Is a Drunk Pedestrian Killed by a Driver Something To Care About?

(Source: Unsplash/Behzad Ghaffarian.)

A mother took her daughter and niece to the library where they stayed until closing time. When they left, it was raining—a chilly December night. Their car was parked in the lot directly across the street. With two young kids in tow, this mother chose the most direct path from the front door to the shelter of the car, forgoing the 600-foot round trip diversion to the closest signalized crossing. One of the cars they tried to dodge when crossing the street was driven by a drunk driver. The driver struck the three of them and the woman’s daughter was killed.

In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, I spend thirteen chapters explaining why this tragedy was not the fault of the mother. Emotionally, that’s not a difficult case to make, especially to anyone with a reasonable amount of empathy. She lost a child—perhaps the most painful thing any mother can endure—and I’ve found that most people are reluctant to heap blame on such a person. It was not her fault, and most of my readers have been willing to accept my technical evaluation in support of that diagnosis.

I made another, related, argument in Chapter 3 (“Whose Mistakes Do We Forgive?”) of Confessions that was less universally embraced. I argued that the intoxicated woman driving the car was also not to blame. It was not her fault.

That opinion was not shared by the police who arrived at the scene. Police are trained to evaluate crashes and identify their causes. Their reports include check boxes and prompts to conduct the analysis. Was the driver speeding? Were they intoxicated? Were they wearing a seat belt? Were they distracted by a cell phone or device? Check all that apply.

The answers we give are, of course, direct results of the questions we ask. “Was the driver intoxicated” is a question with a yes or no answer, but that answer directly relates to how we evaluate crashes. If “yes,” one cause of the crash was that the driver was intoxicated. If that is the only “yes,” then a police officer—and the insurance adjuster, and almost certainly a judge—will say that the cause of the crash was intoxicated driving. Case closed.

What if, in addition to those other checkboxes, we remarked on what color clothing the driver was wearing? Red is a color associated with aggression and passion while blue is more associated with calm and peacefulness. If we focused on the color of clothing worn by the driver, there is no doubt that analysis of such information would begin showing up in academic studies, safety conferences, and on the pages of The New York Times. “Want to reduce traffic fatalities? Experts say to wear blue!” (I’m serious, we’ve seen this kind of thing already.)

Here’s the point: When we have four or five potential causes of a crash, each crash will have at least one of four or five potential causes. Either that or it will be an accident, a random act of God that is essentially unexplainable. Check out Oklahoma’s crash data site from their Highway Safety Department. They track four causes: Alcohol, Drug-Related, Speed-Related, Distracted Driver. And the easiest one of these—the automatic contributor whenever it is found—is alcohol.

A drunk driver goes off the roadway, hits a tree, and is killed. In our system, that driver died because they were intoxicated. In our culture, that person was reckless. Their reckless actions caused their own death. Some would go as far as to say that they got what they deserved, that we should be grateful they only harmed themselves. 

If you haven’t already, you can read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and understand why I disagree with all of this, but I want to take one step back and ask you to consider the adjacent case, that of the drunk pedestrian.

Is the drunk pedestrian acting reckless? When their impairment causes them to misjudge oncoming traffic, have they caused their own death? Are they getting what they deserved?

For a sizable share of our readership, the very notion of holding the intoxicated pedestrian responsible is offensive. For them, there is an imbalance of power between a fragile human crossing the street and a 2-ton motor vehicle. That power imbalance, it is asserted, shifts responsibility to the driver in almost all situations. Nobody deserves to die merely because they’ve been drinking.

Yet, that’s not how our system tends to handle these situations. In a recent Crash Analysis Studio, a severely intoxicated woman was struck and killed in a crosswalk in Hyattsville, Maryland. As I discussed this case with people outside of the Strong Towns movement, all people needed to hear was her blood alcohol level (0.315) to shift the blame almost exclusively to her. Indeed, that is the conclusion law enforcement ultimately reached; this driver can’t be held responsible because the victim was severely intoxicated.

I’m going to now state an uncomfortable truth about our current system: blaming the pedestrian was the only call that could be made. Today’s traffic safety approach requires law enforcement to identify the person who failed to act in a legal or predictable way. The predictable thing for this particular person to do would have been to activate the flashers before crossing or to wait for the vehicle that struck her to pass before stepping out. She didn’t do either of those things, and she was intoxicated, therefore she is to blame. Case closed.

Let me be clear: I find this system disgusting, but I am consistent in that disgust. I find it disgusting when we render a drunk pedestrian to blame merely because they were intoxicated, and I find it disgusting that we render a drunk driver to blame merely because they were intoxicated. 

We have designed streets that are safe if and only if everyone using the street performs in a way that is predictable. So long as everyone does exactly what is expected of them at all times, nobody should get hurt. That is disgusting because it denies even a rudimentary understanding of human behavior. 

We are designing streets for humans, and humans are messy. Traffic engineers and transportation planners can’t ignore that or abrogate that responsibility to law enforcement. You design for the humans you have, not the ones you wish you had.

Here’s the truly insidious thing: Traffic engineers do design for the messiness of humans, but only when they are designing high-speed roadways. The standard approach to roadway engineering, developed over many decades of studying fatal crashes, is to compensate for mistakes that drivers make. We know drivers do unpredictable things and so we widen lanes, add recovery areas, increase clear zones, install guardrails, and make curves more sweeping and generous. On roadways, these things save lives.

There is no corresponding body of knowledge for local streets, no discerning practice in the transportation professions that grapples with the messiness of humans in these places. In the Hyattsville case, a new award-winning “complete street” was built like a racetrack, dividing a residential neighborhood from a major transit stop on the DC Metro. The design accommodated the pedestrians they knew would be there, but did nothing to acknowledge the messiness of that humanity. A woman is dead, as a result.

As I wrote in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, “on our streets, we want the price of mistakes to be paid in fender benders and shattered headlights instead of in human lives and suffering.” To design for the high-speed movement of vehicles where the designer knows a large number of humans will be crossing on foot is the very definition of gross negligence. 

Nobody deserves to die because they have been drinking. Being content with blaming the drunk pedestrian for their own death is a disgusting practice that should have ended a long time ago. If we can extend that realization to drunk drivers, as well, we can then turn our attention fully to the recklessly dangerous designs we routinely employ on our streets.

And then we will stop blaming altogether and, instead, start saving lives.

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