The writing portion of this book was completed in early February 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States. In other words, it was written in what people have already started referring to as the Before. The publishing process is such that there is about a six-month lag between the completion of writing and the first sale, so I want to briefly address this consciousness-altering event that took place in between.
Though the pandemic will likely impact the problem of pedestrian deaths in many ways, at least at the onset of the crisis, it is difficult to predict the full extent. As a result of the reduction in commuting trips and leisure car trips, I would expect the number of pedestrian deaths will almost certainly decline dramatically this year. If we have a recession, which seems assured, that may be true for a longer period. However, mass quarantine has reduced congestion and increased speeding in many crowded metro areas, just as more people are out walking and biking, producing potentially dangerous conditions.
One thing that is all but assured right now is that this pandemic will bring Americans much closer to death and force us to consider some of the ethical trade-offs we make when it comes to the protection of human life. Early in the crisis, many right-wing figures, including President Trump, used traffic deaths—some 37,000 annually—to make the case that some amount of loss of life is an acceptable price to pay for a strong economy. (In the case of the pandemic, we’re talking truly staggering figures.) It was a bad analogy in a lot of ways, but it helped emphasize the strange tolerance we have in our culture for traffic deaths and how they can desensitize us to other forms of cruelty and injustice.
It is also worth noting that while a bad economy may hide them, it won’t fix the problems addressed in the book. Before the global pandemic, we had settled into a “new normal” where pedestrian deaths were consistently about 50% higher than they had been a generation before. So without a change in some of the contributing factors (vehicle styles and weights, engineering conventions, demographic trends), when the economy rebounds, I would expect to see the same pattern emerge. Without addressing them we will see perhaps tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths over the next decade or two.
At this point we can only hope that the devastation from this illness will be limited and we will emerge with a renewed sense of care for our fellow citizens and their health and well-being. This book, I hope can help planners and overlapping disciplines put the values of care, empathy, and caution over habit and convenience to save lives in the same way that we are taking on this terrible global crisis.
—March 2020