. They also <a href="https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/decriminalizing-traffic-tickets-among-new-laws-taking-effect-jan-1-2023">decriminalized</a> driving with a broken tail light and other minor traffic violations that are often a pretext for traffic stops and unfairly burden low-income people and people of color. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="TohRyv"><q>In New Mexico, 300,000 people — one in five adults in the state — will get back their licenses next year</q></aside></div>
<p id="olQmrY">Moseley-Sayles says that while she’s still hoping to work on legislation to make infractions like broken tail lights a secondary offense, she’s glad that no one else will experience what she did. “Anyone with a suspended license or expired vehicle registration or a broken tail light, they’re not a criminal anymore,” she says. “That ticket won’t turn into a warrant. I’m very happy about that.” </p>
<p id="0I8vn6">There are several reforms, experts say, that would reduce the severity of discrimination against Black drivers. Decriminalizing minor traffic violations in the remaining 12 states that still do it is one of them, as is investing in road design changes that will make streets safer for everyone, says Beth Colgan, a professor of law at UCLA. “If we care about pedestrian and traffic safety, then let’s do the necessary infrastructure improvements,” Colgan says. </p>
<p id="Wr21xv">Another idea, which has gained traction as violent traffic stops have become a part of public consciousness, is removing police from traffic enforcement and putting it in the hands of <a href="https://www.npr.org/local/305/2021/04/29/991655875/a-proposal-would-give-traffic-enforcement-to-d-d-o-t-not-d-c-police">municipal transportation agencies</a>. “We see no reason that armed police should be doing traffic duty,” Livingston at NYU says. “The road needs to be regulated but not at the barrel of a gun.” The idea has been circulating among policymakers and advocates in places like <a href="https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/east-bay/traffic-enforcement-police-california/3143548/">Oakland, California</a>, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/local/305/2021/04/29/991655875/a-proposal-would-give-traffic-enforcement-to-d-d-o-t-not-d-c-police">Washington, DC</a>.</p>
<p id="ch2d9t">Ross also points to fine systems that work on a sliding scale, which are <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/">common in Scandinavian countries</a>. Maybe most important, Weiss says, is making sure local courts abide by the guidance issued by the DOJ and root out the discrimination that disproportionately falls on low-income and Black and brown drivers.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="jC130d">Weiss feels hopeful that, despite the scale of the issue, the federal government and local legislators are starting to take notice and correct their policies. “On the one hand, practices everywhere are terrible,” she says. “On the other hand, there’s recognition in many places that using the justice system as a piggy bank is a terrible idea that’s harmful to communities. There’s a lot to undo. But it’s actually doable.”</p>
<p id="eRoH6L"><a href="https://www.vox.com/authors/marin-cogan"><em>Marin Cogan</em></a><em> is a senior correspondent at Vox, focusing on features on a wide range of subjects, including </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis"><em><strong>traffic safety</strong></em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22878920/school-shootings-survivors-columbine-mental-health"><em><strong>gun violence</strong></em></a><em>, and </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22983104/justice-forgiveness"><em><strong>the legal system</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/23735896/racism-car-ownership-driving-violence-traffic-violationsMarin Cogan2023-02-28T06:30:00-05:002023-02-28T06:30:00-05:00Cars transformed America. They also made people more vulnerable to the police.
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<img alt="Police cars blocking a roadway at sunset." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UpgFxhXuVJJ9v0i7GAW19VFCSMk=/243x0:4126x2912/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72020918/1234315387.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>California Highway Patrol officers block a freeway during a protest sparked by the death of George Floyd in 2020. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>How traffic stops became so dangerous for Black drivers.</p> <p id="zCtujy">Traffic stops, usually over minor infractions, are one of the most common ways that people interact with police. The frequency with which they <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-traffic-stops-killings.html">turn deadly</a>, often with <a href="https://www.vox.com/21497089/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-trial-police-prosecutions-black-lives-matter">impunity for the officers responsible</a>, has made them a major focal point in the effort to combat police brutality.</p>
<p id="y7XaGV">In one recent case, police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, pulled over 29-year-old Tyre Nichols for “reckless driving.” Over the next several minutes, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23574206/tyre-nichols-death-bodycam-video-memphis-police-release">officers brutally beat, kicked, and pepper-sprayed Nichols</a> while screaming <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/us/tyre-nichols-video-assault-cops.html">conflicting orders at him</a>. Three days later, Nichols died from his injuries. Investigators have since said they were “unable to substantiate” the claim that he was driving recklessly, and five officers have since been charged in Nichols’s death.</p>
<p id="yGXBKX">Now, <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/news/memphis-philadelphia-driving-equality-tyre-nichols-20230220.html">Memphis lawmakers are considering legislation</a> that would ban officers from stopping drivers for certain low-level driving offenses. The bill, which is modeled after a Philadelphia law, attempts to reduce the potential for deadly interactions between the police and Black drivers, <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/black-drivers-more-likely-to-be-stopped-by-police.html">who are pulled over more frequently than drivers of other races</a>. </p>
<p id="Nx5lly">How did we reach the point where traffic stops escalate into police killings? In her 2019 book, <a href="https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/sarah-seo"><em>Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom</em></a>, Sarah Seo, a historian of criminal law and procedure and professor at Columbia Law School, examines how the automotive era upended society, dramatically expanded the power and authority of the police, and altered our society in the process, resulting in the traffic enforcement system we have today. Vox spoke to Seo about the legal, social, and historical forces that shaped our modern, deadly approach to traffic enforcement.</p>
<p id="isPcgg"><em>This interview has been edited for length and clarity.</em></p>
<p id="4cx7eK"><strong>I want to start by asking you about the police killing of Tyre Nichols. These incidents of brutality are, sadly, not unusual in the United States. How did this traffic stop turn so deadly?</strong></p>
<p id="OTulIc">The unit that pulled over Mr. Nichols was a specialized crime task force. They are trained and delegated to fight crime, and they use minor traffic stops to begin their investigation. So you have a law enforcement unit that’s trained to investigate some of the more serious violent crimes using traffic enforcement as a starting point. It should be totally separate. Traffic law enforcement is an important government function because traffic safety is important, but that shouldn’t be co-opted by a law enforcement unit that’s not trying to enforce traffic laws.</p>
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<cite>Scott Olson/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>RowVaughn Wells, the mother of Tyre Nichols, attends a January 27 press conference following her son’s death.</figcaption>
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<p id="MBlOIK"><strong>How did the advent of the automotive age shape law enforcement in America?</strong></p>
<p id="xKLUr0">Driving and owning cars became very common pretty quickly in American society. Government officials had no idea why almost everybody seemed to be violating traffic laws. Fatal accidents were really common, especially in the early years, to the point where people had morally righteous anger whenever an accident resulted in death. [In his book, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/655382/fighting-traffic-by-peter-d-norton/"><em>Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of The Motor Age in the American City</em></a>] historian Peter Norton talks about this huge marketing shift that the automobile industry had to do to overcome the anger at the chaos and destruction that cars produced. It resulted in a lot of accidents, and also just traffic. It was chaos on the streets. So municipalities throughout the country passed an increasing number of traffic laws, and everybody violated them. They tried different ways of getting people to obey them, what I call 19th-century forms of getting people to comply with norms: churches, automobile associations, civic associations, and none of those worked. So they resorted pretty quickly to police law enforcement. </p>
<p id="TzZY6W">Usually, historians, we emphasize change over time, but this is a constant over time: People get really mad at the people who try to enforce traffic laws. And so given the hostility and aggression that enforcers experienced, what municipalities did was increase their discretionary power, so disobeying an order of traffic police became a misdemeanor. Their authority was increased to manage the difficulty of car drivers. At the same time, car drivers hated to be policed in their cars. They were really irate. A lot of the training of traffic enforcers [involved being told to] exercise discretion. </p>
<p id="4X43M0"><strong>You write in your book about how the Supreme Court dealt with new, difficult questions about cars, crime and law enforcement. Can you tell me about </strong><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/267/132/"><em><strong>Carroll v. United States</strong></em></a><strong> and what it meant for the rights of drivers?</strong></p>
<p id="0mUfOR">Before the Carroll case [in 1925], law enforcement needed a warrant to make a search. That became impracticable with cars because they could be driven off in a moment and there was no time to get a warrant. So the Supreme Court, in the <em>Carroll </em>case, created a warrant exception to say that an officer doesn’t need a warrant to stop and search a car if they have reason to believe that there’s evidence of a crime or contraband inside the car. </p>
<p id="uCf7sL">For a misdemeanor, police officers also needed to see that misdemeanor taking place with their own eyes, which basically means they knew that a crime was being committed. By saying you don’t need a warrant, even for misdemeanors, that basically watered down the standard for when police officers could act as well. So essentially, the <em>Carroll</em> doctrine really transformed and expanded law enforcement powers. It was the first time that the court constitutionally recognized and authorized police discretion. It gave officers the discretion to act to search if they had reason to believe that there was evidence of a crime, rather than actually knowing it.</p>
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<p id="4ICHTA">This is where the traffic part of the story becomes important. Because pretty quickly, there are so many traffic laws and so many traffic violations and now officers actually don’t even need probable cause under <em>Carroll </em>to stop a car, they just need to see a traffic violation.</p>
<p id="lKrcCb">In Mr. Nichols’s case, they didn’t have any reason to suspect him of anything, right? They had a hunch. Maybe they just wanted to pick on somebody. They didn’t even have probable cause to believe that he had guns or drugs in his car. So what did they do? <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/01/28/1152319138/tyre-nichols-arrest-what-went-wrong-policing-experts">[They pulled him over on a] traffic violation</a>. </p>
<p id="Lk35mV"><strong>Practically speaking, what does this mean for Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, which are meant to protect us and our property from “unreasonable searches and seizures”?</strong></p>
<p id="MQBeex">I think the best way to answer that is to actually quote from law enforcement themselves. There’s a text that I analyze in my book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tactics-Criminal-Patrol-Discovery-Survival/dp/0935878122"><em>Tactics for Criminal Patrol</em></a>, and that book says the Fourth Amendment is your tool. Law enforcement are trained to view the Fourth Amendment as not a protector of our privacy rights but as a tool to do what they want. </p>
<p id="Q4zhEk">In an automotive society, it is very watered down. It doesn’t do much.</p>
<p id="5GvEdi"><strong>Wait, how could it be their tool? How could it be interpreted as anything other than a protection of the rights of an individual against unreasonable searches?</strong></p>
<p id="mp2Xl4">Because they have strategies for complying with the Fourth Amendment, and the strategies that they use under the Fourth Amendment are authorized. The Fourth Amendment gives them a veneer of legitimacy.</p>
<p id="8pLVP8">A<strong> </strong>familiar pattern in these cases is they’ll stop someone for a minor traffic violation. They can’t search the car at that point still, because <em>Carroll </em>says you need probable cause to search the car. So the traffic stop becomes a moment where they have to gather facts that allows them ultimately to get to search the car. So there’s a doctrine of consent. That is, the police can say, “Can I search the car?” And if you say “sure,” you’ve given your consent, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. </p>
<p id="NMiAtZ">There’s all these power dynamics involved in getting consent. A lot of people don’t know that you can say no. And the Court held that under the Fourth Amendment, the police don’t have to tell drivers that they have the right to say no. So under Fourth Amendment law, as the Court has explained it, the police can pull somebody over for a minor violation, ask to search the car without telling them they have the right to say no, and then [if they say yes] search the car, and it’s given legitimacy to the entire interaction.</p>
<p id="Bd3Qj5"><strong>I think people are also confused about what the cops can or can’t do when they pull you over. You mentioned the Jay-Z song “99 Problems” in your book. He talks about how his “glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back and I know my rights so you gon’ need a warrant for that.” Is that right? What should people know about what cops can and cannot do when they pull you over? </strong></p>
<p id="d8qIcF">That “you need a warrant for that” line is wrong, because of the <em>Carroll </em>case. What I always tell my students is when you’re pulled over, and it’s not just about a traffic citation, ask the officer, “Am I free to leave?” because unless law enforcement has at least facts supporting reasonable suspicion that a crime is afoot, they have to let you leave.</p>
<p id="5ieckK">If they want to keep you longer than that, always ask, “Am I free to leave?” And if they say no, then ask “Why not?” That’s not a huge help, because there’s so many things that law enforcement can say to amount to reasonable suspicion. </p>
<p id="eKg7Di">One way that police officers have often justified stopping someone for an investigatory stop is to tell the court, “There was an odor of marijuana.” It’s a really easy thing to tell a judge to justify the stop because it’s really hard to disprove it, and judges are very reluctant to disbelieve. There’s a presumption that officers are telling the truth.</p>
<p id="iAhL6m"><strong>One of the things that really struck me reading your book is how many of these questions about traffic, and what makes humans drive the way they do, and about how we keep people safe, were the same exact debates people were having at the advent of the automotive age. We know discriminatory policing is a huge problem. We also know </strong><a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis"><strong>road safety is a huge problem</strong></a><strong>. And what we have now is very selective policing that is extraordinarily dangerous to people. So how do we balance those concerns? What does a system that is safe and equitable, and not sort of randomly deadly for Black drivers, look like?</strong></p>
<p id="RfjTso">I have two responses to that. I think a good place to start with any policy is to ask the most vulnerable people, and in this case, it’s communities of color. Because the pedestrian accident statistics, from what I hear from the people in this field, <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/racial-disparities-traffic-fatalities/">it really affects minority communities more</a>, and there’s more deaths and accidents in minority communities. They are experiencing the worst of both safety issues and the policing issues. What do they think is the best way to strike that balance between safety and curbing police brutality? I think that’s a good place to start.</p>
<p id="UpSQpl">The other answer to your question is, are there ways to enforce traffic laws or even encourage safe driving without using police enforcement? It might not be possible to completely 100 percent eradicate human enforcement, but how close can we get there? I’ve advocated for traffic cameras, and the separation of police units that investigate crime from those enforcing traffic. Those are the two main policies that I’ve argued for. </p>
<p id="phxpFn">Technology isn’t 100 percent discrimination-proof, and we have to also be mindful of things like equitable placement of the traffic cameras, we also have to pay attention to things like what are the fees. We have to pay attention to those policies. And we could consider a whole host of other things, but I think that’s a good start. I really like the idea of separating criminal law enforcement from traffic enforcement because traffic enforcement should be something that no one should be scared of. </p>
<p id="XGQP15">Right now, the situation we have is that people of color, drivers of color, are definitely scared of being pulled over. It’s just harrowing. And you also have police officers saying that traffic stops are the most dangerous part of their jobs, and they’re definitely scared of it. We’re doing something very wrong when everybody’s scared of traffic stops. They should be kind of routine encounters: If you speed, you get a ticket, and that’s it. Just to tone down the anxiety of those encounters, I think, would help a lot. And the way to do that is when people know that when they’re pulled over, it’s not a criminal investigation. It’s just a traffic citation. I think that will go a long way to help.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/23614082/sarah-seo-traffic-police-tyre-nicholsMarin Cogan2022-12-05T06:00:00-05:002022-12-05T06:00:00-05:00A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget.
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<figcaption>Jessica Hart, 39, sits on daughter Allison Hart’s bed at her family home in Washington, DC. In September 2021, Allie, 5, was struck and killed in a crosswalk steps from the family’s home.</figcaption>
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<p>Large vehicles and unsafe streets are killing too many people, including 5-year-old Allison Hart. Now her mother is fighting for safer streets.</p> <p id="zkBMrx">How do you commemorate the life of a 5-year-old girl?</p>
<p id="z8Lj0a">Here is what it looks like on one street corner in Washington, DC: a tiny bicycle, painted all in white, with a little wicker basket filled with purple and white silk flowers on the handlebars. A teddy bear in a princess dress sits on the seat, and on the ground nearby, a pile of stuffed animals — monkeys and puppies and lambs and bears and elephants — turn gray from exposure to the elements. </p>
<p id="aAkdD0">The intersection looks like so many of the four-stop crossings on so many roads all over the country, except for this memorial. It marks the place where, in September 2021, Allison Hart was killed while riding her bike.</p>
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<figcaption>A tiny white bicycle at Irving and 14th streets, Northeast, in Washington, DC, pays tribute to 5-year-old Allison Hart, who was killed here in 2021 amid a larger national spike in traffic violence deaths.</figcaption>
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<p id="BT0wEV">Eight months later, on a humid Wednesday afternoon in May, Allie’s mom, Jessica Hart, places her 3-month-old son in a black stroller. She pushes open the gate to the fence outside her home, a cream-colored bungalow surrounded by wide streets and well-manicured lawns in a neighborhood that appears transported from the suburbs. A longhaired cat sits watching her from the screened-in porch as she maneuvers the stroller onto the sidewalk.</p>
<p id="JRX56f">“We don’t really come this way ever,” Jessica says, walking the block up the street to where her daughter was killed. She’s wearing a striped linen shirt with jeans and pink sandals, which match her pink nails — Allie’s favorite color. A small “A” charm dangles from her neck. As she approaches the memorial, she comes to a stop and takes in the scene, a pair of Ray-Bans shading her eyes from the sun. </p>
<p id="NPhy6G">Allie was with her dad, Bryan, in the crosswalk when she was struck by the driver of a van. She was one of 20 pedestrians and cyclists killed in Washington, DC, in 2021. Another child, 4-year-old <a href="https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/dc-4-year-olds-mom-pleads-safety-changes-after-son-hit-and-killed-by-car/65-1d036b36-2f32-4791-8b13-e28f1474bb4b">Zy’aire Joshua</a>, was killed in Northwest DC as he crossed the street with his mom. Adults were killed, too: a 47-year-old bike courier and father of three named <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/fatal-crash-cyclist-hospital/2021/03/02/8f66162c-7b55-11eb-a976-c028a4215c78_story.html">Armando Martinez-Ramos</a>; a 24-year-old aspiring opera singer named <a href="https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/nina-larson-hit-killed-by-driver-in-adams-morgan-friends-honor-her-life/65-0cbdcfc4-a113-45b3-bbc1-b00833a7d574">Nina Larson</a>; two advocates for DC’s homeless population, <a href="https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/2-pedestrians-killed-at-hains-point-overcame-homelessness-waldon-adams-rhonda-whitaker/2652606/">Waldon Adams and Rhonda Whitaker</a>; a PhD student named <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/pagels-bicycle-crash-washington/2021/04/12/ab7d689c-9b85-11eb-8005-bffc3a39f6d3_story.html">Jim Pagels</a>.<strong> </strong>In 2022, <a href="https://ggwash.org/view/87515/sarah-langenkamp-loved-biking-she-shouldnt-have-died-because-of-it">three US diplomats</a> were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/state-department-fingarson-dead-crash/">among those</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/cyclist-dies-crash-northwest-dc/">killed in the region</a>.</p>
<p id="UQWir6">Across the country, <a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis">more pedestrians were killed in 2021 than at any time in the past 40 years</a>, according to data from the Governors Highway Safety Association. But the pandemic years aren’t outliers — pedestrian deaths have been rising for more than a decade. Between 2010 and 2020, they rose by <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians22#:~:text=GHSA's%20annual%20spotlight%20report%2C%20Pedestrian,single%20year%20in%20four%20decades.">54 percent</a>. Among cyclists, they <a href="https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/bicyclists#yearly-snapshot">rose 50 percent</a>. Contained within the statistics are countless human tragedies, like the Harts’. </p>
<p id="PXKK1k">Allie’s <a href="https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/washingtonpost/name/allison-hart-obituary?id=6544562">obituary</a> told of a little girl who “loved deeply and laughed often,” who aspired to be a “rock scientist,” who was fascinated by Brood X cicadas and Legos and American Girl dolls. At the memorial, her classmates showed up and blew bubbles in her honor. In the early days after she died, there was almost nothing that could ease Jessica and Bryan’s heartbreak. But sharing their memories of their little girl with others, and their outrage at her death in a place she should have been safe, that felt important. “I just wanted to share her with people. At some point, I think, I felt so helpless because I couldn’t save her or protect her,” Jessica says. She pushes the stroller, and her voice begins to break. “It’s just a nightmare, but also it’s just like, my daughter dies, and nothing changes. How could that be?” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="aItptr"><q>Pedestrian deaths have been rising for more than a decade. Between 2010 and 2020, they rose by 54 percent. Among cyclists, they rose 50 percent.</q></aside></div>
<p id="AyQkBx">She thinks about the <a href="https://www.vox.com/23037390/alex-jones-sandy-hook-elizabeth-williamson-book">parents of Newtown, Connecticut</a>, who lost their children and then watched the Senate vote down a bipartisan gun reform bill a few months later. How do they live with this? How does she?</p>
<p id="YT15vV">“So many people die every year because of cars, and nothing changes,” she says. Which can make her new mission — pushing for safer cars and streets so that no one has to go through what she and Bryan did — feel, as she describes it, “like a futile endeavor.” Still, she can’t accept the idea that it’s hopeless. “It won’t bring her back,” she says. “But I just can’t let it go.”</p>
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<cite>Courtesy of Jessica Hart</cite>
<figcaption>A photo of Allie climbing a tree in the front yard of the family’s Washington, DC, home.</figcaption>
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<p id="rSz6lc">At the beginning of the pandemic, Jessica started taking a photo of Allie each day. It was a way to document how they spent a historic time, when life changed overnight. The photographs ended up being incredibly important, a document of what would become a significant portion of their daughter’s life, up until its final day. Jessica thought she would have the photo books printed for her daughter, but they didn’t show up until after she died.</p>
<p id="yswkC2">So much is contained in the photo albums: Allie on a family beach vacation, in a swimsuit adorned with cherries, jumping in the surf. Allie bouncing on the bed, her hips and hair twisting in different directions, the embodiment of joy. Allie twirling in a lavender leotard, eyes focused on her Zoom ballet class. Allie crouching in front of a puddle, wearing a raincoat with floppy ears, making mud soup for the fairies. </p>
<p id="i0oe59">It surprised Jessica, when Allie was born, how much she loved being a mom. She always knew she wanted children, but she was awed by the tactile intimacy of it, how life-affirming it felt to care for this little girl, a love greater than anything she’d ever imagined. All of the small delights of being Allie’s mother, how she loved to be wrapped up in a towel and held like a baby after her bath, even as she was getting to be 40 pounds. Sometimes the grief is an absence of her weight — the knowledge that she’ll never hold Allie in her arms again. </p>
<p id="Q9BHCO">Jessica and Bryan were expecting their second child when Allie died. “Being pregnant when she died saved me,” Jessica says. “Those months between when she died and he was born were just ... awful.” Often, the grief lives at the back of her throat. It is palpable, a wound she would never want to heal. “You have a child for five years, and then suddenly, you don’t.” She remembers thinking: “What do I do with myself?”</p>
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<figcaption>One of the many small photo albums Jessica made, filled with photos of Allie.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Jessica rests her hand on the tree her daughter Allie would climb at the Hart family home.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Family cat Nixon often sleeps on Allie’s bed, which has been kept intact and unchanged since she died.</figcaption>
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<p id="bAcCv7">Soon, they discovered, there were others who shared their grief, including<strong> </strong>the artists who organized an event closing off the street so children and adults could take over the intersection, writing “SAFE STREETS” in chalk and drawing colorful tributes to Allie on the pavement. Jessica also heard from — and reached out to — other parents who’d lost loved ones, including Amy Cohen, whose son, Sammy Cohen Eckstein, <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2013/10/09/samuel-cohen-eckstein-12-killed-by-van-driver-on-prospect-park-west/">was killed by a van driver</a> in New York City in 2013.</p>
<p id="87ub8T">“After he died, I felt like I had to fight for him and make sure this didn’t happen to anyone else,” Cohen says. Before long, she was standing on her street with a radar gun, clocking the vehicles speeding down her street. (<a href="https://one.nhtsa.gov/About-NHTSA/Traffic-Techs/current/ci.Literature-Reviewed-On-Vehicle-Travel-Speeds-And-Pedestrian-Injuries.print#:~:text=One%20estimate%20is%20that%20about,over%2050%20mph%20at%20impact.">Speed is a major factor in pedestrian deaths</a>; the faster a vehicle is going, <a href="https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/winter-2022/05">the more likely it is</a> to fatally injure a pedestrian it strikes.) She encountered Sen. Chuck Schumer, who lived in a neighboring building, and begged him to do something about rampant speeding on city streets. She began speaking out at rallies and connected with Transportation Alternatives, a New York-based group that advocates for policies that make roads less dangerous, who helped Cohen start an organization called Families for Safe Streets.</p>
<p id="gX1l35">At the time, there wasn’t a national organization on the scale of Mothers Against Drunk Driving that included the broader spectrum of loved ones who’ve lost family members to traffic violence. “We thought, how can there not be something for this huge, preventable crisis that we have?” Cohen says. Their first campaign involved lobbying the state legislature in Albany to allow New York City to <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/queenscb10/downloads/pdf/notifications/25mph.pdf">lower the default speed limit on city streets to 25 miles per hour</a> — it became law in 2014. Cohen and her family members <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/when-cars-kill-pedestrians">went to the statehouse with photos of Sammy and handed them out to legislators</a>. Getting the speed limit reduced was difficult, and Cohen says no victory has come as easily since. “I’ve come to learn, painfully, that change is slow,” she says. “But we have seen that our voices can make a huge difference.” The group has since started <a href="https://www.familiesforsafestreets.org/">local chapters</a> across the United States.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="fTsxVi"><q>Twitter became a space for Jessica to share her love for Allie and her rage at a society that treats high levels of road deaths as part of the normal order of things</q></aside></div>
<p id="cHuier">The day after Allie was killed, the father of one of her schoolmates<strong> </strong>posted a video on <a href="https://twitter.com/lambda_calculus/status/1437913085486960645?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1437913085486960645%7Ctwgr%5E923ff15e4be801c312219cdc7fecaf23574472b0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Flocal%2Fallison-hart-bicycle-road-safety%2F2021%2F09%2F18%2F2253d8a4-1820-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html">Twitter</a> of a driver swerving into oncoming traffic so he could bypass the driver in front of him and blow through the intersection without stopping. Jessica also started standing out at the intersection, <a href="https://twitter.com/jlrhart/status/1451668702320078848">capturing drivers</a> rolling through the stop and posting it online.</p>
<p id="P60w2E">Twitter became a space for Jessica to share her love for Allie, her heartbreak, and her rage at a society that treats high levels of road deaths as part of the normal order of things. There, she found a community of people who validated her sense that something was deeply wrong. She tagged local officials, applauding when they added flexible posts that can help guide and slow traffic, and demanding to know when they would add speed bumps. That November, two months after Allie died, she <a href="https://twitter.com/jlrhart/status/1460266653170769935/photo/1">testified</a> for the first time in front of a city council committee, demanding more speed cameras, safety upgrades, and consequences for drivers who violated traffic laws. In her own way, she became one of the city’s most visible advocates for safe streets: a mother who could speak with force and clarity about the devastation wrought by the crisis.</p>
<p id="I154B5">“I think maybe it helps people to have a face or a story or a family,” she says of her decision to speak out. “Being only 5, part of it is having anybody remember her —” she pauses to collect herself, “It’s a gift. So it’s hard. But it’s the least hard of all the hard things.”</p>
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<figcaption>Since Allie was killed, Jessica has worked continuously to keep her daughter’s memory alive and to try to enact change to improve traffic safety and enforcement.</figcaption>
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<p id="BLfMAw">Allie’s death came amid a major transformation on US roads, spurred by the kinds of vehicles Americans drive. SUVs and trucks are getting bigger, and Americans are buying more of them every year. Between 2000 and 2019, the number of sedans and other small vehicles on the road dropped from over 60 percent to around 40 percent of all vehicles, according to an <a href="https://www.justintyndall.com/uploads/2/8/5/5/28559839/tyndall_pedestrian.pdf">analysis by Justin Tyndall</a>, assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii. The number of SUVs increased from 10 percent to more than 30 percent. And the appetite for larger vehicles isn’t slowing down: In October 2021, according to the consumer research firm <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/27/18105479/jd-power-car-commercials">JD Power</a>, trucks and SUVs made up over 80 <a href="https://jalopnik.com/trucks-and-suvs-are-now-over-80-percent-of-new-car-sale-1848427797">percent of all new vehicle</a> sales. </p>
<p id="heZXVY">Poorly designed infrastructure is one of the main reasons the United States has a traffic fatality rate that is about 50 percent higher than other comparable nations: <a href="https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis">Wide roads and a lack of designs that force drivers to slow down</a> encourage them to drive recklessly, without providing safe options for pedestrians and cyclists. But vehicle design is also a key component of the pedestrian fatality crisis, and it’s one that researchers have known about for decades.</p>
<p id="OeWRgH">Sales of SUVs started to pick up in the late ’90s and early 2000s, as Americans started spending money on larger, more spacious vehicles. In 2001, two researchers at Rowan University calculated pedestrian fatality data to determine how much more dangerous large vehicles were than their smaller counterparts. Their <a href="https://www.sbes.vt.edu/gabler/publications/esvped_paper212.pdf">findings</a> were striking: With smaller cars, one out of 20 collisions involving a pedestrian caused the pedestrian’s death; with large SUVs, it was one in seven. With large vans, it was one in four. The authors, Devon Lefler and Hampton Gabler, pointed to multiple factors that explained the heightened risk. Larger vehicles, they wrote, “are heavier, stiffer, and geometrically more blunt than passenger cars.”</p>
<p id="oIe8l4">The heavier vehicles gather more power with speed, increasing the force with which they strike a body. Unlike cars, which tend to be lower to the ground and strike pedestrians in the legs, the heightened front ends of large vehicles mean that they strike pedestrians in the chest and head, putting them at greater risk of fatal injuries. In 2010, a different group of researchers found that pedestrians struck by light trucks (a vehicle classification that includes pickup trucks, some vans, and SUVs) were 50 percent more likely to die than those hit by sedans and other smaller cars. Larger vehicles also have significantly larger blind spots, making it harder to see pedestrians, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/suv-blind-zone-deaths-consumer-reports-safety/">especially when they’re children</a>. </p>
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<p id="KOBCIO">“We’ve known for decades that larger vehicles are more dangerous in pedestrian crashes,” says Robert Schneider, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor of urban planning who analyzed government crash data. He found that while child fatalities significantly decreased between 1977 and 2016 (likely attributable to the declining share of children who walked to school), fatalities involving large vehicles had increased from 22 percent to 44 percent. “It’s been very unfortunate to not have a more serious regulation on vehicle size and front-end design that could be much safer for pedestrians,” he says.</p>
<p id="JR1ejE">Last year, Tyndall, the professor at the University of Hawaii, analyzed the pedestrian fatality rate across different metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2019. The idea was to look at the growth rate of large vehicles as a share of the vehicle fleet in different cities, and look at the pedestrian fatality rates in those same areas. The cities with a sharp increase of SUVs, he found, saw a significant increase in pedestrian deaths. “DC stood out,” along with other cities in the region, Tyndall says, because there was “a big shift away from cars in Midwest and Northeast cities and toward SUVs and trucks — it explains some of the change in pedestrian death rate in the areas over this 20-year period.”</p>
<p id="XKQbzn">Experts have for years been urging the agency to consider pedestrian safety when rating vehicles. In March 2022, the National Highway Traffic<strong> </strong>Safety Administration proposed changing the safety ratings the government gives to vehicles to consider how they impact people outside of cars in crashes. On the public comment page for the proposed rule change, safety advocates inundated the comments section, encouraging the government to take action.</p>
<p id="rSLHui">The failure to meaningfully regulate vehicle design runs deep, according to research by John Saylor. In an academic article published in May<strong> </strong>2021, “<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3845735">The Road to Transportation Justice: Reframing Auto Safety in the SUV Age</a>,” Saylor, then a doctoral candidate at Penn Law, reviewed documents from the agency that revealed they had tried to pass safety regulations considering pedestrian safety several times and were hamstrung by federal policymakers who viewed safety regulation primarily through the viewpoint of consumer protection. In other words, the safety regulations were designed with the auto buyer in mind, at the expense of all others. The age of the SUV, he argued, requires us to dramatically reimagine what it means to regulate the safety of vehicles. </p>
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<p id="9MERuP">In response to questions about criticism that the agency hasn’t moved fast enough to regulate vehicle size and design, NHTSA’s director of media relations, Lucia Sanchez, told Vox in a statement that “advancing safety for vulnerable road users like pedestrians is a priority for the agency and eliminating these fatalities is critical. The Department believes that no crash is acceptable and is working cross functionally, guided by the <a href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com_-3Furl-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.transportation.gov-252Fsites-252Fdot.gov-252Ffiles-252F2022-2D02-252FUSDOT-2DNational-2DRoadway-2DSafety-2DStrategy.pdf-26data-3D05-257C01-257Crebecca.neal-2540dot.gov-257Cbb437250c2424f77ef3408dad21970db-257Cc4cd245b44f04395a1aa3848d258f78b-257C0-257C0-257C638053303952753308-257CUnknown-257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0-253D-257C3000-257C-257C-257C-26sdata-3Dw79mWla1TXFEwbVrmHsjoIGsfRGZ-252FJ-252BY31sw8FJKYgs-253D-26reserved-3D0&d=DwMFAg&c=7MSjEE-cVgLCRHxk1P5PWg&r=Qy5ivFP6qzOP444RnRsrbA&m=mrWDAzMRVVGP1tUlN9sZduW-OLbsQQwg2oKeCBSqhDOj3CYfDjxYWUmAWxxXjPym&s=cXeUgJCMsMeIfcos76nCZHSVO_GhQOgn0lPTzY7DBFM&e=">National Roadway Safety Strategy</a>, to reduce crashes and along with them, serious injuries and fatalities.” Sanchez pointed to a new rule to mandate pedestrian automated emergency braking in new vehicles, and recent proposed changes to the government’s five-star safety ratings for cars.</p>
<p id="8Dmg7I">There’s good reason for the government to act now, Tyndall says. If the current sales trends don’t change, larger vehicles will become an ever-increasing share of all vehicles on the road. </p>
<p id="4dzTpJ">“It’s already sort of baked in that it’s going to get way worse, depending on how long that trend is allowed to continue,” he says.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="oFNJKu">
<p id="5UhDAd">Here’s another tribute to Allison Hart: It’s October, and Jessica is standing in front of a maple tree on her block, its leaves turned crimson. Above her, a slice of moon is just visible in a clear blue sky. A few weeks ago, she went door-to-door in her neighborhood with flyers, asking neighbors to join her and Bryan in cleaning up their block and the one adjacent to it, which they’d adopted from the city in Allie’s memory.</p>
<p id="rEIIlh">It had been a long season — their first summer without Allie. They felt her absence on what should have been her sixth birthday, when they couldn’t think of anything they wanted to do except leave town. They felt it during the summer beach trip with Jessica’s parents in South Carolina, where they imagined Allie swimming in the pool on her own for the first time, and marching up to other little kids and asking them if they wanted to play. “It was so noticeable,” Jessica says. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="8tbE4r"><q>“How can this whole world be out here and my daughter is gone?”</q></aside></div>
<p id="tFDYh1">In September, on the anniversary of Allie’s death, the family rented a cabin in the Shenandoah Valley. The previous summer, they’d driven past the Luray Caverns with Allie and promised her they’d go another time, taking for granted that there would be another time. Jessica thought of how Allie would have loved it, how she would have delighted in explaining the difference between stalactites and stalagmites, how she would have begged for a rock from the gift shop. She remembers looking out over the valley and thinking: “How can this whole world be out here and my daughter is gone?” </p>
<p id="u2BePy">While they were out of town, local news outlets covered the anniversary of Allie’s death, and two neighborhood representatives organized a campaign where local residents filed safety requests to the city with the hashtag #All4Allie.</p>
<p id="UDAtej">Jessica is navigating what it’s like to be both a grieving mother and the mother of a baby. She and Bryan are determined not to let Allie’s death be shrugged off as another unfortunate but unavoidable tragedy, and are dedicated to honoring their daughter’s memory in any way they can think of. It’s a small thing, this neighborhood beautification effort, but it feels like useful work. “I remember once she told me, ’Mommy, I hate litter!’” Jessica says, stamping her foot and channeling Allie’s frustrated voice.</p>
<p id="dGxlwJ">At first, it’s just Jessica and Bryan out there, using rakes to loosen leaves stuck in the curbs and picking up trash from the sidewalk. Soon, other neighbors come out with their children, picking up rakes and gathering leaves. People wave and say hello, and Jessica feels encouraged. They remembered.</p>
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<figcaption>Jessica hung a photo collage, filled with moments from Allie’s life, on the corner near where Allie was killed last year.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>A pile of stuffed animals left at Allie’s memorial shows signs of wear. More than a year has passed since the girl’s death.</figcaption>
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<p id="DIe2i6">A block away, the monument to Allie has weathered another season. The fur of the stuffed animals is matted and shiny after a summer of rain. A pail that held nubs of colorful chalk is now full of rainwater. But there’s something new there, too: a photo collage of pictures of Allie, covered in plastic, hanging from a utility pole. Jessica put it there.</p>
<p id="veTTlw">Part of what’s so frustrating to her is that the <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/how-street-design-shapes-the-epidemic-of-preventable-pedestrian-fatalities/">solutions that could save lives</a> — making streets and vehicles safer, and finding ways to get drivers to slow down — are already known. It’s hard to know what exactly to do when your little girl is killed in a way that so many others are each year, and when everyone continues to move on with their lives as though everything is normal. It will never be normal for Jessica. She isn’t a professional activist. Still, she’s committed to doing whatever she can to make sure Allie isn’t forgotten and that the crisis of road deaths isn’t ignored anymore.</p>
<p id="3i6w15">Later that day, she’ll post a photo on Twitter of all the leaves and trash collected by her and her neighbors beneath one of the street dedication signs for Allie. In another tweet, she shares the sign, along with a tribute: “Put my girl’s name everywhere. Shout it to the rooftops. Remember her bright, joyful being. Know that she is one of too many. Fight for change.”</p>
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https://www.vox.com/23462548/allison-hart-pedestrian-deaths-suvs-deadliest-roadsMarin Cogan2022-07-25T06:51:06-04:002022-07-25T06:51:06-04:00The deadliest road in America
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<figcaption>An aerial view of traffic at the intersection of US-19 and Main Street in New Port Richey, Florida. The road, according to researchers, is the most perilous in the nation for pedestrians.</figcaption>
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<p>Being a pedestrian in the US was already dangerous. It’s getting even worse.</p> <div class="c-float-left"> <figure class="e-image">
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<p id="JZdERB"><em>Part of the </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/23178787/highlight-july-2022-issue"><em><strong>July 2022 issue</strong></em></a><em><strong> </strong></em><em>of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight"><em><strong>The Highlight</strong></em></a><em>, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.</em></p>
<p id="bFP4z1">Drive along this part of US-19, a stretch of highway in Pasco County that parallels Florida’s Gulf Coast, and you’d be forgiven for not noticing the danger. It looks like a lot of American roads, especially in the South: flat, straight, and wide. Three lanes move in each direction, and extra turn lanes on the right and left bring the total number of lanes to eight or nine at most intersections. The road runs through several cities and places — Hudson, Port Richey, New Port Richey, and Holiday — but because of all the sprawl, you never really feel like you’ve left town.</p>
<p id="egR4Pv">Along the road is a panoply of American consumerism: Walmart, Publix, tattoo parlors, chain hotels, motels, 7-Elevens, multiple Dunkin’s, medical equipment stores, condemned buildings, strip clubs, auto body repair shops, oil change places, custom paint job businesses, chain restaurants, deserted property waiting to be redeveloped, and a mini-golf course where you can feed baby alligators, fenced in near the sidewalk. </p>
<p id="XrSw8S">Walk along this road, and you might begin to notice the danger. The speed limit is 45 to 55 miles per hour, but the cars are often going much faster. The crosswalks are so few and far between that a simple act — crossing the street to get to a business a few hundred feet away — might mean walking over half a mile to reach the nearest crosswalk. Even with sidewalks set back from the road, it’s clear that US-19 wasn’t built for pedestrians.</p>
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<figcaption>A cyclist and a pedestrian cross US-19 at Main Street. SUVs have gotten bigger over the last two decades — and more dangerous to pedestrians.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Retailers line US-19 north of Green Key Road in New Port Richey.</figcaption>
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<p id="KTxN91">Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, has never driven on this part of US-19. But amid a <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Full-Report22">rise in pedestrian deaths</a> across the country, Schneider and three of his colleagues — Rebecca Sanders, Frank Proulx, and Hamideh Moayyed — decided to look at the data on pedestrian deaths to try to find out where they were happening most frequently. Using information from the government’s database of fatal car crashes, the <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars">Fatality Analysis Reporting System</a>, Schneider and his colleagues looked at all the pedestrian deaths recorded between 2001 and 2016. The idea was to identify hot spots: 1,000-meter segments of roadway where six or more pedestrians were killed over two eight-year periods. “We thought: What can we find out about the places where these fatalities happened?” Schneider says. There would likely be similarities, he assumed, which could point to potential safety improvements. “One thing we wanted to shed light on is that they truly aren’t random.”</p>
<p id="7QhHNx">They were expecting to find some overlap. But one road came up so many times that the results, Schneider says, were “eye-popping.” Out of the 60 hot spots they identified as having a high number of deaths, <a href="https://jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/1825">seven of them were on US-19 in Pasco County alone</a> — more than any other road in the United States. “When you add the numbers up, that’s 137 pedestrian fatalities over the entire Pasco County. That’s an incredibly high number,” Schneider says. “If an airplane crashed there and 137 people died, people would know about it,” he says. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="The map shows the fatal pedestrian crash spots identified in Schneider’s paper. Seven of 60 are in Pasco County, Florida." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qZvithhYmW4J-ahnBm53kwGeOHw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23904445/pedestrian_fatality_hot_spots.png">
<cite>Youyou Zhou/Vox</cite>
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<p id="9MrTVE">The study looked at deaths through 2016 — the most recent year finalized data was available. But a Vox analysis of open-source data from the Florida Department of Transportation showed that pedestrian fatalities have continued to be a problem: 48 people have been killed in car crashes that involved pedestrians on US-19 in Pasco County between 2017 and June 2022. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="The map shows the fatal pedestrian crash spots in Florida, with yellow dots highlighting those on US-19." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1nv5g3F8QzFrl0W1n0Q8mu0hvPA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23768109/FL_highway_crashes_re.jpg">
<cite>Youyou Zhou/Vox</cite>
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<p id="yxoOwf">For every 100 miles on US-19, there have been at least 34 deaths since 2017, making it the deadliest road across the state. </p>
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<img alt="US-19 is the deadliest highway for pedestrians in Florida. An average of 34 pedestrians died per 100 miles there between 2017 and 2022." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9txpngb_qMxbvSJGqkvxFKGS3NM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23887073/SqkHo_us_19_is_the_deadliest_highway_for_pedestrians_in_florida.png">
<cite>Youyou Zhou/Vox</cite>
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<p id="1TAQKC">Locals might not have the statistics at their fingertips, but they know that US-19 is dangerous. In 2020, 13 people traveling US-19 by car in Pasco County were killed in crashes. For residents who rely on it, US-19 is both mundane and maddeningly treacherous. Crashes are so ubiquitous that some talk about an old bumper sticker on cars that read: “Pray for me, I drive on US-19.” Another part of US-19, in neighboring Pinellas County, is sometimes <a href="https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/driving-tampa-bay-forward/public-meeting-scheduled-for-us-19-changes-in-north-pinellas-county">called</a> “death valley.” But the road is pretty much unavoidable for most people trying to move freely through the area, and the alternatives aren’t much better. No one is more endangered on the road than those who use it unprotected by a ton of steel — and there are a lot of them.</p>
<p id="Nk7XaO">“This road has so many cars,” says Julie Bodiford, a nurse who lives in the area, “and it’s death after death.” </p>
<p id="YQ11DR">Julie’s brother, Kevin Bodiford, knew US-19 well. He didn’t have a car and he liked to walk, so the 33-year-old traveled it often, to visit friends and to move between his extended family’s houses. Each morning, he met his mom for coffee at the 7-Eleven on US-19 and New York Avenue in Hudson; it was their daily ritual, the way he checked in with her to let her know that he was okay.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="The satellite image shows the location where Kevin Bodiford was killed by a truck on US-19 on June 10, 2021." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fSOmabAYoZBAghR1AsJmbWrjeiw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23760015/Crash_spot_rev2.jpg">
<cite>Youyou Zhou/Vox</cite>
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<p id="68tnXa">Just after 2 am on June 10, 2021, Kevin was walking on the side of the road. Surveillance footage from the 7-Eleven shows him in a baby blue shirt, blue shorts, a UNC baseball cap, and a backpack. He’d been at a friend’s house for a bonfire earlier in the night; Julie thinks he was headed for their mom’s house. </p>
<p id="bp8TvP">In the official crash report from that night, the police said that Bodiford was trying to cross the road. The footage Kevin’s family obtained from a nearby business is grainy, but it shows something else: Kevin walks, and a truck towing a trailer passes him without incident. Then he appears to stop. Headlights illuminate his body. A white Chevrolet pickup truck plows through. In the video, Kevin is there one moment and gone the next. He was thrown from the road. His backpack was knocked off. The driver tapped the brakes and drove off, leaving Kevin to die on the side of the highway.</p>
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<figcaption>Julie Bodiford visits a roadside memorial for her brother, Kevin Bodiford, near the intersection of US-19 and New York Avenue. Kevin was fatally struck in 2021; the driver did not stop.</figcaption>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="taVrkj">Because life in the United States is so structured around cars — so many of us depend on them, due to sprawl and lack of good public transit, and because infrastructure in this country is built with drivers in mind — it can be easy to miss the broader crisis unfolding on our streets. Most of us, when we drive, tend to think about our experiences as specific; our roads might have horrible traffic, or our community’s drivers might be particularly reckless. But the evidence mounting over the past few years indicates that something much larger is going on: America is experiencing a pedestrian fatality crisis. </p>
<p id="vtoV6P">It’s not just Florida. In 2020, more than 6,700 pedestrians were killed while walking and using wheelchairs, despite a dramatic decrease in the number of cars on the road and the number of miles traveled. Data from the Governors Highway Safety Association that year projected that the pedestrian fatality rate <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Addendum21">soared 21 percent</a>, amounting to “the largest ever annual increase in the rate at which drivers struck and killed people on foot.” That same year, <a href="https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813266">nearly 39,000 people were killed in car crashes</a>, the largest number of deaths since 2007. When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its preliminary findings, the NHTSA’s deputy administrator <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-traffic-exclus/u-s-traffic-deaths-fell-after-coronavirus-lockdown-but-drivers-got-riskier-idUSKBN26M6KR">told</a> Reuters: “We’ve never seen trends like this, and we feel an urgency ... to take action and turn this around as quickly as possible.” </p>
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<img alt="Pedestrian fatalities have been on the rise in the US in the past decade." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ij3aW_RM6210XYz-GGEFJX1Q1Lo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23904446/Chart3_re.png">
<cite>Youyou Zhou/Vox</cite>
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<p id="jneKSz">In 2021, the problem managed to get even worse. Preliminary data from the Governors Highway Safety Association found that 7,485 pedestrians were killed by drivers, <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians22#:~:text=The%20report%20projects%20that%20drivers,single%20year%20in%20four%20decades.&text=GHSA%20previously%20issued%20a%20report,by%20State%20Highway%20Safety%20Offices.">an 11.5 percent increase over the year before</a>, and the most pedestrian deaths recorded in nearly 40 years. In response to the rising death toll among pedestrians and drivers, the US Department of Transportation announced more than $5 billion <a href="https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-transportation-pete-buttigieg-50eda706e949e4fec059c7169363c83a">in funding</a> for local efforts to make roads safer. “We face a national crisis of fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in making the announcement this May.</p>
<p id="6uMNip">We are so inured to the dangers of driving — and the death toll it regularly incurs — that many people don’t recognize that the United States is an outlier among comparable countries: People are more than twice as likely to die in an automobile crash here as in <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-01/why-canada-isn-t-having-a-traffic-safety-crisis">Canada</a> or parts of Europe.</p>
<p id="i0ESVz">In Florida, which has long been one of the deadliest states to be a pedestrian, 716 people were killed walking on roads and streets in 2020. In 2021, the death toll reached 899, the highest numeric increase of pedestrians killed in any state. “The way to think about Florida is as a leading edge,” says Eric Dumbaugh, a professor of urban planning at Florida Atlantic University and associate director of the <a href="http://science.fau.edu/departments/urban-regional-planning/research/cscrs/index.php">Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety</a>. “Because there’s so much growth going on relative to other places, we see trends that happen nationally go on a lot faster here.” </p>
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<figcaption>A roadside memorial for Gayle Marie Klein on US-19 at Green Key Road in New Port Richey.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>A roadside memorial for Logan Blakley on US-19 at Main Street in New Port Richey.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Traffic rolls into New Port Richey, Florida, on US-19. Multiple lanes, high speeds, and the number of turning points make the road highly dangerous — especially for pedestrians.</figcaption>
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<p id="pkuHMZ">In 2011, state and local officials in Pasco County began meeting to discuss how they could make the road safer, following <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/dangerous-by-design-2011.pdf">a national report</a> indicating that the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area, where the county is located, was the second most dangerous metropolitan area in the country for pedestrians (the top four were all in Florida). The state <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/accidents/Six-years-ago-Pasco-officials-tried-to-prevent-pedestrian-deaths-on-U-S-19-Pedestrians-are-still-dying-so-they-re-trying-again-_171661076/">spent millions</a> on improvements it said would help make the road safer. In 2018, according to the Tampa Bay Times, the state <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/accidents/Six-years-ago-Pasco-officials-tried-to-prevent-pedestrian-deaths-on-U-S-19-Pedestrians-are-still-dying-so-they-re-trying-again-_171661076/">put another</a> $100,000 into developing a new action plan to address the high number of deaths.</p>
<p id="bPUahK">Last year, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) installed crosswalks at some intersections that were missing them, added more sidewalks, built out curbs, installed LED streetlights, and handed out bright lights to people who travel the road by foot or bike at night. </p>
<p id="J2TM7Q">“It’s a huge priority, for the state of Florida, to fix this issue,” says Kristen Carson, a spokesperson for FDOT. </p>
<p id="BYs0vQ">It isn’t just US-19, though. In recent years, other roads in the state have also seen high numbers of pedestrian deaths. “US-19 may be worse,” says Dumbaugh, “but we’ve got a bunch of roads competing for that title.” </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="Wth7cp">
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Muphpt">New Port Richey Mayor Rob Marlowe, who has lived in the area since 1963, says that years and years of deaths — and complaints from the locals who travel along US-19 — have done little to make it better. “US-19 is a problem, and it has been as long as I can remember,” Marlowe says. </p>
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<figcaption>“US-19 is a problem, and it has been as long as I can remember,” says New Port Richey Mayor Rob Marlowe, who’s lived in the area since 1963.</figcaption>
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<p id="cYoYMr">On an oppressively humid Thursday in early June, I meet Marlowe at his office, on the second floor of City Hall. He wants to show me what the streets look like in his community, so we get in his Tesla and drive around town, through New Port Richey’s central commercial district, where palm trees line the avenues, and its residential neighborhoods, where Spanish moss drips from trees shading colorful bungalows. </p>
<p id="7wDTZl">Everywhere, there are signs of roads designed without pedestrians in mind: residential streets that are needlessly wide, despite a lack of traffic, and sidewalks only wide enough for one person, if they’re present at all.</p>
<p id="cbXyDN">The problem, Marlowe says, “really took root back in the 1960s, as the area exploded in population.” Subdivisions sprang up along US-19, as developers anticipated a growing population of retirees who wanted to live cheaply and get around by car. In most cases, the only way to get from one subdivision to another, he says, was to get on US-19 — but back then, it was easier to navigate, because it was only a couple of lanes.</p>
<p id="O0RWoX">Marlowe pulls up to the intersection of Main Street and US-19 — the center of the deadliest hot spot in the country, according to Schneider and his colleagues’ study — where state officials recently built out the curb to provide a safe space for pedestrians trying to cross, and to slow down drivers coming around the bend. As we turn right onto the highway and head north, he tells me to be on the lookout for the next safe place to cross. </p>
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<figcaption>Pedestrians often have to cross eight or nine lanes on US-19. </figcaption>
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<p id="UmK93I">The crosswalks are so far apart it’s easy to see why some people decide to make a run for it. After Main Street, we don’t see another crosswalk until Grand Boulevard in Port Richey — 1.7 miles away. That means someone looking to get across the street between the two might need to walk an extra mile or more to find a safe crossing. The speed limit is 45 mph through New Port Richey, but Marlowe says it’s not uncommon to see people doing over 60 mph, making the road essentially a freeway with residential and commercial development on either side. “US-19 was designed for speed, and they” — meaning drivers — “use it that way,” he says. “The tendency seems to be to just go as fast as you can.” At night, the sheer size and width of the road make visibility a challenge (even with LED streetlights, which are meant to improve visibility), making it even more deadly for pedestrians who try to cross. </p>
<p id="P9N7hx">“The danger of US-19, and all highways, is in their design,” says Frank Starkey, who grew up in the area. Starkey founded a real estate development and consulting firm called <a href="https://people-places.com/">People Places</a> and worked closely with the mayor and other city officials on the revitalization of downtown New Port Richey. Part of the revitalization effort, both men agreed, required slowing down traffic on Main Street, so drivers were more likely to interact with local businesses, and pedestrians could move safely without fear of being hit by cars. But city officials aren’t responsible for US-19 — state officials are. “FDOT’s reason for living is to get as many people as possible, as far as possible, in the least amount of time. That’s their issue,” Marlowe says. “It may not be written that bluntly, but that’s it. In the case of Frank and myself, we’d like people to slow down.”</p>
<p id="oxBMzY">It’s a fundamental conflict, one that plagues communities like New Port Richey all over the country. State transportation departments, Dumbaugh, the urban planning professor, says, designed arterial roads to be high-speed and efficient ways of carrying lots of traffic. Land developers then built up property around the roads. “Once that happens,” Dumbaugh says, “you’ve put together a few things that are fundamentally incompatible.” Add more housing to the mix and you’ve got a situation where people are walking, Dumbaugh says, “in environments that were never designed to accommodate it.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="pMw6WB">Julie and Kevin Bodiford were best friends, but they were more than that. They were only a few years apart in age, and they were alone a lot as kids, so Kevin was like her sidekick, her little brother, and her oldest son all rolled into one. </p>
<p id="trtDIb">As kids, they’d get off the school bus at the end of the day and it would just be the two of them. They adapted to each other’s interests: Julie would play football with Kevin, who was a natural athlete, and he would agree to play Barbies and let her paint his nails with clear polish. Julie loved to sing and dance, so Kevin set up speakers and a microphone for her. “He was my roadie,” she says.</p>
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<figcaption>“He was my protector, more than anything,” Julie Bodiford says of her brother Kevin.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Julie holds a photo of her brother Kevin, taken in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2019.</figcaption>
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<p id="OnLS6V">Kevin was the freewheeling one in the family. He was always operating at full volume, cracking jokes, reminding his more staid family members that life was meant to be enjoyed. He had been incarcerated on and off and sometimes struggled with mental illness. He was also a loving uncle, who tattooed his nieces and nephews’ footprints on his arm and delighted them by doing pushups with the kids on his back.</p>
<p id="h9r2h9">Growing up, Kevin was Julie’s protector — the person who made her feel safe. His strength sometimes made him seem invincible. Losing him in this way shattered Julie’s sense of security. She struggles with PTSD from what she experienced the night of his death, and the memories of her mom calling her, screaming that her brother had been killed. At the hospital, she remembers the police officer who came to confirm Kevin’s identity, and how pained and red his eyes looked as he asked to see her identification. The officers who responded to the scene that night were just down the road, dealing with another crash that killed a motorcyclist and two people in a car. Julie, a nurse, worries about how they handle the aftermath of these crashes. </p>
<p id="4ygbRI">“People just think, ‘Oh, it was just some guy,” she says. “Well, that ‘some guy’ mattered to a whole frickin’ family. You hit him and left him like a stray dog on the side of the road. Like it wasn’t a human life.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="7ErgaD">When fatal crashes happen, the questions — from law enforcement, the media, commenters on Facebook — inevitably turn to human behavior: Was the driver drunk? What was the pedestrian wearing? Was the driver texting? How fast were they going? Was the cyclist wearing a helmet? What was the pedestrian wearing? Could they be easily seen in the dark? In other words, we look for ways to blame individual behavior, rather than consider the larger systemic forces at play.</p>
<p id="UCMFSu">That instinct, to attribute a fatal crash to some failure of personal responsibility, distracts us from the bigger picture: that many of our road designs are inherently unsafe. Jessie Singer, author of the <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accidents/Jessie-Singer/9781982129668">book</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/23016529/there-are-no-accidents-jessie-singer"><em>There Are No Accidents</em></a>, says that the things we think of as “accidents” are in fact the result of dangerous conditions in our built environments. The reality is that the more vulnerable among us suffer the consequences more than others. People who are low-income, who are disadvantaged because of their race, their immigration or housing status, or their status as pedestrians in an environment built for cars, are more at risk of dying as a result.</p>
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<figcaption>A roadside memorial on US-19 at New York Avenue in north Pasco County.</figcaption>
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<p id="FNPHVG">We focus on individual blame, Singer says, because that makes it easier for us to believe that it couldn’t happen to us. Plus, it prevents us from having to make the hard structural changes necessary to prevent crashes from happening again: to call them accidents makes them seem at once inevitable and impossible to change. “This narrative kind of lets the government and corporations off the hook from having to protect us,” Singer says.</p>
<p id="zau3gT">If accidents are supposed to be random, Singer says, “then accidental death would be evenly distributed across the country — but it’s not.” Schneider’s study showed that pedestrian deaths aren’t random, either. The places with the most pedestrian deaths tend to look like US-19 in one way or another: high-speed, with multiple lanes, and lots of commercial and residential development around them. Three-quarters of them are bordered by low-income areas, where people may be less likely to have access to a car. They are in places as diverse as Langley Park, Maryland; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Manhattan, New York; and Los Angeles, California. They’re places where pedestrians are forced to cross roads that are <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/">dangerous by design</a>, alongside trucks and SUVs that are getting bigger and deadlier all the time.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="a29u8l">A decade ago, Charles Marohn coined the term “stroad” to describe roads like US-19. Marohn, a professional engineer who used to work on road design, wanted a useful shorthand for a problem that has become a feature of many communities. A road, Marohn explained, is meant to move people as quickly as possible from one location to another, and engineers design them to be wide, with lots of lanes and clear zones on either side to make driver errors less deadly. Streets, on the other hand, are places: where people live, shop, eat, and play. Because streets are highly developed on either side, vehicle traffic needs to be slow, to accommodate people outside of cars.</p>
<p id="NAb2I9">A “stroad,” Marohn says, is the worst of both worlds. “If you think of a futon that’s trying to be both a couch and a bed and does neither of them well — that’s a stroad. A stroad tries to be both a street and a road at the same time, and it underperforms at both,” he says. Stroads are highly congested, with drivers stuck in stop-and-go traffic and turning across several lanes, and the potential for collisions increasing exponentially.</p>
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<figcaption>The intersection of US-19 and Main Street, looking south, in New Port Richey.</figcaption>
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<p id="giz7Xb">“Stroads are really deadly,” Marohn says. And US-19, with its high speeds, multiple lanes, cars turning on and off — and people walking, biking, and using wheelchairs — is kind of like a stroad on steroids. “This is literally the deadliest design that we could come up with,” he says.</p>
<p id="rQhzZe">Traffic engineers’ typical response to high congestion is to create more lanes for more traffic, Marohn says, which only makes the problem worse. Studies have shown that more lanes tend to <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/">create <em>more</em> traffic</a>, which means that building out stroads usually results in the same amount of gridlock. What happens when engineers widen roads and create clear zones, Marohn says, is that drivers respond to those cues. “It tells drivers, we’ve got your back, and the way that drivers respond to that is by shutting off the active part of their brains,” he says.</p>
<p id="0a13kG">Road design isn’t the only factor contributing to the increase in pedestrian deaths. Over the past 20 years, the size of SUVs and trucks sold for personal use has grown bigger and bigger — and those cars have proven <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/bigger-vehicles-are-directly-resulting-in-more-deaths-of-people-walking/">more deadly for pedestrians and cyclists</a>. </p>
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<figcaption>Crosswalks are few and far between on some parts of US-19, so pedestrians and cyclists frequently cross without them.</figcaption>
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<p id="UGvlP5">At the same time, the country’s housing crisis has created a larger population of people without homes, who are particularly vulnerable to being hit by cars. </p>
<p id="GQJZV7">Experts are still studying why pedestrian fatalities surged across the country during the pandemic, but some think the disruption to normal traffic patterns as Americans stayed home may have exacerbated the problem, because congestion is actually one of the few things that can force cars to slow down. “The congestion has in a sense been covering up our deadly designs,” Marohn says. “What the pandemic did is reveal how deadly our design approach is.” </p>
<p id="5MVaCd">Marohn thinks the fix is for local communities — not traffic engineers — to decide what they want a given road or street to be, and then to focus on meeting those goals, essentially deprogramming stroads so that they’re either streets or roads. It would mean slowing traffic way down to keep cars from moving through streets too quickly, or removing businesses’ driveway access to stroads and keeping pedestrians far from the road so they can become safe for high-speed travel. </p>
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<figcaption>A new walkway was designed to minimize the distance needed for pedestrians to cross US-19 at Main Street in New Port Richey.</figcaption>
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<p id="R3MuLi">Pedestrian safety experts say there is a lot more we could do to ensure streets are safer for people outside of cars. Governments could improve public transit, investing in modes of transportation that are less deadly than driving, and install more traffic cameras to discourage speeding without creating more opportunities for deadly interactions between drivers and police. Car manufacturers could use speed limiting devices to slow cars down. States and local municipalities could design roads to be narrower, remove lanes, and use street design features such as chicanes, traffic circles, curb extensions, and speed humps to help calm traffic. Recently, thousands of advocates and officials across the country <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/03/09/2022-04894/new-car-assessment-program#open-comment">urged safety regulators</a> to begin studying the safety of vehicles for people outside of the car as well as drivers and passengers.</p>
<p id="ihgAb6">“There are simple solutions here,” Singer says. But they require a shift in perspective, one that entails “not focusing on the last thing that went wrong and the last person who made a mistake, but accepting that mistakes are inevitable and premature death is not, and that we can put systems in place that prevent harm when we make mistakes.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="t8jXjQ">They are easy to miss at first, unless you’re looking for them. But then you start to see them everywhere: the roadside memorials for people killed along US-19. One day, I pull over to look at a memorial for Rhonda-Ann Grzyb, killed in a crosswalk in 2017. Driving a bit farther, I make a U-turn across three lanes of traffic to stop at another, for Matthew Francis Sands, killed trying to cross the road on foot in 2018. A short distance from there, down a sidewalk, partially flooded, is another for Kevin Michael Osborne, killed when his SUV collided with a Jeep Cherokee in 2007. After a certain point, it no longer feels safe to keep crossing multiple lanes of traffic for each stop, so I drive south across Pasco County toward Tampa and count the number of memorials I see. Over about 15 miles, I come across 12 more signs commemorating the dead.</p>
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<figcaption>Kevin Bodiford’s brother marked the site where Kevin died on US-19.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Julie visits a roadside memorial her family made for her brother Kevin.</figcaption>
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<p id="3t6Fae">After Kevin Bodiford died, the family made a cross with flowers that they took to the spot where he was killed. At some point it was dug up — they’re not sure by whom — so they made another. The state also placed a memorial sign that says “Drive safely in memory of Kevin Bodiford” near the spot where he was killed. His brother spray-painted Kevin’s name on the road, close to two circles he painted, which outline the place where Kevin’s blood spilled. </p>
<p id="rF9ryj">The man who hit Kevin was arrested and is facing charges for leaving the scene; Julie thinks the family would have felt more forgiving if he had just stayed. Instead, they find themselves returning to court for hearing after hearing, hoping for some accountability for Kevin’s death. </p>
<p id="lDAnRo">The family didn’t really want to celebrate the holidays without him last year. When they gathered, his mom brought his ashes with her. Julie keeps some of them sealed in a heart locket she wears every day. She got a half-sleeve tattoo of a cardinal breaking free from a cage, to honor Kevin’s memory. </p>
<p id="rDRbBU">She has no real choice but to keep driving the road where her brother was killed. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="moK948">On my final evening in Pasco County, I’m driving on US-19 past Main Street, where Marlowe took me earlier in the day, when I see a group of people gathered on the street corner near a gas station. Most of them look to be in their late teens and early 20s. Dusk is settling in, and big pink cotton-candy clouds glow to the west, over the water. I pull over and ask a group of young women what they’re doing. One woman, whose name is Jessie, tells me it’s the one-year anniversary of her boyfriend’s death. He was 21 and driving his car when a driver struck and killed him.</p>
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<figcaption>A roadside memorial for Logan Blakley is displayed near the intersection of US-19 at Main Street in New Port Richey. Blakley was killed driving his car in 2021.</figcaption>
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<p id="KVMMwt">Jessie and her friends are from the area. US-19 has always been a part of their lives. It’s not just pedestrians; it’s perilous for drivers, too, they say. “It’s extremely dangerous,” Jessie says. “There’s been so many accidents.”</p>
<p id="tngUFc">While we are talking, an ambulance screams past, its lights flashing. Jessie and her friends watch it drive by. One of them nods toward the vehicle. “That’s probably one now.”</p>
<p id="LvuDOL"><em>Marin Cogan is a senior correspondent at Vox.</em></p>
<p id="IBGFli"><em><strong>Correction, July 29, 3:30 pm: </strong></em><em>A previous version of the chart for the pedestrian fatality rate over the past decade incorrectly used the male population fatality rate for 2010 instead of the rate for the entire population. It has been corrected. </em></p>
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https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisisMarin Cogan