Street Safety - Initiating Culture Changes

 

We previously outlined four major problems to solve to improve street safety, and two of these are related, as they both deal with responsibility.

• Figure out how to make somebody in relevant authority responsible AND accountable for street safety
• Alter our social and legal responsibility for crashes from individual obligation to collective responsibility.

Let's dig in a bit. We know that changing broad social attitudes -- the culture -- is not easy. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" said Peter Drucker. We also know how to actually change culture, and we also know that intent, discussion, convincing arguments, and cajoling will not do it. Changing culture requires forced action first, and then over time, with empirical experience, attitudes change. It takes pressure on a lot of implicit points, and it is generally a slow process.



Yes, individuals can change their views on their own, but it's an even slower process with uncertain results. It's better to join forces with like-minded people, and advocate at the individual level while striving for collective change at higher levels as well.

For safety culture at the city/county level, we currently have a system where nobody has much responsibility for street safety, as we've clearly said that driving safely is an individual responsibility, and then we've increasingly reinforced that "accidents" due to "human error" are unfortunate and should not be heavily punished, and that "minor infractions" like speeding should be loosely enforced, and that same speeding should determine local speed limits anyway. This is a pretty crappy system, to say the least!

We can be confident that no mayor, governor, or their staffs are going to leap at the opportunity to become culpable for the deaths of thousands of people any more than individuals want to for their driving kills, especially when the majority of constituents support the status quo, so there is a LOT of inertia in the system. To force a change will require a major outside force. Maybe there are more, but I can think of only two:

• Massive public uprising, like the "stop the kindermoord" demonstrations in the Netherlands in the 70's. This might work, but I think it's unlikely, given a couple of generations of frog-boiled drivers now inured to death and with their children safely ensconced in metal cocoons or walled enclaves.
• Top-down changes from the Federal government, directly linking liability or limiting funding based on behavior of cities and states.

The latter may, unexpectedly, have some support with the new NTSB chair, Jennifer Homendy. The NTSB has long done a good job with airplane travel safety from a system perspective (which you know I advocate), first with airplane design, then airport and air lane management, and finally with pilot roles and behaviors. Today they somewhat police vehicle design, but road safety is more handled by DOT departments and industry standards, and as for car pilots...well, we just wring our hands and pretend nothing can be done.

For the former, the trouble with a bottom-up effort is that there are plenty of advocates and supporters, but individual action can carry a lot of risk. In most car-centric cities, drivers do not interact with enough pedestrians and cyclists to have their brains calibrated to notice them. Kanneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" System 1 prevails, and it sees the hazards from vehicles but mostly doesn't see smaller things like people. This is why motorcycles feel invisible, too, and yet those are larger and have less speed differential than cyclists or pedestrians. This means that in a relatively unprotected environment, adding more pedestrians and cyclists who are trying to make a difference simply adds more soft targets to be hit due to random errors by drivers or the pedestrians and cyclists themselves. This is why in the Safety Pyramid we look for near-misses and hazard conditions, as a distracted driver bumping up over the curb or crossing a paint line can be a minor incident or a deadly impact, depending on the distribution of pedestrians and cyclists.

We know, empirically, that cyclist and pedestrian safety improves greatly when their are a lot of them, but it's an ugly process to get past the plateau of unintended neglect by most drivers. This is NOT to say that we should not all, individually, do what we can to shift our modal share away from cars where we safely can, but that we should do so with our eyes open, and we should also advocate for safety whenever and wherever we can make a difference.

Ideally, we would get city staff accountability for public safety in place before vastly increasing the population of vulnerable users, and do some of the hard work to address problems 3 and 4 proactively. I think this will be an uphill battle, yet it is still worth fighting since it will save lives, and it will also create an advocacy structure that will be needed for stronger processes anyway. If we are lucky, we get some top-down support from NTSB and road standards organizations along the way, and perhaps gather support from those concerned with related issues like climate change, social equity, and public health as well.

We've said we want to move from mobility to accessibility, shift away from cars, and embrace a safety culture. Until we have a top-down push, and/or a big demonstration of the "stop the kindermoord" variety, we should all strive to advocate for small steps, such as the following:

• Act locally. Vote for mayor, council, state reps, and other elected officials who support anything but cars. Talk to your officials, and help them understand your priorities and the problems with cars. Quite likely, they are uninformed, and have lots of support for the status quo.
• Push for safety audits and reviews, especially (but ideally not only) after every fatality crash.
• Support local biking and pedestrian advocacy. These groups should network with each other to develop outreach resources, and to identify best-practice cities to hold up as examples to others.
• Pick a pet project to push for. Sidewalk gaps, especially near schools and senior centers, are a great thing to work toward, plus filling gaps in your own neighborhood.
• Try hard to use alternative infrastructure that is available and safe, and make it visibly popular. Use social media as outreach, and to normalize non-car trips in car-centric areas. Embrace the continuum of car-usage, and strive to move your life and your city further toward the "people" side:
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• Support regulations and investment to reduce the priority of cars when the opportunity arises:
  • Lower speed limits
  • Pedestrian-first laws, like priority at crosswalk entry
  • Better vehicle mileage and safety, especially pedestrian sensors
  • Funding for bike lanes and mixed-use paths, sidewalk gaps, etc.
  • Congestion fees
  • Eliminating parking minimums
  • Decreasing parking spaces, and increasing fee costs
  • Mixed use zoning, and elimination of SFU
  • Dual taxation mechanisms, separating land and building value (reducing idle land investment)
  • ToD (transit oriented development)
  • Mass transit, including buses. Focus on BRT and short headways -- service frequency over geographic coverage
• Think hard about the sort of world and life you want to have, and make decisions that align with that. Go read "Curbing Traffic" by the Bruntlett's, too.
  • Pick houses close to work or jobs close to home. Or remote/work-from-home options.
  • Find a house close to elementary and middle-schools, where the kids can walk/bike
  • Choose a smaller, higher efficiency car, and drive it less
  • Try to find a smaller lot, but with a common park nearby
  • Start keeping track of walkscores and bikescores, especially when moving, or traveling.
  • Support small businesses downtown or in neighborhoods, and neglect big-box stores at the edges
  • Try to shop locally, instead of on-line (yes, that's not easy in this time of COVID)
  • Pick denser, tighter street grid areas -- the classic parts of town, if reasonable

Next round, we'll look at the last two problems, and think through those a bit.