Why Does Someone Need To Die for a Street To Be Made Safer?
(Source: Flickr/Wayne Roe.)
“It’s not just that they have community complaints. They have a fatality. They have several fatalities,” my colleague Edward Erfurt exclaimed when we were reviewing the facts of a crash in Carlsbad, California. “What more does City Hall need? What would it take?”
We were looking at the death of Christine Hawk Embree, who on August 7, 2022, was struck while biking with her daughter in her hometown of Carlsbad, California. She is survived by her daughter, who was 16 months old at the time of her mother’s death, and her husband, a local firefighter. Hers was one of several traffic fatalities that summer, a uniquely deadly one in the coastal city. In fact, weeks before he lost his wife, Bob Embree addressed the Carlsbad City Council, pleading for traffic calming interventions.
“We have young kids that walk to school there,” Bob Embree told the council. “Speed bumps, roundabouts, stop signs, anything to save a life. All I’m asking is if we can slow traffic down and save a life.”
City officials offered their ears. When his wife would fall victim to Carlsbad’s inaction just days later, they offered condolences. Two weeks later, Carlsbad declared a state of emergency. This granted staff the unique opportunity to bypass often lengthy processes to expedite whatever interventions they saw fit to address the crisis they’ve identified. Yet, a year and a half since the tragedy, the site of the crash looks the same as it did in August 2022.
It’s not that Carlsbad officials stood idle. In a public statement after her death, one official promised that the city would collect more data. I return to Erfurt’s words: “What more does City Hall need?”
When Death Actually Brings About Change
There’s a question that follows many tragedies, which paraphrased goes something like this: “Why does blood have to spill for something to change?” Or perhaps this variation will be more familiar to some: “Why does someone need to die in order for us to change this street?”
In Chicago, when 47th Ward volunteer Peter Paquette was killed walking home, hours after a safe streets rally took over the neighborhood, the city finally intervened. The five-lane Irving Park Road, devoid of stop lights and pedestrian islands that claimed Parquette’s life had long been a sore point for advocates. It was one of those roads that many avoided if they could and everyone could agree was dangerous by design.
A combination of Chicago’s electeds concluding Parquette’s death was the last straw and a well-timed Memorandum of Understanding reached between the city’s Department of Transportation, CDOT, and the state’s, IDOT, allowed the city to streamline improvements to the corridor.
Nevertheless, many asked why it took Parquette dying to catalyze change. It’s not that advocates weren’t relieved that the city finally admitted that Irving Park Road was a death trap. It’s that it took the worst outcome to convince the city to do what advocates have been urging for years.
In Ottawa, the answer to “what will it take” is baked into policy. The city made news for all the wrong reasons when it piloted a campaign that in one ad graphically depicted a bloodied person laying feet from a car that ostensibly struck them. It read: “You jaywalked to save time. But you lost it. Forever. Cross only where it’s safe.”
Apologies ensued and the campaign has since been pulled, yet its legacy endures in the Catch-22 some advocates uncovered during the fiasco.
Ottawa: "cross where it's safe"
— anton lodder (@antonlodder) September 9, 2023
also Ottawa: "at least 150 ppl need to cross in an 8-hr period for us to consider making a location safe"https://t.co/rlOBJIuLIv https://t.co/EAzMehLQw4
“The city’s message to people who walk is, on one hand, ‘We’re not going to give you a safe crossing unless we see a lot of you jaywalking,’” Daniel Herriges explained in the article “Ottawa to Walkers: Drop Dead.” “And, on the other hand, ‘If you jaywalk and you’re hit, it was your own fault.’”
According to Ottawa policy, on a roadway that carries 15,000 vehicles in 12 hours, a minimum of 150 people must attempt to cross in six hours for the city to consider signalizing the intersection. In this calculus of supply and demand, pedestrians must routinely endanger themselves where there are no safe crossings in order to trigger Ottawa to consider painting a crosswalk. That’s evidently what it will take.
You Are Already Liable
An obstacle all too familiar to both city staff and advocates is the specter of liability. “We must build excessively wide and unsafe streets or we are liable when someone gets hurt,” Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn wrote a decade ago, illustrating the ironies in liability. “We must put up a ridiculous number of signs because, even if there are too many to read at 45 mph, we don’t want to be liable if someone does something stupid.”
Liability is often the first and last defense against traffic-calming interventions. On State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, liability—alongside “insufficient data”—was the excuse for not redesigning even just one block of the street that claimed the lives of Destiny Gonzalez in 2014, Gayle Ball in 2022, and Michael Cooley in 2023. In fact, in 2019, the city’s public works director claimed that a signalized crosswalk would actually make the area more dangerous. Since then, at least two people have died on the exact same stretch of State Street.
There’s another perspective on liability from a vigilante urbanist in Chattanooga that really struck me. One December night, when driving on the Bailey Avenue overpass in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jon Jon Wesolowski noticed a broken guardrail. He thought to himself, “The city should’ve put something up for pedestrians.” As he was about to leave, that thought evolved into, “I should do something about this.”
Yet, he didn’t want to be held liable for installing a makeshift guardrail or committing vandalism. But then had what he called a revelation: “From this moment forward, you already are liable.”
In the dead of night, knowing it was illegal, yet being unwilling to wait any longer for the city to budge, Wesolowski installed a wooden guardrail with the help of his neighbor.
He was unable to live with the thought that if someone were to fall through the next day, he would be liable, not because he broke the guardrail, but because he noticed it was broken. In other words, he could do something about it and therefore he should do something about it.
When I first heard Wesolowski’s story, I thought to myself, “If only public works directors, engineers, and the constellation of professionals who make our cities run adopted this perspective on liability, rather than the approach that lets them wipe their hands of blame when the worst happens.”
Whether it’s Carlsbad or Springfield, the cost of inaction is evidently so much higher than rushing to a makeshift solution. In fact, in both cities the highest price was paid: a life. Several lives, actually.
I return to Erfurt’s question: “What more does City Hall need? What would it take?”
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.