Everyone Involved Was Following The Law
(Source: Flickr/Quinn Dombrowski.)
The stories hit differently for me these days. When I read last week about the latest victim of San Francisco's unsafe streets, a four-year-old girl who was killed by an SUV driver while being pushed in a stroller in a crosswalk by her dad, I couldn't stop thinking about my 3-year-old. I still can’t. I can't not picture her face, or think, “What if it were her lying on the asphalt?”
Rage is an easy and totally normal response. It stems from fear and impotence. The most important thing in my life right now is to protect my kids while they learn to navigate the world, and the drip, drip, drip of stories of traffic death are a reminder that there’s no guarantee I can even do that. My child just wants to walk to the park in our own neighborhood with me. It fills me with fury that I even have to teach her that that’s a dangerous thing to do. Why should I? Why should it be? The situation deserves rage. It deserves obscenities.
I've been walking with my three-year-old quite a bit this summer, and so we've been talking about traffic laws. At her age, that's how I can best help her understand safety. She doesn't have the judgment to look at a situation and size up the physical danger she's in or anticipate ways she could be hurt. And she doesn't really understand the physical consequences if she were to be hit. We talk about it; she knows she'd get a “big ow” and have to go to the hospital, and that maybe she couldn't walk or play on the playground for a long time. She repeats this like a mantra with an impish grin that says, “Look at me, I was listening to you,” but also, “I don’t really get what that means.”
But she does understand rules, and that breaking them comes with consequences. So we talk in those terms. She knows that if she's in a parking lot, she has to hold my hand. She knows that we can only cross the street when we have a walk signal, and she and I have checked in all directions for cars, and she’s holding my hand. In the car, we talk about how I drive the speed limit and stop at the red lights because that's the law. And it’s the law because it keeps people safe.
It’s the law because it keeps people safe. I know better than this, but I’m not telling her that.
“Reckless” is not a concept a three-year-old can truly grasp. “Illegal” is. So for now, I teach her about “illegal.”
Unfortunately, the American public at large struggles with the same distinctions when it comes to the use of our streets. Too often, curbing illegal driving is used as both a mental shortcut for what needs to be done to make our streets safe, and as a practical heuristic guiding the things we actually try to do.
Illegal driving, reckless driving, and unsafe driving are three different things. I can’t get my kid to understand that, and the truth is that most drivers don’t even intuit the difference, so I want the system to understand it.
Everyone Involved Was Following the Law
A young girl is dead and her father suffered life-threatening injuries. The law would not have saved my daughter or myself from that same fate on the evening of August 15, had it been us in that crosswalk. This is because, as far as I can tell, everyone involved in this situation was following the law.
Let me caveat that: the driver, who stayed on the scene and cooperated with police, was in fact arrested and charged with vehicular manslaughter and failure to yield, because hitting a person on foot is, by definition, against the law. What I mean when I say “following the law” is this:
She wasn’t speeding.
She does not appear to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
She had a green light and was making a legal right turn from the correct lane.
The people in the crosswalk had a walk signal and had the legal right-of-way.
In other words, nobody in the story was behaving contrary to the way our system of traffic controls and signs told them to. Nobody was behaving recklessly. There’s an aversion—for good reasons—to the word “accident” among a lot of street safety advocates. But this is, by all indications, as close to an honest-to-goodness car “accident” as you’re going to find.
That’s not our default assumption. In the first hours after the story gained traction on social media, the overwhelming reaction was rage at the then-anonymous driver who killed the four-year-old, and a desire for punishment or retribution. Again, rage is an understandable and even productive emotion in response to these events. But rage at what?
Here’s a sampling of tweets from Tuesday night:
“Driver stayed on the scene” = killer will sleep in their own bed tonight and might never see the inside [of] a courtroom, much less a jail cell. We are depraved.
[T]hey deserve to think about what they did in a jail cell for a long time.
Driver needs to go to prison for life… RIP little one this is heartbreaking.
There will be no prosecution because juries don't convict drivers that kill people. Couple points on their license. That's how sick the USA is.
what an absolute nightmare—accident or not the driver should pay in blood
By Wednesday, details had emerged about the nature of the crash. Warren Wells, a transportation planner and bicycling advocate, shared a photo of the intersection from Street View and an explanation of what had happened. Here's what it looks like:
The latest pedestrian killed in San Francisco was 4-year-old in a stroller pushed by her father.
— Warren J. Wells, AICP 🚴🏙️🦀 (@WarrenJWells) August 16, 2023
According to witnesses, the driver turned right from the middle lane. He had a green light while the family had a walk signal.
This design is deadly, and should be outlawed. pic.twitter.com/wrDhSwXVe4
If you are traveling southbound on 4th Street at the intersection with King Street, you will encounter two right-turn lanes. Both of these lanes permit simultaneous right turns during the light’s green phase, at the same time as the crosswalk parallel to 4th has a walk signal. The father and his daughter were legally in the crosswalk when the driver attempted to turn right from the middle lane and hit them.
This is an appallingly dangerous design that should never have been approved. If you are a driver turning right, it is all too easy to fail to see a person in the crosswalk. This is all the more true if you are in the middle lane and a vehicle is also in the rightmost lane, obscuring your view of anyone who might be crossing on foot.
It is, of course, always your obligation as a driver to scan the environment carefully for hazards or unknowns, and to proceed with utmost caution if there is any possibility of encountering someone that you did not expect. There is an argument to be made that any failure to see a person in your path is reckless driving by definition.
People, however, are human, and there are limits to our diligence and to the intensity of our sustained concentration. A transportation system designed for humans should be designed for human flaws: it should be safe when we are at our worst and least attentive, not only when we are vigilant.
In theory, this is what we task transportation engineers to use their judgment to do: to assess the potential conflicts inherent in the design and to use all design techniques available to make sure that these conflict points are visible and obvious to a driver. Where that's not possible, they should use design to restrict the physically attainable driving speed to a safe one, and limit simultaneous movements that could result in a collision.
This intersection is directly in front of San Francisco's downtown commuter rail station. This is the site of heavy pedestrian activity at all hours of the day. If safety were at all the city’s top priority (rather than traffic volume and speed), they would have long ago implemented a solution such as a pedestrian scramble: a crossing phase in which people can enter the intersection on foot in all directions, and, at the same time, all motor vehicles have a mandatory stop.
The city has had plenty of time to act. This was not an unknown problem. Here’s footage of transit riders 14 years ago complaining about how dangerous the intersection of 4th and King is. Back then, I lived in San Francisco and frequented this very intersection on foot, always with heightened anxiety. As reported by ABC 7 News, city data reveals that from 2019 to 2023 alone, there have been 12 collisions on 4th and King with 19 injured victims.
If you want to rage at someone, rage at a bureaucracy that seems incapable of responding to years of forewarning of last week’s tragedy.
The driver in this situation made a terrible mistake. She will likely suffer the psychological consequences of that error for the rest of her life, above and beyond any legal or financial consequences. But at least she’s alive, which is more than can be said for the four-year-old.
As Wells observed, however, the traffic engineer who signed off on 4th and King will never be confronted with the consequences of what they did.
One final thought.
— Warren J. Wells, AICP 🚴🏙️🦀 (@WarrenJWells) August 17, 2023
We have arrested and charged the driver for her rational, albeit careless, use of public infrastructure. The world will be no better if she is convicted and serves time/probation.
The engineer who designed the intersection will never be confronted.
What I am not willing to do is convict this driver, even in my mind, of casual disregard for the life of a child. There is simply no evidence to support that notion. The driver was doing what the law and the signage told her to. She failed to notice someone in her path, yes, but engineers set the whole intersection up to make it far too easy to make that mistake.
There but for the grace of God go I. And my daughter.
Children haven’t changed in the past 100 years, but our attitudes about their ability to be independent have.