Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (12 page)

A substantial minority of pedestrian traffic deaths are hit-and-run accidents—about one in five. Hit-and-run crashes of all types (car versus pedestrian, car versus bike, car versus car) have been on the rise for years and are ridiculously common in some cities where sprawl and readily accessible freeway systems make getaways easy. In recent years, a data search by the
LA Weekly
found, nearly half of all car collisions in the City of Los Angeles were hit-and-run cases, and the death and injury rate from hit-and-runs was four times the national average.
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In 2014, 27 deaths and 144 serious injuries resulted from hit-and-run collisions with pedestrians, bikes, and other cars in Los Angeles; all reported cases of hit-and-runs (including parking lot scrapes and fender benders) in the city topped 20,000 that year. Arrests were made in less than 20 percent of the cases; more than half of reports were not investigated at all.
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The last year in which a comprehensive look at the problem nationwide was made, 2011, there were 1,449 fatal hit-and-runs in the U.S.
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Attitudes about what to do when the mix of driver and walker goes wrong have changed markedly over time. In the 1920s, as cars first became commonplace on city streets previously dominated by men and women on foot, rapidly escalating numbers of pedestrian injuries and deaths led to public outrage. There were demands for reform and pedestrian protections, occasional riots and acts of vigilantism against cars, and massive parades to protest car violence. Secretary of Commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover launched a federal probe of the problem.

“Nation Roused Against Motor Killings,” screamed a headline in the
New York Times
about Hoover's investigation on November 23, 1924. The story's illustration spoke volumes: a picture of a skeletal, caped figure of the Grim Reaper driving a giant roadster, crushing hundreds of children beneath its wheels. In explaining “the alarming increase in automobile fatalities,” the opening of the news story warned
Times
readers that cars were a greater menace than World War I: “The horrors of war appear to be less appalling than the horrors of peace. The automobile looms up as a far more destructive piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death than the artilleryman. The man in the street seems less safe than the man in the trench.”

The prevailing view at the time seemed to be that drivers who ran over people were by definition reckless simply by driving too fast or incautiously in areas where there were pedestrians about, particularly children. Carmakers came under pressure to install “governors” on engines that would prevent speeding over 25 miles per hour in highly populated areas. This turns out to have been a pretty good speed to single out. Subsequent research has shown
that the vast majority of pedestrians survive crashes in which the vehicle is traveling under 20 miles an hour, while most victims die when the speed exceeds 40 miles an hour.
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In a barrage of marketing and lobbying, car manufacturers, auto dealers, auto clubs, and related industries in that era not only fought off such requirements as “antiprogress” and an affront to personal freedom, they succeeded in reframing the debate to shift blame away from drivers and onto pedestrians. This is when the term “jaywalkers” came into prominence with public and press, often accompanied by cartoon images of fools and bumpkins wandering cluelessly into traffic. Crashes began to be referred to less as innately reckless and more as blamelessly accidental—or due to the recklessness of pedestrians for failing to look both ways before daring to walk near moving vehicles. Next the idea that pedestrians were impediments to progress, travel, and commerce—and therefore should be confined to crosswalks and punished for crossing “against traffic”—came into vogue. Cityscapes were reengineered and traffic signals installed to manage rising car traffic, but the moves also had the effect of corralling pedestrians.
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This reframing of the relative rights of drivers and pedestrians began before the Great Depression and continues to dominate current law, street behavior, and thinking. Drivers today have little patience for pedestrians who “impede” them, and rules that allow right turns on red lights have forced pedestrians at crosswalks to hesitate before stepping from the curb because of the risk of being run down by heedless or distracted drivers, despite the fact that pedestrians have the right of way. Speeding is a principal factor in car-pedestrian crashes, yet a majority of drivers routinely exceed posted speed limits,
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with many reporting that they find it impossible to keep up with traffic flow without speeding.
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Engineers routinely create streets and roads that encourage this with designs appropriate for speeds far in excess of posted limits. When a child runs into the
street and is struck by a car, the prevailing sentiment today, unlike sixty years ago, often places blame on the child's parents for negligent supervision. In Denver, there was widespread uncertainty over whether to view four-year-old Austin Strasser's death while legally crossing a street with his mother a crime or an unfortunate accident that could have happened to anyone. This confusion lingered even after the driver admitted to driving so carelessly it killed a boy. The antipathy is understandable: the driver who plowed into a mother pushing a stroller in a Denver crosswalk did something terrible, but did she do anything unusual? What driver hasn't turned the wheel and pushed the accelerator in a moment of inattention or impatience or bad decision-making? The explanation for little Austin's death, that the driver was blinded by glaring sunshine, is no excuse. The proper response when visibility is poor at an intersection where pedestrians are present is for the driver to stop until certain the way is clear, not to plunge blindly into a crosswalk. But other drivers make bad choices all the time in all sorts of circumstances. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, nothing bad happens. The driver—and the Strassers—were just the unlucky exceptions. Harsh jail sentences for doing something everybody else does daily seem hypocritical to many. But trivializing the carelessness that killed a child is no solution, either. So far this conflict between rules, practice, and decency has yielded a moral paralysis—and decades of a deadly status quo.

Some high-profile programs in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles seek to shake society free of this torpor, to make the world safer for pedestrians with lower speed limits in select areas where walkers and cyclists abound. The slogan “Vision Zero”
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is often used to describe such efforts, which aspire to create a human environment in which there are zero traffic deaths. So far, the U.S. efforts on this score, and on traffic safety in general, seem to lag far behind the European programs they
emulate—and have been plagued by pitched political battles and mixed messages as well. Drivers simply don't want to slow down, and all too often, they are enabled rather than discouraged, even in Vision Zero cities. The police departments in Los Angeles and New York responded to a rash of pedestrian deaths in recent years not by cracking down on bad drivers but by stepping up the issuing of very expensive tickets for jaywalking.

A
nother deadly pattern emerged on February 13, beginning with Heidi J. Springer. The fifty-two-year-old nurse-anesthetist at the Cleveland Clinic was ejected from her BMW X5 SUV after she drifted from her lane, overcompensated by jerking the wheel when she realized what had happened, then struck the concrete center median. Pedro Padron Sanchez of Hamilton, Alabama, lost control of his Chevy Silverado pickup in similar fashion when he wandered off Highway 253 in a moment of inattention. He, too, was hurled from his truck as it overturned. At almost the same time, an eighteen-year-old driver was thrown from his car after taking a sharp curve too fast and crashing through a farm fence, rolling the car four times. Christopher Short, meanwhile, drifted off a rural road at high speed and hit a ditch along Louisiana Highway 568, not far from his hometown of Waterproof. Short's Chevy pickup became airborne with such momentum, it crossed two lanes of traffic before landing, overturning several times on impact, and throwing him from the car. Short died on his nineteenth birthday.

Each of these crashes—and they were not the only ones to follow this pattern this day—had three things in common. They were fatal. The drivers were hurled from their vehicles with terrible force, inflicting catastrophic injury. And none of the dead were wearing seat belts.

The physics of car crashes are brutally simple: unrestrained people, pets, and objects turn into missiles inside cars during rapid deceleration. Isaac Newton first explained this phenomenon in 1687 with his First Law of Motion, and the merciless physics never change: if a car going a mere 30 miles per hour crashes to a sudden stop, everything that's not anchored in place continues to move forward at the same speed, striking anything around them with tremendous force. For the average adult male in the U.S., that force can have an effect roughly the same as dropping a twelve-ton weight on his head. That's more than twenty times the force of a professional boxer's best roundhouse punch. And so people fly through windshields. Their bodies bend or shatter steering wheels. Passengers in the backseat fly forward into the people in the front, injuring or killing them along with themselves. And if you're holding a baby in your arms, the infant will seem to weigh hundreds of pounds and be torn from your grasp, impossible to hold on to during impact.

And that's at 30 miles an hour. At 60 miles an hour, people fly through car windows and windshields like cannonballs. The official cause of death in such cases—and the single most common finding by coroners working fatal car crashes—is termed “blunt-force trauma.” This is the coldly clinical term for the internal and external injuries a human body sustains when it is turned into a high-speed projectile striking metal, road, rock, tree, or ground. The reality is much messier than the term.

Seat belts are the single best way to avoid turning into a human missile during a car crash. The statistics on this are undeniable: the surviving passengers in fatal crashes studied in 2013 were wearing seat belts 84 percent of the time.
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Only 16 percent of the survivors in those fatal crashes were not buckled up. There are always anecdotes of people who survived because their lack of a seat belt allowed them to be “thrown clear.” That happens
from time to time, but far more often the unbelted are thrown to death.

Seat belt use has steadily improved during the last half century. Overall, 87 percent of Americans say they wear seat belts when driving or riding in a car. This rate varies depending on the region and whether a particular state imposes strict fines for not wearing a seat belt. The West led seat belt use in 2014 with 95 percent of car occupants buckling up. The South was next, matching the national average of 87 percent, while the Northeast and Midwest trailed with 83 percent of car occupants using their seat belts.
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Men are 10 percent less likely to wear their seat belts than women, and rural residents are 10 percent less likely to buckle up than their urban counterparts.

S
hortly before midnight, a married couple and their three-year-old daughter were all killed in Lonoke, Arkansas, when their Mercury sedan skidded and screeched off the road and into a tree after being rear-ended by a much heavier SUV. Glenna Michelle Wright, thirty-eight, who had been driving; her husband, Aundrey “Bucky” Wright Sr.; and their daughter Aunaysia Wright, all died at the scene, about forty miles away from their home in Stuttgart, Arkansas. The driver of the Mercury Mountaineer SUV was uninjured.

This mismatched weights and sizes of the two vehicles—one of several such mismatch crashes this day—illustrates a deadly trend that emerged in the early nineties in the U.S. After two decades of steadily dropping traffic fatalities on America's streets and roads, the numbers started climbing again. The shift coincided with another change: the rapid rise in popularity of a new type of passenger car—the sport-utility vehicle, a bigger, heavier
car that was actually classified as a light truck (the same classification as a pickup truck).

The confusing part of this: heavier cars are supposed to be safer, not more dangerous, yet traffic deaths were going up.

Researchers soon figured out what was going on: vehicle owners were, according to University of California, San Diego, economist Michelle J. White, “running an ‘arms race' on American roads by buying increasingly large vehicles.”
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The SUVs that had become so popular at the time were, in fact, safer for drivers and passengers inside them, White reported in a 2004 paper. She found SUV occupants were 29 percent less likely to be seriously injured in a collision with a smaller car, irrespective of who was at fault in a collision. However, the reverse showed the high cost of that increased safety: the small car occupants were 42 percent more likely to be seriously injured in the same crash. Again, it didn't matter who was at fault. The occupants of the lighter vehicle were more likely to be toast.

And when all the various types of cars and traffic collisions were taken into consideration, White found that for every crash death avoided inside an SUV or light truck, there were 4.3 additional collisions that took the lives of car occupants, pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. The supposedly safer SUVs were, in fact, “extremely deadly,” White concluded.

She calculated that the safety benefit of replacing light trucks and SUVs with conventionally sized and weighted passenger cars would be “similar in magnitude to the benefit of seat belts.”

The simple bottom line of this: heavier cars make most people more likely to die. If we all drove lighter cars, we'd all be much safer.

But the popularity of SUVs and the newer, similar class of vehicles known as “crossovers” has continued to rise, although some newer models do not run quite as huge as the original versions. In
2014, for the first time, SUVs and crossovers took a larger share of the American car market than sedans. Cars of all kinds have grown heavier as well in the last forty years: the original Honda Civic, a compact car, debuted in 1973 at 1,500 pounds but now weighs in at more than 2,800 pounds.