Walking Is Increasingly Deadly, and Not Because People Are on Their Phones
In 2018, 6,283 people died in the U.S. while walking or using a mobility device, a number not seen since the mid-1990s | Jack Berman/Getty Images
A new book on the pedestrian-death crisis busts myths and offers solutions. Over the past decade, the number of pedestrian deaths in the U.S. has increased by 50 percent, even as other roadway deaths have decreased. When Angie Schmitt would tell people she was writing a book about the reason why, they?d always claim to know the answer.
?Cell phones,? says Schmitt. ?It?s always cell phones.?
That?s why the entire first section of Schmitt?s new book, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, walks through the potential causes for the dramatic increase one by one. She rigorously myth-busts the ?distracted pedestrian? trope: More people walking or using mobility devices are killed at night and while crossing mid-block, where they are unlikely to be obliviously scrolling through Instagram. (Phones ? in the hands of drivers ? probably do play a role, she says, but do not alone explain it, since smartphone adoption has increased in other countries over the past ten years without a marked increase in deaths.) Instead, it?s a convergence of trends: Cars are getting bigger, drivers are going faster, roads are getting wider, and more people are moving to transit-lacking suburbs and Sun Belt cities. But as Schmitt, a former editor at Streetsblog, clearly argues, while the flaws of vehicle des...
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