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While in San Diego this week, I spent one morning hiking an urban “trail” I found online.
The six-mile loop took me through some of the nicest parts of the city — from Balboa Park, home of the famous zoo, to desert gardens overlooking peaks and valleys that define much of Southern California.
But the hike also brought me face-to-face with a reality all too common for Americans: How dangerous it is to walk in a city designed for cars.
Once I got out of Balboa Park, I faced ill-defined crosswalks across six- to eight-lane roads, alongside narrow walkways with nothing but paint separating me from cars that can legally go 40 mph — way faster than it would take to kill me.
That pedestrians are overlooked in American urban design is nothing new. While European counterparts have slowly made streets safer for pedestrians, the United States has seen a steady rise in pedestrian deaths by cars:
Between 2010 and 2022, U.S. pedestrian deaths rose 77%.
Over the last 20 years, the share of deaths from car crashes for pedestrians has also increased, from 21% of deaths in 1994 to 36% of deaths in 2022.
So why is a climate newsletter writing about pedestrian deaths? Because safer streets often also mean greener streets:
For example, by retrofitting roads with narrower lanes — combined with bike lanes, trees, streeteries, curb extensions, sharper turns, etc. — cities force drivers to slow down, giving pedestrians a much easier, enjoyable, and safer walk.
Such streets also encourage people to take more trips by foot or bike rather than by car, turning an emitting trip into a non-emitting one.
And remembering these shared goals is key to accomplishing climate goals because, like it or not, climate change is rarely a singular motivator for change.
In a recent poll by Yale and George Mason, climate ranks 19th among the 28 issues prioritized by registered voters. And only 3% of registered voters ranked climate change as their most important issue.
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Of course, regardless of how we frame them, safer, greener streets will inevitably get pushback. Mostly because we’ll need to retrofit existing infrastructure, which is more expensive than building it right in the first place. Perhaps more difficult, we’ll also need to retrofit existing mindsets.
It’s been ingrained since childhood that the primary purpose of streets is to serve drivers. It’s why it’s legal to turn on red, why even city roads can be eight lanes wide, why cars are allowed to balloon in size — all of which are more convenient for a driver crossing a city but more dangerous for a pedestrian crossing a street.
“We have an approach to street design that does not truly prioritize the safety of everyone that uses our transportation network, especially those people who are most vulnerable to be struck or injured or killed by a vehicle,” said Steve Davis, assistant vice president at Smart Growth America, said in a recent webinar.
These car-centric mindsets, unsurprisingly, are hard to shake. Just look at what recently happened in New York City: Despite the obvious benefits of the city’s congestion pricing — which would’ve charged cars to enter Lower Manhattan during peak hours and funneled billions of dollars to the city’s subway system — most voters were against it.
As to not alienate all my readers who drive every day, I want to emphasize that drivers are not solely at fault here. The thing is, most cities keep building wider streets, which send drivers cues that these roads are built for speed. In other words, through our road designs we have made dangerous behavior easy and safe behavior difficult.
My point today, then, is to not simply acknowledge the power of our country’s car-centric mindset, shaped greatly by our car-centric infrastructure; it’s to determine what can change such a mindset.
We already know that the climate argument against cars by itself largely fails to break through to a general public used to the convenience of driving. But maybe a public safety argument can.
We may not all want to change our roads to “save the Planet,” but a lot of us, given the opportunity, would change them to save our neighbor. For that we’ll need safer, and greener, streets.