When a motorist hits a pedestrian, who gets the blame?
The answer can vary, depending on the road and the neighborhood that road runs through.
Ohio State University geography professor Harvey Miller is a co-author of a recent study on the subject, which was recently published in the Journal of Transport and Land Use.
Matthew: The study looked at five years of traffic data for Columbus and Franklin County from 2015 to 2019. In that time, there were 2,757 pedestrian crashes in the county. Broadly speaking, what trends did you see?
Miller: Well, we were looking in particular not at the trends of injuries and fatalities from traffic crashes, but we really tried to explain who is assigned the blame or fault in the crash reports. In these crash reports, the responding officers say whether it's the driver, pedestrian or undetermined when a car strikes a pedestrian. We want to understand, are there any biases in this because of the rush to blame individuals for traffic crashes and fatalities, and not the broader systematic-built environment and the way we're designing streets.
Matthew: We'll get to some of the disparities you found in a moment. But a lot of this isn't all that surprising, right? In the areas with more pedestrian infrastructure, such as crosswalks, drivers were more likely to be the ones found at fault. So what, if anything, was surprising about the data?
Miller: Well, I actually think it is a bit surprising, because you think about it, it's a bit paradoxical: where there's more choices for pedestrians to cross the street, there's less blame assigned to pedestrians, but whether it's fewer choices for pedestrians to like cross streets, we tend to blame the pedestrians for doing something wrong. In fact, if there's more choices when a pedestrian is at fault, it should be glaringly obvious that they didn't fall on these choices. However, in these other environments, these big arterial roads where there's not many pedestrian crossings, some as much as a quarter to a third of a mile away from each other, we tend to blame the pedestrian for making a fairly desperate move when there's not any pedestrian infrastructure. So really what we're what we're looking at in this study is the fact that instead of looking at the individual, we need to look at the built environment, because that seems to explain where these crashes are and (where) fatalities are occurring.
Matthew: You note stark differences between downtown Columbus and the Hilltop and South Linden neighborhood, specifically. What sets these two apart?
Miller: These are neighborhoods where there's a lot of traffic, of course, a lot of car traffic, but there's not as many signalized crossings or marked pedestrian crossings. Some of them can be as much as 400m apart, which is quite a length. So if they say the infrastructure is working against the pedestrians in those neighborhoods, as opposed to a place like downtown Columbus, where there's lots of places to cross, and these are also areas where you see businesses, you see grocery stores, you see shops and things like that. What we're basically asking people to do is to instead of crossing the street—and this is particularly true when it comes to bus stops—people get off bus stops and are asked to take as much of a ten minute or half a mile detour to walk down to a signalized crossing, cross the street and come back to a place that's only a few hundred feet from where they got off the bus. Now, if with that type of lack of pedestrian infrastructure, combined with reasons why pedestrians would be there, it's understandable that after doing this repeatedly, you know, many times a day, you get off a bus and you want to cross the street, you want to go across the street, but if you have to walk a half mile the way you're going to go for it once in a while, and when you call for it, that's when bad things happen.
Matthew: What can be done in terms of road design to help lower the rates of pedestrian crashes in Columbus and beyond?
Miller: Well, first thing is that we have to take a more holistic understanding of why these crashes are occurring. So one of the suggestions we make in this paper is that we should be amending the crash reporting forms to include the built environment and the infrastructure around where the crash occurs. Where's the locus? Where's the closest signals are crossing? So instead of looking for individuals to blame, we need to look more systematically and holistically about the built environment, how they're contributing to these crashes and who ultimately is to blame.
