The American pedestrian suffers no shortage of indignities. On my average day walking around the deeply car-obsessed city of Los Angeles, I am ignored, cut off, honked at, and regularly threatened with bodily harm. I am made to breathe through clouds of belched diesel, forced to keep my head on a swivel to avoid the aforementioned bodily harm, and confined to crossing the street only where and when the car-focused infrastructure of my neighborhood allows me to. I am routinely punished for making a decision that is healthier, cheaper, and more efficient for not just me but my community as well. But of all these small indignities, there’s one that gets under my skin more than the others. There’s one that can, without fail, make me feel like an absolute doofus every time I try to cross the road. I’m talking, of course, about the little walk button.
The little walk button is a travesty. It is an audacious, cruel, flag planted on the bones of a world where you could once walk directly from one side of a place to the other. It stands guard at each intersection, humbly requesting that any pedestrian who wishes to cross the street press their finger into the worn, greasy, nub that activates its beacon. Why are these buttons so uniformly disgusting? What substance are they somehow all coming into contact with? Your guess is as good as mine. But as long as people are inclined to follow directions, they’ll give in to the tyranny of the nub, greasy or not. Each crosswalk will turn us into modern day Oliver Twists offering our empty bowl to the traffic signal. Please, Sir? May we cross the street without dying?
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While in some cities, the little walk button is purely ornamental, a trap for tourists and the overly cautious, In Los Angeles, it’s press-to-play. Pedestrians are advised to only cross the street when they have the walk signal, and the walk signal only appears if you put aside your dignity and gingerly press a knuckle into that horrid nub. And if you refuse? You’ll have to wait. The signal will not change. You’ll enter into a sort of pedestrian purgatory, a state in which the crosswalk is open but the signal that protects you from harm is nowhere to be seen. You’ll be forced to either perform the rare “right of way jaywalk” or wait until another cycle passes. So in time, you learn to give the little walk button what it wants.
The little walk button’s success was always assured because it hijacks our best instincts. Wanting to obey the rules of the road, to actively participate in the community that you’re a part of, should be a good thing. But the little walk button does nothing for safety that the existence of stoplights and crosswalks didn’t already do. It’s more of an insult to pedestrians than any sort of assurance of our safety. Adding it as an extra layer of optional protection would be one thing but making it a mandatory requirement of crossing the street only serves to reify the dominance of drivers and cars over pedestrians, a reminder that every time we cross a street, we are moving through the car’s territory, and any misstep could lead to death.
I understand that this is silly. I understand that life is filled with hundreds of equally benign civic annoyances. I also understand that when confronted with these sorts of daily annoyances, most people just deal with them, move on, and are happier and healthier for it. But I am a complainer born and I believe that ours is an important role in the ever-roiling sea of history. Complainers can change the world. Well, in the interest of being as accurate as possible, complainers draw attention to aspects of the world that need to be changed by other (probably less easily annoyed) people. But without the brave complainers, how would revolutionaries know which direction in which to revolt?
And it’s time for that revolution. In under a hundred years, pedestrians have gone from the undisputed focus of city planning to an afterthought. The little walk button isn’t just fodder for idle complaining, but a sign of how much we’ve normalized the idea that pedestrians must fend for themselves. The fact that, in some cities, a button must be pressed in order to gain the legal right to cross the street implies that at all other times pedestrians are unwelcome intruders.
I’ve already told you that one of the moments that made me dislike cars was looking at the layout of my neighborhood and realizing that the majority of its public space was outright hostile towards my presence as a pedestrian. This is a common thread within the anti-car community, the experience of examining the layout of one’s own city and realizing that they live in “Car Hell”, a common term (with no clear originator) used to describe public spaces that can’t be navigated without a car.
Looking at the portion of our homes that is dedicated to car travel and car travel alone can be alienating. When you’re forced to confront that your home is not designed for you, you can begin to wonder if there’s anywhere you can feel safe.How did it get this bad? Is there anywhere we can escape to? Is there anywhere a car can’t kill you?
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It should be said that pedestrians have never been the sole inhabitants of our roads. Over our species’ long history, those on foot have shared both urban and rural thoroughfares with everything from streetcarts to trolleys to riders on horseback. Efforts to assure safe passage for all go as far back as recorded history itself, with evidence of pedestrian crossings having been found in the ruins of Pompei. There was never a golden age in which pedestrians owned the streets and sidewalks. Even in our country’s infancy, situational awareness alongside a general investment in the wellbeing of yourself and those around you were crucial skills (as they are in nearly every aspect of community-based living).
But while there has never been a pedestrian utopia, the division of American public space was far more equitable prior to the car’s 20th century explosion in popularity. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American cities more closely resembled the reclaimed al fresco dining areas we saw during the Coronavirus lockdowns. Streets were shared spaces, and when cars were first introduced into them, they were viewed as loud and intrusive status symbols for the wealthy.
These intrusions turned bloody on September 13th, 1899 when America experienced its very first pedestrian death at the hands of an automobile. Henry Bliss, a real estate seller, was crushed by an electric taxi as he exited a trolley. The passenger happened to be the son of former New York Mayor Franklin Edson, a doctor being ferried home from work by a cab driver named Arthur Smith.
The New York Times’ recounting of the accident is eerily familiar to anyone who drives, stating that the cab driver had sped near the trolley in an attempt to pass a truck that was in its way. Even from the start, slowing down (or god forbid, stopping) was never on the menu for drivers. Bliss had his skull crushed and was pronounced dead. Smith was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Those charges would later be dropped as Bliss’s death was eventually ruled “unintentional.”
This opening salvo between drivers and pedestrians set the tone for the next century and beyond. Throughout the early 1900s, the number of pedestrian deaths at the hands of automobiles exploded. The incident’s labeling as an “accident” laid the groundwork for car companies as they began to shift blame for these deaths from the carelessness of drivers to that of pedestrians. The use of the term “accident” at the time made sense. Cars were a new technology that had seemed unimaginable just a few decades prior. The word “accident” was practically invented for a situation in which someone lost control of something they barely understood. But even as cars lost their novelty, becoming quite easy to control and understand, the idea that any act of violence committed behind the wheel of one was accidental unfortunately stuck. In typical American fashion, a series of negligent actions resulting in someone else’s death would be labeled an unfortunate act of god, while being killed by someone else’s negligent actions would simply be the result of that person not paying close enough attention. In 2023, nearly one hundred and twenty five years after Bliss was killed, 7,318 pedestrian deaths were reported at the hands of automobiles. This number (down five percent from 2022’s shockingly high number of 7,737) amounts to around twenty pedestrian deaths per day.
To the credit of the pedestrians of yore, the consistent rise in car-related deaths over the course of the early 20th century wasn’t something that went unnoticed. Outcry against cars was strong and sustained throughout multiple regions of the country. This came to a head in 1923 when over 40,000 residents of Cincinnati signed a petition to require that all cars have a device that limited their speed to twenty five miles per hour. The measure had the potential to change the power balance of America’s roads in the crucial decades to come. Unfortunately, its failure inspired automobile manufacturers to be more aggressive in their attempts to take control of the American street once and for all.
With the issue reaching notoriety on a national level, President Herbert Hoover held a traffic conference in the hopes of establishing a nationwide model for traffic laws. This conference could have established a sensible and equitable approach to expanding American streets and the cities that housed them while also securing the safety of future generations of American pedestrians. Instead, a committee of just thirty four people wound up including twenty four members of various auto clubs and executive boards. The policy that came from those meetings, the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance or MMTO, claimed streets as the sovereign space of cars and trucks, confining pedestrians to crossing at right angles in established crosswalks. The policies outlined within it have remained largely unchanged since.
With a massive victory under their belt, automobile advocates took to securing dominance. Automobile advocates (who at the time often went by the eye-rollingly opulent nickname of “Motordom”) took to indoctrinating a new generation to the idea that the streets were not for them. The fact that this was a relatively new, and often contested, claim was not brought up. History is, as ever, written by the victor. The American Automotive Association (whose director, William Metzger, was a member of the committee that helped forge the MMTO) began a PR campaign that emphasized the danger of streets. At one point, Detroit schoolchildren held a mock trial for a boy who had crossed the street unsafely. He was eventually sentenced to a week of cleaning chalkboards.
As for the grown ups, Motordom (ugh) needed only to make use of America’s favorite pastime: shame. As we’ve proven time and time again over the last century, there’s no loss of rights that can’t be normalized by giving the American public someone they can shame for meaningless infractions. Those who crossed the street unsafely were painted as inattentive and selfish. Police were lobbied to make a spectacle of enforcing these new rules with whistles and tickets. Actors were even hired to wear outmoded clothing while crossing the street illegally in a theatrical attempt to show how out of style the practice was. It was here that the concept of the “Jay Walker” would be born.
In the early 1900s, calling someone “Jay” was essentially calling them an idiot. The term was akin to saying that someone was a bumpkin or hick. It became shorthand for describing someone from a rural area who wasn’t urbane enough to understand the way that the ever-growing American cityscape worked. In an ironic turn, the term was originally applied to careless motorists who were often referred to as “Jay Drivers”. In the years prior to the MMTO, newspapers in cities across the country ran articles about the problem of jay drivers and the duty of local governments to do something about them. Flipping the term was a simple but effective way for motordom to cement the existence of the in group and the out group. At a 1924 New York “Safety Parade,” a man dressed as a clown played the role of a jaywalker, crossing the street illegally only to be repeatedly rammed by a Model T to howls of laughter from the crowd. Finally, Motordom’s rebrand was complete. Those who got in the way of cars now would be seen as fools who’d sealed their own fates.
The success of this shame campaign was also made easier by the automobile’s growing affordability and its status as a futuristic object. It heralded a bright and expansive future and to stand in its way was illegal. Any who still tried could be accused of being luddites, fools, or worst of all: poor. By the 1930s, the car had become far more financially accessible than it had been a few decades prior. As is so often the case, the easiest way to silence critics was to let them join the club.
From that point onward, the war for American streets was won. The number of car owners grew yearly, as did the number of pedestrians they were killing inside and outside of crosswalks. The car grew from alluring new technology to a cornerstone of America’s lifestyle and its culture. To challenge the car’s dominance was to stand in the way of the American dream. Long standing metropolises and rural areas alike were reimagined, with every inch of their expansion being tipped in the favor of drivers. As the American economy boomed after World War II and the suburban experiment began, whole towns were created under the assumption that each of their middle-class residents would own a car. The street, once a communal public space shared by all, was the sovereign ground of Motordom. The number of people that stood against them, or even remembered what life had been like before the MMTO, shrank with each passing year.
This is where we find ourselves, with a pedestrian policy that has remained stagnant for just shy of a century. Pedestrian crossings in most cities are limited to crosswalks and are made mostly at right angles. Pedestrians are told that they can be confident of their right of way in crosswalks, just as they should be certain of the legally permissible death that awaits them outside their lines. For most of us, this is enough. More than half of American workers commute by car. A slightly smaller portion commutes by bus or train. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that less than 5% of Americans commute on foot or bike. Getting around without a car isn’t something the average American has to think about all that often. We may daydream about going back in time and changing the way our infrastructure was built, but as long as we’re stuck in Car Hell, maybe it’s best to keep things simple. Inside the crosswalk, you’re safe. Outside of it, a car can kill you. No one could accuse that of being difficult to remember.
But is it true? Are we safe in crosswalks?
The answer is complicated. While the broad strokes of pedestrian safety have remained simple, many nuances have emerged when it comes to when they’re in danger. In some states, the law is minimalist. Connecticut law states that “vehicles must yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk” and that “pedestrians must yield the right of way to vehicles if not in a crosswalk.” This is about as cut and dry as one is likely to find, though additional nuance certainly isn’t the enemy here. California goes a step further, saying that drivers “must exercise due care for the safety of pedestrians.” While one would hope that the basics of human empathy would encourage drivers to exercise this due care regardless, I personally am thrilled to see that it’s been codified into law somewhere.
At a glance, pedestrians maintain the right of way in crosswalks (provided the walk signal is on) in all 50 US states. Everyone can agree that hitting a pedestrian during their allotted walking time is in poor form. Where the cracks in the system begin to show is in the consequences, which remain as easy to evade now as they were for Arthur Smith in 1899. In legal settings, terms like “due care” become problematically vague, allowing for arguments to be made by drivers that their idea of due care and the person they hit’s idea of due care may be entirely different. Municipal codes often say that pedestrians must yield to cars that are already in crosswalks until they’ve passed, but if a pedestrian begins crossing while the light is beginning to blink, they lose their right of way once the blinking is complete. Many codes state that a pedestrian cannot step into a crosswalk if they would be placing themselves directly in front of a car, even if that car lacks the right of way. With each layer of changing lights and little walk buttons, additional exploitable nuance is added to the simple question of where can a car kill me?
This leaves restitution firmly in the hands of the expensive world of personal injury lawsuits, where your chance at justice is only as good as your lawyer. It becomes yet another instance of America making a free market solution to something that should be dealt with on an infrastructural level. If negligence or improper use of a crosswalk can be established, the driver can be let off the hook. As such, many of these cases result not in jail time or in suspended licenses, but in the great American copout: fines.
Fines are a way for those with money to excuse themselves from the responsibilities of living in a community. They are always set just high enough to be back breaking for a poor person and inconsequential for a rich one. To talk about violently running over another human being with your car in financial terms is to miss the point. Life is all we have, and if your car takes someone’s away there is no sum that will make them feel as though the exchange was fair. Despite this,Texas’s crosswalk law makes a sad attempt. If a vehicle disobeys the law and “hits a blind or disabled person, they must pay a $500 fine and perform 30 hours of community service for a charity that serves blind or disabled people.” How considerate.
The complication of pedestrian right of way can also be attributed to the increased presence of traffic lights, which govern many of the busier intersections of our cities without any sort of required uniformity at a federal level. Some are simple green/yellow/red lights with crosswalks. Some have separate lights for left turns. Some have walk signals, others do not. Some have the little walk button. For all their bells and whistles, these systems aren’t really about pedestrian safety. Instead, the main beneficiary of traffic lights is, well, traffic. Walk signal lengths are determined not by how long a person (even one who is elderly, disabled, or simply taking their time) takes to cross the street, but by how much traffic is being relieved on the street parallel to them. As a frequent user of these automated traffic crossings, my safety often feels like a happy side effect of their existence rather than their intended purpose.
In a lightless intersection, it’s generally understood that you should drive more slowly in anticipation of pedestrians who may wish to use the crosswalk. Of course, drivers have never once in the history of driving done this voluntarily so once an area reaches a critical mass of cars, traffic lights are added as a way of reducing accidents. Once traffic lights are in place, crosswalks no longer legally function in the same way. A pedestrian now only has the right of way in a crosswalk if all nearby walk signals are illuminated. In effect, drivers' reckless inability to slow down at crosswalks has been rewarded with an even greater share of the road. In fact, most attempts at increasing pedestrian safety do so at the cost of pedestrian sovereignty.
Imagine an intersection in a residential area. Most of these intersections are free of stoplights, instead using stop signs and crosswalks to manage traffic. A pedestrian can cross any of the four crossings, knowing that between the stop sign and the crosswalk, they have the right of way. As time goes on, more drivers begin to pass through the area. Maybe a restaurant nearby has drawn newcomers to the area, maybe navigation apps have begun diverting drivers through the quiet neighborhood so that they can shave a few minutes off their commutes. Whatever the cause, the road becomes more crowded. More accidents and pedestrian deaths begin to occur as congestion peaks. A set of traffic lights is added to monitor the flow of traffic. Pedestrians can now only cross when the lights allow them to. The congestion remains, but the pedestrians are slightly safer. As the traffic in the area peaks, navigation apps begin to send drivers down a nearby residential street in hopes of helping them shave a few minutes off their commutes. The cycle repeats itself a few blocks over. There are more cars, more lights, and more traffic, all at the cost of pedestrian autonomy. The intersection has gone from a place where both drivers and pedestrians must exercise caution and share the road to a place where pedestrians must wait their turn to cross at their peril.
The idea is that you are safe on American streets, and thus if you are harmed somehow it must be due to negligence on your part. This is the great tangled knot of American empathy. Look in any comment section for a video of someone being struck by a car and you’ll see people tripping over themselves to make excuses for the driver. The walker should have looked both ways! They had their headphones in! The walk signal had begun to change! There’s no rhetorical device they won’t deploy to avoid acknowledging that they aren’t safe on the streets outside their own homes.
And so we return to the little walk button, the ambassador of hollow American gestures of safety. A little hoop for us to jump through that promises safety but guarantees nothing and can ultimately be used against us if push comes to shove. It is just another thing for pedestrians to pay attention to, to potentially forget, as we’re left to fend for ourselves in cities that show open contempt for our continued existence.
So where can a car kill you? The answer is anywhere it wants. As it was with Arthur Smith in 1899, it remains today. A driver who is drunk or excessively speeding can be held to account but one who was simply impatient or inattentive is unlikely to face much more than fines, if that. The pedestrian’s life will continue to be one of both endless vigilance and nonstop rolling of the dice.
But our communities don’t need to be this way. We may never be able to restore the world that existed before the MMTO, but we don’t have to live in fear. While our legislative and political options may be minimal, those looking to think outside the box when it comes to ensuring pedestrian safety need only look to our neighbors in the north.
In April of 2024, Vision Zero Vancouver, an activist group dedicated to reducing the number of pedestrian deaths in the city to zero, decided that enough was enough and launched the Pedestrian Brick Crossing System. A crate of bricks was placed on either end of a busy intersection where drivers were known to ignore pedestrians' right of way. Those crossing were encouraged to pick up a brick, wave it menacingly at any driver who dared threaten them, and then safely cross during their stunned silence.
The initiative was a satirical one, of course. The bricks were foam and never thrown. However, that didn’t stop the message from getting under the skin of drivers. The thread beneath the Twitter video from Vision Zero Vancouver is filled with defensive motorists feigning concern for a hypothetical driver who may respond to this threat with violence. And while yes, anyone who tried this in the United States would be likely to be shot by one thousand simultaneous gunshots, the drivers never once stopped to think about how succinctly the brick project explains the relationship between them and pedestrians.
Whether they like it or not, drivers wave far more than a brick’s worth of harm at pedestrians each time they advance too far into a crosswalk or forget to check the street before taking a hasty left turn. Pedestrians are at all times avoiding threats of harm that are far from satirical and the frothing rage of drivers in response to a gentle rebuttal only serves to underline the imbalance of their relationship. Angry as they are to see pedestrians meeting a threat with a threat, they’re forced to relent that the brick they wave weighs a few thousand pounds more than the ones in the activists’ hands.
And the message further beneath it all is a simple one: keep trying to kill us and the next ones might not be foam.
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