It’s winter where I live, in the northeast corner of the United States, and for the past few weeks, most of the streets have been bracketed by high snowbanks. The plows have made the roads passable, but the same cannot be said for the sidewalks, which on many mornings freeze into something resembling a luge run with lumps. For those of us who walk, this presents a stark choice: risk a broken ankle, or walk on the street and take our chances with the cars.
Among other things, Covid-19 curtailed our addiction to driving. People worked from home and didn’t go out as much. This resulted in a steep reduction in the total miles Americans drove in 2020 and 2Car021, and could have been a silver lining to all of this. One might expect to see a corresponding decrease in road deaths – but in fact, the opposite happened. People drove less, but the number of car crash deaths went up.
Why? What’s going on here?
The statistics are particularly grim for pedestrians and cyclists, the most vulnerable users of our public roads. One theory blames the super-sizing of American vehicles. Hummers and behemoth pickup trucks may give the driver a feeling of tank-like invincibility, but they can wipe out a pedestrian like a cargo ship running down a sailboat. The hoods of some of these vehicles are as high as the heads of the people crossing the street in front of them. A person in a wheelchair is practically invisible.
Combine that with the still-prevalent roads-are-for-cars get-out-of-my-way attitude of too many drivers, and the overall disintegration of civility in our public discourse, and you have a recipe for disaster.
It’s not just drivers who are acting out. Every day we read about fights on airplanes, assaults on health care workers, screaming school board meetings.
Is it really surprising that some drivers might vent their pandemic frustrations by driving too fast and too aggressively on less-crowded roads? Decades of macho automobile advertising have marginalized non-drivers, and taught generations of drivers to view pedestrians and cyclists as at best nuisances and at worst collateral damage. Government and business have piled on with practices that favor drivers: free parking, lack of walking city centers and communities, anemic public transportation, and poor sidewalk maintenance.
To be fair, drivers have legitimate concerns. It IS hard to see a dark-clad pedestrian at night, and it IS easier to keep a well-traveled roadway clear of ice than a sidewalk. Potholes ARE a problem and need to be fixed. But those of us on foot and bicycle help pay for the roads with our tax dollars, too, and we are coequal users of this public resource. It is high time for public policy and public behavior to reflect this.
