Americans should all have the protected right to travel on foot. They don't.
The year 2024 will include the 10th anniversary of a case that threw pedestrian infrastructure -- as well as race and inequality -- into the spotlight. Not a lot has changed.
IT STARTED WITH someone being suspicious of foot traffic. It often does, it seems.
Michael Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, were walking in the street. Officer Darren Wilson saw it from his squad car and stopped them.
What happened next -- did Brown reach for the officer's pistol? Did he have his hands up? -- is disputed, but what is indisputable is that it resulted in Brown's death, followed shortly after by the town of Ferguson, Missouri going up in flames as residents protested a zone of low opportunity and what they saw as a pattern of overreach by local police.
"Within the police car there was a struggle over the officer’s weapon,” the county's police chief told the New York Times at the time. “There was at least one shot fired in the car." Twelve bullets were fired during Wilson's killing of Brown and the events leading up to it.
While the street where Brown was shot has sidewalks, the small side streets abutting it do not. Nor does much of the rest of Ferguson. It is entirely understandable why a man who lived in that environment would get accustomed to walking in the street as a matter of habit.
As of January 1, 2024, we’ll enter the year when all of that was a decade ago.
***
ROUGHLY A YEAR LATER, I was having trouble believing what I was seeing. There were a total of eight helicopters hovering near my block in Baltimore -- just across the Jones Falls, to be exact. The helicopters, a mix of police aircraft, national guard machines and media networks, were there to watch the Mondawmin neighborhood, across the Jones Falls, where a group of high school students, after being kettled by police -- penned in after school without charges and without access to restrooms or their rides home -- started throwing water bottles, leading to the extremely evitable confrontation that followed and prompting the partial destruction of the neighborhood in the process.
The tension that birthed this foul melee was centered around the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray, a man who was arrested in West Baltimore, contorted into a pretzel during the arrest and then given a "rough ride" to a jail -- a ride in a police van lacking restraints -- which ultimately resulted in his death. The reason for his arrest? Running near police with a knife, which he was allowed to have under Maryland law.
"This case has been like nothing we have ever imagined,” Gray's family lawyer, Billy Murphy would tell the Washington Post a few months after the killing. “This was a man arrested for nothing, for running while black and then an extraordinarily, deadly injury happened to this kid while he was in custody. Thank God someone had video.”
As with the cases of Brown and Ahmaud Arbery, being on foot was the trigger for violence. And the sin of walking or running is likely to continue leading to violence in the future.
***
IT’S TEMPTING TO SAY that this is a problem solely for people with high levels of melanin in their skin, and someone saying this would not be completely wrong. There is, after all, so much of this type of thing that the phrase "running while black" has its own Wikipedia page. I'll definitely come back to that angle of this topic in a bit.
But first, it's worth mentioning that the challenges of normalizing pedestrian transport is not "just" an urban problem or a problem for black people, or even solely a problem for people who interact with police. Just walking around in the suburbs can be dangerous in itself. With the Governors Highway Safety Association finding a 77% increase in pedestrian fatalities between 2010 and 2021, thanks largely to the growth of bloated SUVs and "crew cab" trucks that never saw a construction site in their existence, municipalities around the U.S. are considering whether to finally ban right turns on red again after decades of allowing the practice.
Trucks that are mostly used for carrying groceries and passengers are now so loathsomely turgid that there are significant blind spots all around the driver, the logic goes, it only makes sense to avoid any vehicular movements that might mow down pedestrians -- of any color, and in any location, whether that's the city or the suburbs.
Auto companies have done little to help the situation as they chase the higher profits that trucks' anachronistic carve-out in federal gas mileage standards allow. Ford stopped selling sedans in 2019, and GM has also cut back its sales in the category drastically. All of this during a time when the climate emergency has been getting steadily more obvious and destructive.
And the already monstrous status-symbol trucks the Detroit Three are making are getting bigger with each passing decade, leading to a trucklash as people who need to do actual work with their machines increasingly import tiny Japanese vehicles or go with the output of companies like the Texas firm Ayro, which is building a small utility truck.
In any case, something is going to need to change, and soon: Even as projects like Vision Zero, which aims for a year with no pedestrian deaths, gain traction, the statistics are going in the opposite direction. Both 2021 and 2022 set records for pedestrian deaths. (As of the time I'm writing this, 2023 numbers haven't yet been tallied.)
Clearly, we have an issue. Walking and running are increasingly deadly.
***
SO WHAT CAN U.S. policymakers do to start to fix the problem?
To begin, they can match the federal truck- and SUV-related mileage carve-out -- originally implemented to help business owners -- with a new requirement that large trucks require special licenses. If a vehicle is special enough to be exempt from gas mileage requirements, after all, it's special enough to require its own license category. This has been proposed in France, but none of the most prominent American transportation groups are currently pushing such a proposal. That needs to change.
But it shouldn't stop there.
Groups like America Walks are supporting actions to stop giving five-star safety ratings to vehicles likely to kill pedestrians, and to push for automatic breaking measures to be required on cars and trucks. Those movements should be encouraged.
Additionally, states need to step up and make it illegal for cities to continue citing people for crimes like "jaywalking" and the even more vague "manner of walking" without the cities proving, using hard data, that those arrests aren't being overwhelmingly used against black and brown people. (Spoiler: They usually are.)
While they're at it, if they want to keep federal policing dollars, cities above a certain size -- let's say 25,000 people -- should be required to provide a yearly report showing what they're doing to to make their sidewalk distribution more equitable as, according to Streetsblog USA, "there are only eight states where people of color are not disproportionately at risk [largely from unevenly distributed infrastructure] while walking: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and West Virginia."
Finally, cities and states need to get serious about rail transit, acknowledging the reality that transit is not just "poor people transportation" and that, increasingly, employers are unwilling to locate major job centers in places with a lack of serious rail transit infrastructure.
(Likewise, it's important for young people. My birth state of Michigan put together a panel this year to examine why the state was losing population, and one of their key findings was that "rapid transit is a big, big, big, big, giant game changer for young people," as a co-chair of the group told the Detroit Free Press. "Young people don't want to drive. They don't want driver's licenses, and they're going to places that have rapid transit." We'll see if the leaders in Lansing listen to their experts.)
This brings us full-circle, to Ferguson. Down in St. Louis, the metro area where Michael Brown's hometown is located, the lack of strong transit has been one of the factors leading to the central city being one of the five fastest-shrinking cores in the United States. When I visited Ferguson and the surrounding area in 2015 for a database management training seminar, I was struck by the way the solitary St. Louis light rail transit line just … ended … rather than crossing the Missouri River into nearby St. Charles County, where my hotel was located. (Ferguson is 72 percent black. St. Charles County, across the river, is 84 percent white.)
A decade later, little has been altered. The most recent public referendum on extending the rail line across the river was conducted not within the years since Brown's death, in a good-faith move to heal from the city's collective trauma and improve opportunities for people of all races in his area, but in 1996, the year he was born.
The plan was voted down.
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Selected links from this piece:
» In Much of Ferguson, Walking in the Street Remains the Only Option
» Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think
» Is it time to ban right on red?
» Humanity at ‘code red,’ facing climate emergency, scientists warn
» Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks
» This tiny electric truck can fit through double doors—but still carries 1,200 pounds
» Pedestrian Deaths Set a Four-Decade Record in 2022 (Yes, Again)
» French MEP calls for special driving licence for SUVs
» NHTSA shouldn’t give 5-star safety ratings to vehicles that are dangerous for pedestrians
Other recent writing I’ve done elsewhere:
» With the FBI moving, it’s time to plan a Green Line extension (Greater Greater Washington)
» Cyclists say these 5 policies are virtually free. NC lawmakers have only implemented 1 of them (Queen City Nerve).
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Image by Arild Finne Nybø - Flickr, Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported,