Thoughts on Traffic Safety
High School Kids Should Not Need Help Crossing the Street
The Sydney Morning Herald has run an article with the clickbaity title: Why high school kids need help crossing the road. They quoted me,1 current WalkSydney President Marc Lane, who has also written more about this, as well as others.
This title is unfortunate (though I don’t blame the author). Safety matters, but it does not require infantilising all of society, just regulating the perpetrators of the safety risk, not the victims thereof. Dedicating 24 hours per day of crossing guards (at say 12 schools for 2 hours per day) is not going to save 1 high school student’s life even over an 80 year lifespan. Instead it will just, yet again, incrementally delay the onset of independence.
Guards are located near the school, where there are already many pedestrians, and generally traffic safety features like marked crosswalks. This is not where high school students generally get hit and killed, in contrast, there is a “safety-in-numbers” effect, so the likelihood of a crash is lower when there are a lot of pedestrians (and the cases where someone plows into a group of pedestrians is more likely to be terrorism or a driver’s health (mental or physical) emergency than an “accident”).2 The main reason more populated areas see the highest numbers of deaths and injuries is higher exposure, there are simply more people walking who can be hit. We need to look at deaths and injuries per km travelled or per capita to understand risk.
We need to distinguish between general trends and statistical noise. Each individual crash is unpredicted in advance (or we would avoid it), so there is going to be day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year variation in the number of crashes, injuries, and fatalities even in the absence of a major underlying cause. But if we see the average change in a consistent direction over a longer period of time, there probably is some underlying cause. Part of the difficulty is that, because fatal collisions are so rare, it takes a longer period of time to distinguish randomness (statistical noise) from a pattern (statistical signal).
If there were no cars, pedestrians would be very safe in the City of Sydney, the likelihood of getting killed by a truck, bus, emergency vehicle, or tram would remain, but there are many fewer of those than private cars. Similarly, if there were no cars in the city, bikes could more easily take to the street, and conflicts between bikes and pedestrians would be less severe. But because so much valuable real estate is given over to cars, pedestrians and bicyclists are crammed into a tighter space, and shared paths are used instead of protected bike lanes in many places.
The “blame the pedestrian” lobby is missing the point that people should be able to walk freely without fear of death, and only face fear of death in cities because large motorised vehicles have entered areas where they were not designed for and where they do not belong. People should not have to live a life of fear because we want to cross the street. Cell phones have distracted everyone, but pedestrians using cell phones are more likely to obey traffic signals and stay within the crosswalk, and tend to be walking in crowds. Pedestrians violating traffic signals are more likely to look before crossing (precisely because they are violating the signal). Signals and rules don’t of themselves guarantee safety. Pedestrian cell phone use is not the main problem.
Instead the solution requires regulating the automobile and its driver:
Speed limits should be lowered in urban areas, residential areas, and shopping streets, as well as around schools, to 30 km/h. This should be enforced. This gets back to the discussion of exposure. Most Australian streets where we find people are posted at 50 or 60 km/h. Thus we see more fatalities in this speed range. Pedestrians are generally not on motorways. Few streets have lower speed limits (and if they did, we would see fewer deaths and injuries).
We need to reduce the size of vehicles, both in terms of mass and height. One generally concerning trend is the rising size of personal vehicles. Most “cars” now are small trucks. But even small trucks are more massive and higher than average cars. So when someone is hit by a truck they are more likely to be more severely injured and more likely to die (so someone hit by a car at a given speed might survive, but hit by a truck is more likely to die). Trucks are higher, so when they hit a person, they hit the more vulnerable upper body rather than the legs. Pre-teen children are shorter, and so harder for drivers to see, especially in taller cars and trucks. When even cars (as well as especially personal trucks) hit children they hit the upper body rather than the legs, which is more vulnerable. So people have broken organs rather than broken bones. Serious injuries rose from 2005- 2018 pretty steadily, and then have dropped from 2018 - 2022, but not back to their 2005 levels and still above the 18 year average. The years 2020 and 2021 were heavily COVID affected, so may be outliers, and since the onset of COVID travel behaviour has changed (more work from home, so less daily commuting, but probably more non-work travel. Fatal crashes are more likely to be non-commute trips.
We need to discourage auto travel in places where good alternatives to driving exist, and give more road space over to pedestrians, bicyclists (protected bike lanes), and public transport (bus lanes), and plant more trees, which in addition to providing shade, generally reduce driving speed.
We need to make sure more areas have good alternatives to driving, especially routes to school. As noted in the SMH article, children aren’t as developed as adults and thus, like seniors,3 more vulnerable when injured. Children’s behaviour is also less predictable than adults, and so may be more likely to appear in the street at places and times when unobservant and too fast drivers don’t see them in time. The solution isn’t to regulate children even more, but to regulate the adults driving vehicles.
There need to be footpaths separate from the vehicle path in more places, especially on higher speed roads.
There need to be more safe places to cross the street, someone shouldn’t have to walk 500m to find a crosswalk.
Road rules should give more priority to pedestrians crossing, (every intersection is a cross-walk) so drivers are responsible for (and more likely to) yield to pedestrians.
We should use “Leading Pedestrian Intervals” at intersections so pedestrians get a “walk” signals before cars get a green light, making people on foot more visible to drivers.
Distracted driving (using the phone screen while driving especially) should be prohibited and more severely punished.
We should establish “Emergency Streets” (downloads file), as suggested by my co-author Kevin Krizek, and shut down (or at a minimum greatly slow down) roads after a fatal or severe injury crash to allow time to conduct a full crash scene investigation of any engineering causes of the crash, just as we would with a bridge collapse, train crash, or plane crash, and not just assume it’s a fluke and the driver’s (or pedestrian’s) fault. This has several additional salutary effects:
Driver reminder of road danger locally
Driver reminder of road danger in general
Increase safety by lowering speed
Our main problem is that people (and the press) are typically more concerned with certain kinds of spectacular deaths (airplane crashes, bridge collapses) then the continuing drip of road fatalities, which is far greater, but too common to be “news”. Much of this is seen as personal tragedy rather than a systematic societal problem that can be fixed. But it is systematic, and it can be fixed.
My quote in the article:
Sydney University transport professor David Levinson said men may be walking more at night when drivers have worse visibility.
“Men are less risk averse than women on average, and so may walk in more dangerous locations, such as along roads at night when there is lower visibility,” he said.
Thirteen of the 299 pedestrian fatalities between 2018 and 2023 were a result of disobeying traffic signals and seven were attributed to the use of headphones or a mobile phone, according to Transport for NSW.
Levinson said drivers should not hit a pedestrian even if they are on the street.
“Notably, almost no automobile driver deaths are caused by pedestrians,” Levinson said. “Drivers have a duty of care and responsibility that does not disappear just because a pedestrian is in the street.”
Your regular reminder that cars are weapons, and should be regulated as such.
For elderly people’s higher rate of death from crashes, frailty is a huge part of this. Elderly people also have slower reaction times and cannot easily jump out of the way when a speeding car threatens.
David, here is a comment on your "Traffic Safety" story, especially your words on "blame the pedestrian." Blaming pedestrians to shift responsibility away from other factors is wrong, but an important point should not be missed. The issue is not "regulating" pedestrians but educating them. In 50 years of driving -- with no moving violations from the cops -- I have had to brake or steer suddenly very hard a dozen times because of pedestrian behavior entering my car's path of motion. In a few of these near misses it would have been my fault. In most of those few I would have gotten off, like when a ped is running fast on red across my path of motion on green. In overseas countries with left hand driving I've almost died as a pedestrian not looking in the correct direction, and the driver had to brake hard. Which gets me to my main point:
Pedestrian safety requires dual responsibility. This is not about overemphasizing Blame the Victim instead of the Drivers. Of course society should expend ongoing resources on all the steps you mention in the bullets and more to try to keep drivers from hitting pedestrians. But lets not forget it's the ped who pays the most for driver errors, infrastructure errors, and anything else policy and public spending impacts that tries to lower the chances of a pedestrian being hit, when all of society's good works are not sufficient to keep a car from hitting a person. And too often the ped was not paying enough attention to avoid a bad result.
My own perspective was shaped early in my life as a second grader who wanted to run quickly across the street at a guarded crossing, trusting the crossing guard who stopped the traffic, which she did every time I had crossed every school day in the months before what happened to me on my way home for the beginning of Christmas holidays. Four lane highway, unsignalized crossing with a marked crosswalk, used by school kids walking between a residential subdivision and an elementary school: as I ran out, two lanes to my left were stopped, third lane coming from my right was stopped, fourth lane was blocked from my view if I was even looking. An 80+ senior in a 1948 Plymouth had seen a traffic slow down but saw an open lane and decided to proceed. Two wheels over me at quite low speed. Broken leg and internal organ damage. I recovered after some months in the hospital, with two surgeries, and little permanent damage.
Was this the driver's fault? Absolutely. My parents sued him and it was the beginning of my high quality academic path in the best available schools starting in 3rd grade with tuition paid from the elderly driver's estate. I feel sorry for the adult crossing guard. I'm sure her psyche was damaged. Probably blamed herself. I'm sure she had waved her hand that it was safe to proceed. I ran out ahead of the other kids, just wanting to get home quickly to begin the holiday period.
But I regard myself as guilty of trusting other than my own eyes that the street was safe to cross. I should have been looking, plain and simple. The point is, the ped is the one who has the most to lose, and for a bigger probability of a safe life MUST take ultimate responsibility to be careful in street space not to get hurt, and in fact must be ready to jump out of the way even walking beside a road. Walk facing traffic! Wearing bright colors and carrying a light at night Improves the odds. Taking zero chance of getting distracted by pulling the cellphone away from your head and pivoting to look in all directions? Yes. This experience influenced how I trained my young daughter about ped safety, and how I tell her she should be training her two young sons, my grandsons. Good pedestrian training can make a person safer "jaywalking' mid block with a clear view in all direction than at a signalized road intersection where you are likely to be assuming the signals will protect you.
John Niles, Seattle
P.S. I've subsequently learned from you in separate correspondence about my experience described here that I was victimized by a "four lane death road" as described at https://streets.mn/2014/10/28/four-lane-death-roads-should-be-illegal/ , arguably a road design error -- better to convert to three lanes, two for travel, one for left turns. But I stand on my point that potential run-over victims (that's all of us) need to understand that our attention to imminent danger in or near vehicle lanes of any configuration is an important last line of personal defense and lowered risk of death or injury.
Well said David. I was just reading a statistical analysis of US ped fatalities and there was no causation with larger and heavier vehicles (a common issue). It would be good to unpack if that is indeed a problem, so if it is statistical noise, we can campaign for other things which are much more able to be controlled at a local level. When I was responsible for road safety in the City of Sydney I did a study that showed 72 per cent of people crossed against signals, but as noted, these people were more likely to undertake a personal risk assessment before crossing. What it did lead me to understand is that signals made to optimise traffic are all based on a one peak sample, but the traffic is highly variable, and thus a lot of time is wasted by compliant people (mostly with kids!). We trialled a couple of signals to rest on the pedestrian green and only be called up by an approaching vehicle, and these worked very well, but were considered heretical by the road planners. We also solved an intersection which had very high crash rates with pedestrians not by fencing it (road planner solution) but by signficantly shortening the cycle so phases were very short. This meant pedestrians got to cross within 20 seconds and thus were less likely to take a risk where (in this specific situation) it was very hard to judge travel speeds due to sight lines and inclines. Amazingly, this also meant that the traffic could clear ahead of the signals and so intersection blocking was resolved and more traffic was able to move through the intersection. We also lowered speed limits despite very great resistance. And I committed a crime by making up my own speed signs and hanging them over the statutory ones, which everyone complied with and less accidents followed. The road authorities wanted 40km/h where doors literally opened directly into the laneway rat-run. Sign-posting it at 10km/h both deterred traffic but also meant people just took over the street! There are a multitude of place specific solutions which are very easy to do, but the TfNSW road folks have a KPI to keep the greatest volume of traffic moving at the road design speed, no matter changes in use or community desire. If speed management in built up areas was devolved to Councils there would be slower residential areas, without the multi-million dollar expense of pointless road treatments, and much more in road planting which blocks sight lines and is proven to slow traffic more than speed humps and chicanes. The local politicians could own the problem as well. Sigh. Commonsense is anything but.