Chapter 1 The Geography of Risk

Saa’mir Williams was just seven months old when his mother pushed him in a stroller to the corner of Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia the night of July 9, 2013, and paused to look for an opening in traffic.

Saa’mir was a doted-on baby brother, the youngest of four sons to Samara Banks, a twenty-seven-year-old daycare teacher. That night, the whole family was together, waiting at the curb, bound for their apartment across the street in the Feltonville neighborhood. The oldest boy, Saa’yon Griffin, was just five years old.

They were headed home from a party at a relative’s house nearby that Saturday night at the height of summer. It was close to 10 p.m. There had been a water fight at the party, and everyone was tired and happy as they approached the road.

To live near Roosevelt Boulevard, Philadelphia’s most notorious street, is to live in the shadow of a serial killer, however. Every year, an average of twelve people die along Roosevelt’s fifteen-mile-long passage through the city.

Standing on the side of its roaring twelve lanes, it is easy to see why. The boulevard is a jumble of access roads and turn lanes. It stretches about three hundred feet across, about the length of a football field. Roosevelt would take well over one minute for a fit, younger man walking at an average speed to cross. That is a long time to be exposed to traffic traveling near the posted speed limit: 45.1

For Philadelphians living nearby, a high-stakes game of Frogger stands between them and their work or the things they need every day. Roosevelt has every kind of risk factor that makes a street deadly for pedestrians.

As the Banks family made their way home that July 2013 night, two men—Khusen Akhmedov, age twenty-three, and Ahmen Holloman, thirty2—were speeding down Roosevelt, one man driving an Audi and the other a souped-up Honda. The pair had been drag racing for miles, weaving in and out of lanes as fast as 79 miles per hour.

Witnesses would later testify that they heard a loud boom. “They saw stuff in the air,” said Latanya Byrd, Samara Banks’s aunt. “They thought it was debris. They had no idea.”3

When Banks and her sons were struck, the cars were going as fast as 70 miles per hour. The force of the blow was catastrophic. The bodies of Banks, baby Saa’mir, almost-two-year-old Saa’sean, and four-year-old Saa’deem were thrown as far as 210 feet, according to reports.4

Shortly after the crash, Byrd remembers getting a call from a cousin. “I got to the scene and I just seen cars blocking off the road,” she said. “My husband and I couldn’t get through. Me and my daughter just ran toward wherever it was. They would not let us get to her. They covered her up.”5

The boys lived long enough to be transported to the hospital. After that, the family was never allowed to see Samara or her three youngest boys again. Their faces and bodies were too badly disfigured. “To identify them, they just took a picture, maybe a partial of their face,” said Byrd.6

Saa’yon, five years old at the time, was the only survivor. Akhmedov, an ambulance driver, was charged and convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to seventeen to thirty-four years in prison.7 The sentence—but not the conviction—was overturned on appeal in 2017, however.8

This notorious crash—the near annihilation of a whole family, three of them children under age five—was a galvanizing case in Philadelphia, but it was just the tip of the iceberg in many ways. Roosevelt Boulevard sees about seven hundred total crashes annually. In 2018, it was the site of an astronomical twenty-one deaths—about one in five of the traffic fatalities that occurred within the city of Philadelphia.9

Pedestrian deaths are not random. They happen in geographic clusters, at intersections, and they happen along radiant lines—on thoroughfares like Roosevelt Boulevard.

In the planning industry, these kinds of roads are called suburban arterials: wide, high-speed roads that have a lot of commercial and residential destinations that people want to access on foot or wheelchair. In the United States, a majority of pedestrian fatalities—52 percent—occur on these kinds of roads, according to Smart Growth America.10

In Denver, For another example, 50 percent of all traffic fatalities occur on twenty-seven corridors, or 5 percent of the street network.11 In Albuquerque, the story is much the same, with 64 percent of traffic fatalities occurring on 7 percent of the city’s roads.12 Planners call this kind of cluster a high-crash network. Almost every city has at least one road like Roosevelt.

For example, in Rockford, Illinois, just three roads account for 40 percent of all pedestrian crashes, and one road accounts for almost one-fourth of them.13

Pedestrian deaths, in other words, are a design problem. Certain streets are designed to kill.

“If you map out where those deaths are happening, they’re not for the most part in downtowns or neighborhoods,” said Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. “They’re on these roads that were never intended for people to walk on.”14

After her niece’s death, Latanya Byrd became an advocate for safer streets in Philadelphia. She joined with other Philadelphians who lost family members to car crashes and helped found a group called Families for Safe Streets Greater Philadelphia (FSSGP) to advocate for safety improvements. Together they lobbied for three years in Harrisburg, the state capital, and at home in Philadelphia to add automated speed cameras on Roosevelt. Speed cameras have been shown to reduce fatalities as much as 55 percent in cities like New York15 and might have prevented the racing incident that killed most of Banks’s young family.

After the years-long campaign, including testimony from Byrd in Harrisburg, Families for Safe Streets finally prevailed, winning special permission to install a limited number of speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard only. The first ones went live in late 2019.16

Philadelphia has long-term plans for more dramatic changes to Roosevelt, but that street will be tricky and expensive to change because it has so many driveways and lanes. In the meantime, a traffic light with bright lighting was added where Banks and her boys were killed. Philadelphia even renamed the passage “Banks Way.”

“Gaps” in the Infrastructure

The Roosevelt Boulevard of Rockford, Illinois, is called State Street. In 2018, Michael Smith, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, conducted a study to find out why this five-lane federal highway was so deadly. Smith installed cameras along key intersections and recorded pedestrian behavior. He found that many pedestrians were “breaking the rules,” but it turned out that in a lot of locations, that behavior had a rational explanation: the infrastructure was hostile.

State Street serves as an important commercial corridor for the region, but its land use is suburban. Pedestrians have to navigate a collision course of commercial driveways and parking lots to report for their shift, grab a burger, or buy a bag of diapers. Sidewalks are intermittent, beginning and ending at random points. The traffic signals on State Street in the area Smith examined do not even have walk signals. And bus stops were mostly just a pole in the ground.17

Smith’s video footage showed that pedestrians were adapting their behavior to the environment. In one video, a man in a wheelchair is seen rolling out to the intersection of Longwood and State. He reaches the curb and then turns around, rolls off into a gas station driveway, and then rolls into the street. For a few moments he rolls right along the curb in the street, mixing with car traffic, before turning the corner and rolling up to the intersection again.

Smith saw wheelchair users perform this same maneuver over and over again. He noted that there is an affordable senior housing complex near the intersection, but there is no curb ramp at the intersection that could accommodate wheelchairs.

Again and again on State Street, Smith found that the infrastructure was failing people who were vulnerable. The situation was similar at bus stops, where pedestrians were put in a dangerous position by the lack of amenities. Rather than stand on the side of the road next to a pole in the grass in the rain or the hot sun without a place to sit, for example, bus riders would wait under an awning of a nearby business. “And then the moment a bus would come, you’d see a mid-block crossing, running across the street,” Smith said in 2018.18 Many bus riders in Rockford rely on buses that come just once an hour, which adds to the pressure to dash across the busy street to avoid missing their connection.

Thanks in part to these conditions, State Street sees only about one hundred pedestrians a day, and the people who walk along the street are not powerful politically. Rather, they are struggling to survive on the margins of a transportation system not designed with them in mind. Some engineers might even argue that such a small number is not worth the trouble of accommodating.

But ignoring the needs of these pedestrians turns out to be very dangerous. “When you take 100 persons a day, 365 days a year you get some statistical likelihood that there’s going to be an accident,” Smith said.19

There is a lot that can be done to repair roads like Roosevelt and State, however.

New York City’s “Boulevard of Death”

Not too long ago, New York City’s Roosevelt Boulevard equivalent—Queens Boulevard—was known locally as the Boulevard of Death. Between 1990 and 2014, 189 people—predominately pedestrians—were killed on this ten-lane raceway through some of the most densely populated, most transit-dependent neighborhoods in the United States.

But in 2014, city officials overhauled the road. They painted the outside lane green and added plastic bollards—a series of evenly spaced posts—creating a protected bike lane. On the curbside, they added a red-painted lane reserved for city buses. The redesign was cheap—according to the New York Times, the cost was just $4 million20—but it was remarkably effective. There was not a single traffic fatality on the road following the redesign until 2018.21

To reduce pedestrian deaths, roads like Queens Boulevard—and State Street and Roosevelt Boulevard—need to be fixed. The kinds of issues Smith documented—the dangerous gaps in the pedestrian infrastructure—need to be resolved, and vehicle speeds in areas where pedestrians are present need to be slowed down.

The urgency of repairing the nation’s roads is only increasing as poverty in the United States increasingly shifts to where suburban arterials get their name.

A Suburban Problem

Tara Boulevard in Clayton County, Georgia, was named for the fictional Tara Plantation in the movie Gone with the Wind. The 1939 classic was filmed in part in Clayton County, south of Atlanta. At the time, it was rural farmlands, a picturesque setting for a period piece about the antebellum South.

This part of Georgia remained mostly rural farmland until the 1970s. Since then, however, wave after wave of suburban growth has overwhelmed its 143 square miles.

Only eleven thousand people lived in Clayton County in 1940.22 Today’s population is more than two hundred times as large. Atlanta’s notorious urban sprawl has long since leap-frogged past Clayton County altogether, toward Henry and Fayette Counties to the south. Clayton County is now a suburban county. But the face of the suburbs is changing, and in many ways, the old infrastructure is ill-suited to this new era.

Clayton County saw its first big boom in the mid-1970s, as blue-collar white workers flooded into the county, fleeing desegregation orders in the Atlanta public schools. Growing bedroom communities like Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett Counties made little to no accommodation for pedestrians. This period of suburban growth coincided with the height of the highway era in the United States. The Interstate Highway System, started under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, was well under way, and it had opened vast swaths of formerly rural lands to suburban development.

During this era, Clayton, like Atlanta’s other suburban counties, was resistant to joining Atlanta’s transit system, MARTA (the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority). In 1965 and 1971, Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton Counties, led in some cases by openly segregationist political leaders, all voted against joining MARTA. Atlanta magazine later called those decisions “referendums on race” and the point where “it all went wrong” for Atlanta.23 As a result, Atlanta’s suburban “collar counties” that surround Atlanta’s urban counties were designed almost exclusively for drivers.

Despite their early efforts at segregation, counties like Clayton have experienced dramatic racial change. The first waves of migration began when the Atlanta Housing Authority began shuttering high-rise public housing projects in the 1990s. Spurred on by the federal HOPE VI housing program, which encouraged the creation of mixed-income housing, public housing in Atlanta was decimated, and only a small portion of those units were replaced by mixed-income housing.

“The lack of affordable housing in more walkable areas pushed a lot of people to more suburban areas along streets that were designed for just cars,” said Sally Flocks, founder of PEDS (Pedestrians Educating Drivers on Safety), an Atlanta-based pedestrian advocacy group.24

In addition to migrants from Atlanta, these collar counties have seen successive waves of highly diverse migration from other parts of the United States, including the Rust Belt, since the 1970s. By 2010, the notion of white suburbs and a black inner city was completely outdated. That year, 87 percent of Atlanta’s black population lived in the suburbs (compared with just 47 percent in 1980).25

Perhaps no suburban county typified that change better than Clayton County. By 2018, Clayton County was 69 percent black.26 It had been 75 percent white just a generation before in 1990.

“During the ’90s, Clayton County goes from a suburb that’s white and becomes a place where many black people move to for the ideal suburban life,” said King Williams, an Atlanta-based writer and documentary filmmaker whose work explores gentrification in Atlanta, “but also many who are poor as well.”

Those who moved to Clayton County in later waves of growth were less likely than their predecessors to have a car. Today, about 22 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line.27

Now it is suburban counties like Clayton, Gwinnett, and Cobb where pedestrians are increasingly getting killed, said Flocks.28 The county has been held up by national news outlets as an example of the difficulties presented by the suburbanization of poverty.

“This place isn’t meant for poor people,” said Lauren Scott, a twenty-eight-year-old single mother and Clayton County resident who was featured in a 2015 Washington Post article.29 (The Post followed her transit and walking commute to a job interview; It took four hours round trip.)

Tara Boulevard is now one of the most dangerous roads in Georgia. The posted speed limit is 55 miles per hour. The street serves three bus routes, yet it lacks very basic safety infrastructure such as streetlights and sidewalks. Clayton County pedestrians have worn dirt paths in the grass up and down Tara Boulevard.

Tara Boulevard was never designed to accommodate large numbers of pedestrians; it was designed to be a rural highway, and the mismatch is deadly. Seven people were killed on Tara Boulevard between 2011 and 2015. Another seventeen were seriously injured.

In 2018, the Georgia Department of Transportation named Tara Boulevard one of its “focus corridors,” which makes it eligible to receive modest additional resources to address safety problems.30 Meanwhile, the Clayton County Police Department’s solution has been to ticket pedestrians.31

Suburban commercial development norms—drive-throughs, large street-facing parking lots with no pedestrian walkways—add to the problem. A 2017 study by the Center for Transportation Research at the University of South Florida found that the presence of a Walmart store, Family Dollar, or fast-food restaurant significantly increased the odds of a pedestrian crash. A low-income census tract with fifteen hundred residents could expect to have 1.8 more pedestrian crashes over a four-year period if it contained a Walmart and an additional 0.68 crash if it contained a fast-food restaurant like McDonald’s or Taco Bell.32

Suburban governments, especially lower-income ones, are building infrastructure to accommodate these kinds of businesses or are permitting the businesses to build it themselves, without providing any safe access for people on foot—and that gets people killed.

Charles T. Brown, a research specialist at Rutgers University whose work focuses on bicycle and pedestrian issues (and author of the foreword of this book), said that historic displacement (shuttering of public housing) and contemporary displacement (gentrification) have produced a dangerous situation. “You take a population that was wholly reliant on transit and you take them to a suburban location that lacks transit,” said Brown. “Then they’re walking on streets that don’t have the infrastructure to support them, and that’s high-speed roads with SUVs.

“If you wanna find out where death happens,” he continued, “look at where the speed is.”33

Speed

Chief among the risk factors for pedestrians, according to Leah Shahum, director of the Vision Zero Network, a group that supports cities trying to improve traffic safety, are design features that promote speed. Wide travel lanes, shoulders free of obstacles, and generous turning radii all promote speed. And speed and pedestrians are a dangerous combination.34

“There’s a level of physical impact that our bodies can survive and there’s a level that we cannot,” Shahum said in a 2018 press briefing.35 “We know that when crashes happen . . . if the speeds are lower and manageable that folks are going to be able to walk away from that.”

Speed is perhaps the most crucial factor that will determine whether a pedestrian will walk away from a crash unscathed or will be killed. And critically, the force of the blow rises exponentially as speeds increase. For a pedestrian struck at less than 20 miles per hour, risk of death is less than 5 percent, according to a 2011 study by the AAA Foundation, but the risk rises fast; 65 percent of pedestrians struck at 40 miles per hour or more will be killed.36 At 60 miles per hour, the force of the blow is like falling off a twelve-story building.37

“Small differences in speed produce huge differences in the amount of raw force unleashed in a crash,” said Neil Arason, a Canadian traffic expert, in his 2015 book, No Accident. “Doubling the speed leads to four times the kinetic energy.”38

The Sun Belt

Speed and geography in the United States are linked. You find it at the epicenter of the pedestrian safety crisis in the United States: the Sun Belt, from the Carolinas to Southern California. Of the top twenty most dangerous metropolitan areas for pedestrians ranked by Smart Growth America in 2019, all but one—Detroit—were in the South or Southwest.39 Florida in particular is a horror show for pedestrians, with nine of the top twenty most dangerous metropolitan areas, including all six of the worst-rated ones.

Since the 1940s, cars have been the dominant organizing principle in neighborhood and city planning in the United States. Huge portions of every US metro area have been designed to prioritize driving speed over pedestrian safety.

But in the Northeast and some parts of the Midwest, cities like Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Boston came of age during the streetcar era or earlier. These precar neighborhoods have narrower streets than newer cities and buildings that are oriented toward them. As a result, they are inherently safer for pedestrians.

That is not the case for cities like Fort Myers, Florida, and many of the other cities topping Smart Growth America’s list. A good rule of thumb is that if a city or state developed after the invention of air conditioning, it is likely to be a dangerous place to walk. Texas and Georgia, for example, have more than twice as many per capita pedestrian fatalities as Massachusetts, even though people walk at much higher rates in Boston than in Houston.40

“In most of these states, their built environments were constructed with Eisenhower’s Interstate Highways System as the model,” said Atherton of the National Complete Streets Coalition.41

Geoff Boeing, professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California, analyzed the street networks across the United States and found different patterns based on the “era” an area was developed.42 Boeing found that places that developed prior to 1940—central Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, and the central cores of small towns and big cities alike across the country—have a high level of what Boeing calls “griddedness.” In other words, those places had a tight network of streets that were highly connected to one another, forming a rough grid with lots of right angles and four-way intersections. A walkable, fine-grained street network—the traditional street grid—is very important for making walking useful and comfortable for pedestrians. Portland, Oregon, is famous for having a very “griddy” network of blocks. Boeing also found that griddedness helps predict lower car ownership, even when controlling for income, geographic terrain, and commute length.

Between 1940 and 2000, however, street grids fell out of style. Communities that were built during this period were also more likely to have streets that wound like outstretched fingers into cul-de-sacs and fed into megablocks of dangerous suburban arterials. (Since 2000, Boeing reported, in a bit of hopeful news, the trend away from grids has reversed to a large extent.)43

This pattern—griddy versus winding streets and the time frames at which they were dominant—illustrates why Florida is so dangerous for pedestrians. The overwhelming majority of Florida’s growth took place during the era where roads were extremely hostile to pedestrians. In 1940, Florida had just 1.9 million residents; today, it has 21.6 million people. By comparison, Pennsylvania (population 13 million today) has added just 3 million people since 1940.44

Regional Culture

The transportation culture in many Sun Belt cities compounds an already difficult situation. When there are few people walking in the first place and those who walk are very marginalized, building political support for changes that might benefit people who walk, wheel, or take transit is a tough political battle.

In Phoenix, for example, almost one hundred people are killed while walking every year. In May 2018, however, almost every member of the city’s Complete Streets Advisory Board, a group of volunteers appointed to make recommendations to address the problem, resigned en masse, saying that their work was “maligned by developer lobbyists, disrespected by City staff, and dismissed by ill-prepared political bodies.”45 The following year, a Vision Zero plan developed by city staff that would have recommended actions shown to reduce the bloodshed—such as adding bike lanes on major thoroughfares—was rejected by the Phoenix City Council.46

The opposition to the plan was led by city councilman Sal DiCiccio, who told his nineteen thousand Facebook followers, in all caps, that Vision Zero would “DOUBLE YOUR TRIP TIMES AROUND TOWN—AND LIKELY YOUR TAXES.”47

Meanwhile, Atherton said that classism and racism help explain the lack of concern. “We have the solutions. We actually have the funding; we’re just not spending it well,” Atherton said. “We just don’t have the political will.”48

That lack of political will, especially in cities like Phoenix, has a lot to do with who is being killed.