This regimentation - the corraling of drivers along asphalt rivers - is captured nicely in this last part in a really good series on walking: an excellent discussion of the way traffic engineering has created forgiving roads - roads which are built to 'forgive' the mistakes of drivers. One such method is to get rid of trees so, when someone does get in an accident, they won't be up against trees to boot. As Vanderbilt points out, of course, now the lack of trees just means that cars smack right into pedestrians instead. Of course, such roads aren't usually designed with the idea that anyone would be walking on them.
Vanderbilt discusses the infamous Raquel Nelson case where, disembarking from a bus, Raquel Nelson walked her four children across a busy highway to her apartment complex. She was supposed to walk 1/3 a mile to the crosswalk and then another 1/3 a mile back to her apartment. When a driver with a history of bad driving, hit and runs, and who admitted to having been drinking and was on pain killers hit the family, one of Nelson's children was killed.
For that, Raquel Nelson received a charge of second-degree vehicular homicide. The driver's charges were dropped to "hit and run" which effectively meant that Nelson would do more time than a driver with a record.
he more important question is: What were the conditions that helped contribute to the death of Nelson's son? Highway engineers learned long ago that the best way to drive down injuries was not to blame the "nut behind the wheel," but instead to reduce, through design, the possibility that a crash could happenand to lessen the likely impacts of those that do. Consider, for example, that the sidewalks along Austell Road, which in an earlier age might have been behind trees, giving pedestrians a sense of comfort, are now nestled immediately against the highway. Why? To "forgive" the mistakes of drivers, who might otherwise smash into a tree. But there is no forgiveness for those on foot. Pedestrians, using the one mode of travel that cannot actively cause injury to others, must pay for their mistakesand the mistakes of everyone else on the road.
A large part of the problem is that places like Austell Road were built on the idea that there wouldn't be anyone walking on them. Indeed, there wouldn't be much of anything happening on them, except for cars speeding uninterruptedly from one dense town to another. This was the vision articulated by early optimists like Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford, who sounded their call for such roads in a 1931 Harper's article called "Townless Highways for the Motorist." Not only should highways avoid the centers of towns, they arguedin order to keep long-distance traffic from congesting already-busy urban thoroughfares but those highways should themselves be free of commercial development. But even then, America's fledgling highways were marked by "the familiar row of frontage developmentsthe peanut stand, the hot-dog kennel, the dewdrop inns, the superfluous filling stations with their cut whisky and applejack and their cut-price gasoline." Today it's more like Costco and Fatburger, but Mumford and MacKaye's question still rings: "What is the use of a road's bypassing a town, only to find that the road itself has turned into a townand a cheap, nasty town at that?"
But, as transportation engineer Walter Kulash says, "the fact that 50,000 travelers a day are bundled together makes [roads] irresistible to commerce." And so the high-speed suburban arterial became a kind of American Main Street. The presumption has always been that this is a boon for traffic safetyin place of crowded downtowns with their narrow streets, busy intersections, and innumerable "conflicts," there were wide, obstacle-free roads with generous sightlines and capacious parking. But the work of Eric Dumbaugh, a professor of urban and regional planning at Florida Atlantic University, has shown precisely the opposite: It is the suburban arterials, not downtowns, that represent the most significant driving hazard. The combination of high speed and "access"i.e., being able to zip in and out of that drive-thruis a dangerous cocktail. That strip mall with your favorite frozen yogurt joint? "A single strip commercial use," writes Dumbaugh, in an article in Journal of the American Planning Association, "would be expected to produce up to 6 times more crashes than one would expect to occur from one million miles of vehicle travel alone, and a single big box store up to 14 times more crashes." That crowded street in town? It's linked with "significant reductions in crashes."
<http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/walking_in_america_how_we_can_become_pedestrians_once_more_.html>http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/walking_in_america_how_we_can_become_pedestrians_once_more_.html