Focus Shifts From Ticketing Pedestrians

(Opinion) As pedestrian advocates, we were disheartened by the pedestrian ticketing that was carried out last month and promptly suspended after public outcry. (We are more recently glad to hear that the pedestrian tickets that were issued have been/will be voided, to our understanding.) Clearly everyone wants to see the same outcome – fewer traffic deaths and injuries on our streets – but there are much more effective ways to work towards this goal.

Pedestrians are vulnerable road users, posing little risk to anyone but themselves, often simply seeking the quickest way to walk from one point to the next. Meanwhile, motorists operate potentially deadly machinery in a public space — thus it is motorist behavior that should be held to the highest standard of safety. Focusing on pedestrian behavior has long been a convenient sort of victim-blaming. As historian Peter Norton details in his book ​“Fighting Traffic,” the offense of ​‘jaywalking’ was concocted by automotive interests in the early 1900s to deflect public outrage away from the massive loss of life associated with early motor vehicle use in American cities.

Ticketing pedestrians for ​‘jaywalking’ creates opportunities for bias and error. An analysis by the Florida Times-Union and ProPublica of five years of pedestrian ticketing in Jacksonville found that African-Americans were three times as likely to be ticketed for a pedestrian infraction, and residents of the poorest neighborhoods were likewise over-represented. The same study found high numbers of erroneous citations, reflecting a misunderstanding of complex roadway laws.

This type of enforcement is also simply not effective. Streetsblog quotes Ben Fried of TransitCenter as saying: ​“No city has ever fined pedestrians and achieved huge safety gains as a result.” Michael Lewyn’s 2017 University of Illinois Law Review article, ​“The Criminalization of Walking”, suggests that the practice could end up increasing the risk that pedestrians face by discouraging walking and therefore reducing safety in numbers (as well as reducing the vibrancy needed for the city to thrive), as well as secondarily encouraging less careful and cautious driving.

Road violence is a national epidemic, apparent in the alarming trend of rising pedestrian deaths in recent years. New Haveners have reason to be particularly concerned. We live in a city where nearly 30 percent of households do not have an available automobile and where around half of commuters that live here don’t drive alone to work but instead use transit, walk, bike, carpool, or other means. New Haven has more than triple the proportion of car-less households than the United States as a whole. And while around half of commuters that live in New Haven get to work without driving solo, over three-quarters of commuters do so in the United States as a whole. (Side note: use the American FactFinder’s Advanced Search if any of the previous three links do not work.)

People of color, older adults, and people walking in low income neighborhoods are more likely to be victims of traffic violence. Nine pedestrians were hit and killed by people driving motor vehicles in New Haven in 2019 (five in the month of August alone), approximately the same number that were killed by guns. These tragic pedestrian deaths include Mr. Rafael Torres Jr., Ms. Helen Ramos, Mr. Ruperto Estrada, Mr. Lony Bosquet, Mr. Jesse Marzullo, Mr. Carlos Kercado, Mr. Emmanuel Torres, a 72-year-old man with a walker who tried to cross Dixwell Avenue on October 30th, and an elderly man who tried to cross Ella Grasso Boulevard on December 6th. As a society, we need to acknowledge these events as the tragedies they are rather than simply an immutable consequence of modern life.

So what should we do about traffic safety? Slowing down cars is the most important intervention to reduce pedestrian injuries and fatalities (and all traffic crashes for that matter) through the way our streets are designed. Education of motorists and other road users can undoubtedly be part of the solution. Additionally, enforcement of irresponsible motorists can be improved, such as through strengthening Public Act 14 – 31 (the vulnerable road user law in CT) by better defining what constitutes ​“serious” injury and increasing the penalty to motor vehicle operators, allowing red light cameras, and coming up with a better revenue sharing formula for motor vehicle traffic tickets. But again — appropriate street design is the key to greatly reduce speeding in cities, and slowing down cars saves lives.

Finally, if our streets were designed for slower speeds there would be much less need for police traffic enforcement in the first place. Streets in cities have to be seen as fundamentally different than roads in suburban and rural areas. For several generations, too many of our city streets have been designed and over-designed for the frictionless flow of cars as if they were highways. Instead, we should redesign our streets to prioritize multimodal safety over automobile throughput. We need to retrofit many of our streets to be Complete Streets, or Self-Regulating Streets, which are streets designed so that motorists instinctively drive at slower speeds appropriate for built environments where pedestrians, transit riders, bicyclists, and motorists are moving around. In many cases this would involve narrowing and removing vehicle lanes in order to provide shorter pedestrian crossings, bus-only lanes, bike lanes, and so on. It would also involve installing traffic calming (such as raised intersections and speed humps) where appropriate to physically limit speeding, as well as returning most, if not all, of New Haven’s one-way streets to two-way streets.

Re-engineering New Haven’s streets for safety should involve the development of a citywide master plan of safe street redesigns, vetted by neighborhoods and stakeholders across the city. Layout changes to our city streets should include both changes that can be easily and modestly implemented when streets undergo routine repaving (such as striping changes), and modifications that necessitate more intensive capital efforts. Measurable goals for the number of safe street/complete street fixes per year should be set ahead of time and then actually implemented. As necessary, more resources should be dedicated to making our streets safer.

With the appropriate planning, engineering, resource investment, and implementation we can improve our city not by targeting pedestrians and vulnerable users, but by redesigning our streets for much less speeding, slower motor vehicle speeds and safer conditions for all.

Carolyn Lusch, an urban planner, and Neil Olinski, a transportation planner/engineer, live in New Haven.

Click here to listen to a Friday WNPR ​“Where We Live” episode dedicated to this topic, featuring New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes and regional planning experts.