Longtime Streetsblog USA editor Angie Schmitt was in Seattle last week to talk about the pedestrian safety crisis. Schmitt stepped down from her Streetsblog position in September to finish a book on the subject due out in August 2020. She and Anna Zivarts, director of Rooted in Rights, led a discussion at Peddler Brewing hosted by local pedestrian advocacy group Feet First.

I caught up with Schmitt just before the talk to hear more about her research. The Cleveland-based author had just been in Portland to do a similar talk at the invitation of Portland State University, who named her an endowed speaker. (Bike Portland has a great summary of her talk as well.) There really hasn’t been many books or academic research done on the pedestrian safety crisis in America even as the crisis gets markedly worse. Pedestrian deaths are up statewide and in nearly every jurisdiction across the country. 

Some smaller publications–and I would include The Urbanist and Streetsblog in that–do talk about street safety, but it can feel like yelling into the void as far as what the agenda is on the regional, state, and federal level. Folks like House Transportation Chair Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) would rather jump on the next fad–whether autonomous vehicles or hyperloops–than wade into street fights and safety campaigns. We are still a suburban nation more interested in expanding highways than investing in infrastructure for people walking, rolling, biking, and riding transit.

What Schmitt had to say really made me excited for her book to drop. You should be able to pre-order her book (which is being published by Island Press) in July. To track her progress and traffic safety takes, you can follow her on Twitter @schmangee.

Ideas like banning sport utility vehicles (SUVs) or pedestrianizing streets don’t seem so far-fetched after you hear the scale of the problem we face and the corruption under-girding it all. At the very least, the case is clear that much more research on pedestrian safety is needed. Cars have claimed much of our cities and our lives. Automobiles have taken so much from us that we haven’t been able to document it all. In fact, society trains us not to see it. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Below, lightly edited for brevity, is what Angie Schmitt had to say in our interview.

Why is there a pedestrian safety crisis?

What I’m going to try to do with the book–and the first draft is pretty close to being done–is speak to this question of why are so many additional pedestrians being killed than just a few years ago. I don’t think there’s one explanation. I just came from Portland where I spoke at the university and showed this graph which shows this real skyrocketing of pedestrian deaths beginning around 2009. People just want to guess: what’s the cause? Obviously, everyone is curious about it.

A lot of people maybe think smartphones or distraction. You can tie the rise of the iPhone to around that time. But I don’t think it’s any one thing. I think there’s a combination of trends that are underway and some of them have been underway for longer than 10 years. When the recession hit, there was a decline in driving that could have hidden that for a while.

One that I talk about a lot is the rise of SUVs. Cars are getting bigger. Cars are more powerful. They’re more likely to kill pedestrians. Not only are more pedestrians getting struck by cars, but when they do get struck it’s more likely to be fatal. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) did some research on this that’s really important. Some of the other people who have investigated this like the Detroit Free Press have sort of arrived at the same opinion. They basically found that when you look at what’s happening now versus years ago when pedestrian deaths were lower: more pedestrians are getting struck, but collisions are 29% more deadly.

As for the collisions that are happening, it could be one of two things: either they’re at higher speeds or they’re happening with heavier vehicles. There’s really strong data that the federal government tracks–one of the things they track really well is when there’s fatalities what type of vehicle it was. So we can look at the data really clearly and make the connection to SUVs. So there’s really been this real explosion in growth in SUVs since we came out of the recession.