Earlier the same day, I was crossing 12th Avenue when a northbound driver suddenly decided to turn right. Happily she saw me before she hit me, and to her credit she looked sheepish. Besides that one day, in the past few weeks cars or trucks have come way too close to me for comfort on 1st Avenue (I scrambled out of the way), 2nd Avenue (braked so hard on my bicycle I almost fell off), and 8th Avenue (jumped back). It did not seem that any of those drivers saw me at all.
And this is in a state rated by the NHTSA as the least deadly for pedestrians in the last five years (Dangerous By Design 2022, pp. 51-52)!
So you can imagine I fail to see the humor in this ad proclaiming the brake-assist feature of the 2022 Volkswagen Atlas that keeps popping up online.
The title of the ad is "Those Guys," but it might as well be "Pedestrians are Idiots Who Deserve Death." The mangy fellow who will live to see another day thanks to the sponsor's product not only crosses the street oblivious to traffic, when the SUV brakes he indignantly indicates that he was ON THE PHONE! "What an a##hole!" chortled one commenter.
Not only is this not funny to those of us who daily deal with SUV drivers who don't see us, it promotes a hateful stereotype I hear all the time: conscientious law-abiding drivers who must deal with a world filled with reckless, lawless cyclists and pedestrians. (See also Furchtgott-Roth 2022.) Yeah, VW is not only culture warring here, it's taking the side of the powerful. It's stoking the flame of resentment at a time when road deaths of pedestrians (including wheelchair users) and cyclists have been steeply climbing for a decade. 2020 saw 6700 pedestrians killed on streets and roads, with considerably more (7485) estimated for 2021 (GHSA 2021).
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| Source: Cogan 2022b. Used without permission. |
Like most stereotypes, this one is partly true but mostly false. There are aggressive people using all forms of transportation, and everyone makes mistakes--including, alas, me. But crashes and traffic deaths are not random events. The new edition of Smart Growth America's annual report, Dangerous By Design 2022, takes a deep dive into the factors in the rising numbers of pedestrian deaths. So does Angie Schmitt, in her impressive book Right of Way [Island, 2020]. Pedestrian deaths are associated with place, socio-economic status, and vehicle size.
In 2020, the vast majority (60 percent) of the 39,000 road deaths occurred on one type of motorway, for which Chuck Marohn coined the term stroad: wide lanes and high vehicle speeds, as well as substantial built environment with a lot of cross-traffic. The higher vehicle speeds make conflicts harder to anticipate, and resulting crashes more deadly (Dangerous By Design 2022, pp. 6-8). Because of the way we've built for most of the last 75 years, the United States is deadlier than Canada or much of Europe (Zipper 2022).
Within the U.S., pedestrian deaths are overrepresented in those metropolitan areas that have grown the most since World War II, because that's when stroads became widely utilized. Those areas are in the southwest and southeast; the 20 most dangerous metros are arranged along a U-shaped line from Stockton, California (9th deadliest) to Greenville, South Carolina (17th) (Dangerous by Design, p. 26). Within those metros, Researchers Robert James Schneider and colleagues found 60 hotspots of pedestrian deaths over the years 2001-16, with by far the leader being US19 near Tampa, Florida (Cogan 2022b). These areas also showed the biggest increases in pedestrian death rates during the coronavirus pandemic, as auto traffic diminished and speeds increased (Dangerous by Design, p. 42).
It follows from where the deadliest roads are, the poor and BIPOC neighborhoods through which they were driven, and who would be walking on them, that the pedestrians killed are predominantly nonwhite, low-income, and older adults (Schmitt 2012, Dangerous by Design pp. 33-36).
Disastrous stroads have existed for decades. So why the recent surge in pedestrian deaths? For that we need to look at trends in vehicle design. Mike McGinn of America Walks notes (Dangerous by Design, pp. 24-25) that SUVS and light trucks have in the last decade become taller and heavier. They hit pedestrians higher, and provide the driver with less visibility (cf. also Schmitt 2021, Davis 2021). A lot of this is attitude-driven: a sampling of ads for Ford, Hummer, and Jeep suggest they're built that way in part to project the power of the driver (cf. also Powell 2019). Vehicles are also equipped with ever more distracting technology.
The stereotype of the irresponsible pedestrian to which VW is pandering has several roots. In a dangerous world, it's some comfort to think those whose lives were cut short somehow had it coming, that we who behave responsibly are safe. Jessie Singer, author of There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster--Who Profits and Who Pays the Price [Simon & Schuster, 2022], told Marin Cogan of Vox:
Seemingly random horrors and tragedies are terrifying. As a result, victim blaming, or even perpetrator blaming, is a comfort because it's a way of feeling in control of an uncontrollable siutation.... The urge to blame victims is a way to say, "Not me, couldn't happen to me. I wouldn't have made those decisions." It gives us quite a bit of space from this thing that terrifies us. (Cogan 2022a)
There are additional factors at work. The vaster part of the U.S. is solidly auto-normative. Pedestrians, cyclists, and particularly wheelchair users must operate in a world that was built for motor vehicles. Everything that has been done to facilitate the movement of cars and trucks makes it difficult-to-impossible for everyone else. Also, speaking as someone who's been watching the culture wars for decades, the world is full of people who deal with difference by looking down on the other, and thinking the other would be better off they would just be more normal.
So VW and its fellow auto manufacturers are not only promoting a stereotype to sell products, they're encouraging hatred towards the other as an alternative to taking responsibility either for street safety or the environment. That's not funny. It's despicable. And dangerous.
By the way, the SUV in the VW ad brakes when the mangy pedestrian is directly in front of the car. The driver should have seen him crossing much earlier, and had plenty of time to brake without the assistance of fancy technology. What was he paying attention to, instead of what was in front of him on the road?
Maybe if you just read the title of this post you would expect me to talk about gun manufacturers. But while guns kill 30,000+ annually in the United States, motor vehicle crash deaths topped 40,000 in 2021. This is not to exonerate gun manufacturers, though. This week a House Oversight and Reform Committee investigation found assault weapons makers pitched their version of hate, fear and death to young men and racists, and reaped $1.7 billion-plus over ten years. The report cites examples like Palmetto State Armory and Daniel Defense offering a floral print similar to the Boogaloo Boys logo, Daniel Defense's catalogue picture featured a Valknot tattoo, and the infamous Bushmaster "man card" ad pictured above (Karni 2022). As with traffic deaths, the cost of corporate profits falls heaviest on the poor and nonwhites (Love and Vey 2019). State legislatures and courts have simply acquiesced to the corporations' political power.
America is the land of SUVs and automatic guns. The rest of us just live here.
SEE ALSO:
"Summer Reading from Island Press," 8 June 2021 [includes review of Right of Way by Angie Schmitt]
"Violence, Fear, Guns and Our Common Life," 7 December 2015
Ben Kaplan, "Mount Vernon Road is Dangerous by Design," 21 June 2021
Charles Marohn, "Do We Really Care About Children?" Strong Towns, 12 September 2016
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