They are suddenly everywhere, like mushrooms after the rain: Walking at night with the right-of-way but with their heads down; occupying the intersection for just a couple seconds too long while answering a stray text message; wandering midblock into a suburban thoroughfare where the crosswalks are a mile apart and the cars zoom by at 40 mph. They are the recurring nightmare of every driver going a little too fast when it’s a little too dark out; their specter haunts local-news websites when there’s a fatal crash in the neighborhood and self-proclaimed “car guys” rush to the comments section to exonerate their own. They are, in short, the newest menace on American streets: the distracted pedestrian.
In the last year, local lawmakers across the nation have become convinced that smartphone-addled pedestrians are a pressing public-safety concern. Honolulu, a city where the weather is so perfect that everyone should naturally want to walk everywhere at all times, passed the nation’s first “distracted walking” law in July, which approves fines for pedestrians who look at a phone or other digital device while using a crosswalk. Next came San Mateo County, a suburban area south of San Francisco; similar laws are under consideration in Cleveland, Stamford, Ct., and the entire state of New Jersey. In early November, two Chicago aldermen proposed an ordinance to ban “distracted walking,” punishable by fines of up to $500. The aldermen, like most proponents of distracted-walking crackdowns, claimed that they were responding to an alarming spike in local traffic fatalities. (...)
It’s difficult, however, to see how distracted pedestrians bear any real responsibility for this trend. Most Americans drive, and the primary effect of what transportation planners call “windshield bias” is to always blame somebody else. (Even in New York, the mayor is an avid driver whose car-centric perspective has led him to take positions that would actively harm most of his constituents.) Everything we know from countries that have successfully reduced road deaths indicates that the most effective approach is to systematically redesign streets to prioritize safety over speed. The growing moral panic over being wired while walking takes none of this into account. Instead, Americans are increasingly being told that the solution is an arbitrary, punitive approach that has little evidence to back it up.
“Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians. (...)
If there were anything close to a “petextrian” epidemic, it would be a textbook example of a self-inflicted harm. (A collision between a driver and a careless pedestrian has never ended with the driver being killed.) More to the point, the evidence that rising traffic deaths are the direct result of distracted walking has never been anything but anecdotal. In July, the National Transportation Safety Board released a comprehensive study showing that motor-vehicle speed is the factor most heavily correlated with death or severe injury on the road. Tara Goddard, who teaches transportation engineering at Texas A&M, told me in an email, “I’ve seen studies looking at pedestrian distraction, both observation (in the real world) and using virtual reality. But neither of those observed or included, respectively, distracted drivers. Part of that is methodological, since it is much easier to observe pedestrian behavior than the behavior of someone in a car, and police reporting is currently very much dependent on the survivor getting to tell the story.” While acknowledging that pedestrians sometimes do things they shouldn’t, Goddard wrote, “When automotive companies are literally adding online shopping to the in-car tech, I don’t think this focus on pedestrians, which has no empirical basis that I’ve seen, is constructive.”
So what’s the motive force behind this new round of ped-shaming tactics? It’s an offstage, but rapidly looming, disruption of American car culture: the advent of the driverless car. (...)
Much about this future remains a mystery, but we do already know that compared to human drivers, autonomous vehicles will be very conservative and risk-averse. Computers, after all, are designed to follow rules. For almost a decade, Google has been testing driverless cars in California. During one test in 2009, the New York Times writes that the car “couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage—paralyzing Google’s robot.” Google cars have been rear-ended while stopping to yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian, and in 2015 one was pulled over in Silicon Valley for driving too slowly. Crashes between autonomous vehicles and human-driven cars have occurred, but in almost all cases, the human driver was found to be at fault.
In recent years, major car companies have joined Silicon Valley giants in developing and testing autonomous vehicles, but adapting the engineering marvel to our existing, hyper-individualist car culture remains a tricky task. In a November article in Wired, Aarian Marshall joked, “If the Silicon Valley motto is ‘move fast and break things,’ Detroit’s seems to be ‘move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.’” His experience in a GM driverless car in San Francisco was mixed: On one hand, Marshall says, “the whole thing felt very safe” and the car was exceedingly polite towards pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. On the other, cars “stop at the hint of danger, sometimes slamming on the brakes and throwing passengers forward in their seats.”
What this means is that AVs will rupture the unspoken contract between automakers and drivers. Currently, automakers simply make the machines; they’re conveniently able to profit off their creations and then wash their hands of responsibility if a vehicle’s actual operator does something stupid or dangerous. Meanwhile, pedestrians on car-choked city streets are kept timid and obedient by the very real threat of a driver striking and killing them at any time, with the law poised to take the side of the driver. (Even when drivers who kill pedestrians are found to be legally in the wrong, punishments are often minimal.) In other words: Take an aggressive, entitled jerk driving a souped-up BMW and replace him with a law-abiding computer. What happens next?
A recent paper by urban-planning professor Adam Millard-Ball uses game theory to outline three possible answers to this question. The first hypothetical outcome is “human drivers,” i.e., drivers choose to continue manually operating their cars because it affords them greater speed and flexibility. (It’s unclear whether insurers would even be willing to cover human drivers once a much safer alternative appears, but that’s another issue.) Millard-Ball’s second scenario is “regulatory response”; here, “laws are changed to reduce pedestrian priority . . . enforcement action against jaywalkers and similar violators is stepped up, and legislation specifies that an autonomous vehicle manufacturer is not liable for any collision where a pedestrian was unlawfully present in the roadway.” The third scenario speaks for itself: “pedestrian supremacy.”
The specter of a road system once more ruled by pedestrians seems all but unimaginable to anyone living outside a handful of city cores where pedestrians already dominate. Speculating on this future has mostly been done from the driver’s perspective; a typical article included phrases like “jaywalking paradise” and “gridlock hell.” The Drive, Time Magazine’s website devoted to cars and car culture, summarized Millard-Ball’s paperby worrying that “pedestrians could bully self-driving cars into gridlock.” Put another way: Pedestrians, long shunted to the margins of America’s transportation system and left to fend for themselves, would now be empowered to walk when and where they please, reclaiming their equal right to move about the city.
In the last year, local lawmakers across the nation have become convinced that smartphone-addled pedestrians are a pressing public-safety concern. Honolulu, a city where the weather is so perfect that everyone should naturally want to walk everywhere at all times, passed the nation’s first “distracted walking” law in July, which approves fines for pedestrians who look at a phone or other digital device while using a crosswalk. Next came San Mateo County, a suburban area south of San Francisco; similar laws are under consideration in Cleveland, Stamford, Ct., and the entire state of New Jersey. In early November, two Chicago aldermen proposed an ordinance to ban “distracted walking,” punishable by fines of up to $500. The aldermen, like most proponents of distracted-walking crackdowns, claimed that they were responding to an alarming spike in local traffic fatalities. (...)It’s difficult, however, to see how distracted pedestrians bear any real responsibility for this trend. Most Americans drive, and the primary effect of what transportation planners call “windshield bias” is to always blame somebody else. (Even in New York, the mayor is an avid driver whose car-centric perspective has led him to take positions that would actively harm most of his constituents.) Everything we know from countries that have successfully reduced road deaths indicates that the most effective approach is to systematically redesign streets to prioritize safety over speed. The growing moral panic over being wired while walking takes none of this into account. Instead, Americans are increasingly being told that the solution is an arbitrary, punitive approach that has little evidence to back it up.
“Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians. (...)
***
The phantom menace of the “distracted pedestrian” is just an updated version of the same tactic. In bringing it to pass, local and state lawmakers are once again getting an assist from one of the world’s most storied car companies. The 2017 Ford Fusion included a new feature called Pre-Collision Assist, which uses a combination of radar and cameras to scan the roadway and identify objects blocking it. Fair enough—except that Ford is advertising Pre-Collision Assist as a way to defend the driver against “petextrians.” The company website states, “By identifying the problem that petextrians pose to drivers and creating a new technology to combat and prevent this issue, we have reaffirmed our commitment to making the roads safer for everyone.” A company engineer helpfully added, “We were startled to see how oblivious people could be of a 4,000-pound car coming toward them.” In a battle between one person wearing clothing and shoe-leather and another wearing a speeding, combustible two-ton metal machine, Ford wants us to believe that the former is the real threat.If there were anything close to a “petextrian” epidemic, it would be a textbook example of a self-inflicted harm. (A collision between a driver and a careless pedestrian has never ended with the driver being killed.) More to the point, the evidence that rising traffic deaths are the direct result of distracted walking has never been anything but anecdotal. In July, the National Transportation Safety Board released a comprehensive study showing that motor-vehicle speed is the factor most heavily correlated with death or severe injury on the road. Tara Goddard, who teaches transportation engineering at Texas A&M, told me in an email, “I’ve seen studies looking at pedestrian distraction, both observation (in the real world) and using virtual reality. But neither of those observed or included, respectively, distracted drivers. Part of that is methodological, since it is much easier to observe pedestrian behavior than the behavior of someone in a car, and police reporting is currently very much dependent on the survivor getting to tell the story.” While acknowledging that pedestrians sometimes do things they shouldn’t, Goddard wrote, “When automotive companies are literally adding online shopping to the in-car tech, I don’t think this focus on pedestrians, which has no empirical basis that I’ve seen, is constructive.”
So what’s the motive force behind this new round of ped-shaming tactics? It’s an offstage, but rapidly looming, disruption of American car culture: the advent of the driverless car. (...)
Much about this future remains a mystery, but we do already know that compared to human drivers, autonomous vehicles will be very conservative and risk-averse. Computers, after all, are designed to follow rules. For almost a decade, Google has been testing driverless cars in California. During one test in 2009, the New York Times writes that the car “couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage—paralyzing Google’s robot.” Google cars have been rear-ended while stopping to yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian, and in 2015 one was pulled over in Silicon Valley for driving too slowly. Crashes between autonomous vehicles and human-driven cars have occurred, but in almost all cases, the human driver was found to be at fault.
In recent years, major car companies have joined Silicon Valley giants in developing and testing autonomous vehicles, but adapting the engineering marvel to our existing, hyper-individualist car culture remains a tricky task. In a November article in Wired, Aarian Marshall joked, “If the Silicon Valley motto is ‘move fast and break things,’ Detroit’s seems to be ‘move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.’” His experience in a GM driverless car in San Francisco was mixed: On one hand, Marshall says, “the whole thing felt very safe” and the car was exceedingly polite towards pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. On the other, cars “stop at the hint of danger, sometimes slamming on the brakes and throwing passengers forward in their seats.”
What this means is that AVs will rupture the unspoken contract between automakers and drivers. Currently, automakers simply make the machines; they’re conveniently able to profit off their creations and then wash their hands of responsibility if a vehicle’s actual operator does something stupid or dangerous. Meanwhile, pedestrians on car-choked city streets are kept timid and obedient by the very real threat of a driver striking and killing them at any time, with the law poised to take the side of the driver. (Even when drivers who kill pedestrians are found to be legally in the wrong, punishments are often minimal.) In other words: Take an aggressive, entitled jerk driving a souped-up BMW and replace him with a law-abiding computer. What happens next?
A recent paper by urban-planning professor Adam Millard-Ball uses game theory to outline three possible answers to this question. The first hypothetical outcome is “human drivers,” i.e., drivers choose to continue manually operating their cars because it affords them greater speed and flexibility. (It’s unclear whether insurers would even be willing to cover human drivers once a much safer alternative appears, but that’s another issue.) Millard-Ball’s second scenario is “regulatory response”; here, “laws are changed to reduce pedestrian priority . . . enforcement action against jaywalkers and similar violators is stepped up, and legislation specifies that an autonomous vehicle manufacturer is not liable for any collision where a pedestrian was unlawfully present in the roadway.” The third scenario speaks for itself: “pedestrian supremacy.”
The specter of a road system once more ruled by pedestrians seems all but unimaginable to anyone living outside a handful of city cores where pedestrians already dominate. Speculating on this future has mostly been done from the driver’s perspective; a typical article included phrases like “jaywalking paradise” and “gridlock hell.” The Drive, Time Magazine’s website devoted to cars and car culture, summarized Millard-Ball’s paperby worrying that “pedestrians could bully self-driving cars into gridlock.” Put another way: Pedestrians, long shunted to the margins of America’s transportation system and left to fend for themselves, would now be empowered to walk when and where they please, reclaiming their equal right to move about the city.
