Franklin School (1869) with a tiny Benjamin Franklin on the roof (now Planet Word, 925 13th St NW)
Washington, D.C. is a strange place, being at once a town with residents and businesses and such, a museum of national history, and a fortress around working government buildings. Last weekend, in town for a Washington Term advisors meeting, I experienced all three. Walking from my hotel on the southwest side to the program headquarters on the northeast side, I passed through the mostly-empty Capitol grounds, dotted with security guards and barricades.
But on to more inspiring matters!
Churches
One feature of residential Washington that is both historically interesting and aesthetically pleasing is the plethora of old church buildings. They testify to the variety of faiths present here, as well as the importance of faith to those who built this city.
Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes (1874), 1217 Massachusetts Ave NW
National City Christian Church and Luther Place Memorial Church face each other across Thomas Circle in northwest Washington. I was guided here by my trusty Frommer's guide (cited below).
National City Christian Church (1930), 5 Thomas Circle NW
cupola at National City Christian
Luther Place Memorial Church (1860s), 1226 Vermont Ave NW
Worshipers in these congregations included Presidents James A. Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
These churches might not be as full as they used to be, but they continue to perform vital ministries. National City Christian, for just one example, lists on its webpage refugee and immigration ministry, food pantry, youth ministry, and an LGBTQ community, in addition to weekly worship services. Both Luther Place and Ascension/Saint Agnes were promoting upcoming blessings of the animals.
Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church (1883), 1306 Vermont Ave NW (formerly Vermont Avenue Christian Church)
Community Church (1903), 1405 15th St NW (formerly Grace Reformed Church)
Memorials
As full of religious buildings as Washington is, there are memorials to national heroes everywhere--not just the big names around the Tidal Basin. Frommer's tells us Irish residents celebrated around the statue of John Barry from County Wexford, "Father of the American Navy."
Revolutionary War: Commodore John Barry (1745-1803) in Franklin Park
There's much representation of 19th century wars, particularly the War of 1812 and the Civil War.
Civil War: General George H. Thomas (1816-1870) in Thomas Circle
civil rights: Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) Council House, 1318 Vermont Ave NW
Civil War: General John A. Logan (1826-1886) in Logan Circle
27 years in Congress: Daniel Webster (1782-1852), 1301 Bataan St NW
These memorials are spiritual, too, in their way, contributing to the national spirit--what Gail Gehrig (1979: 2), following Sidney Mead and Robert Bellah, calls the "transcendent universal religion of the nation." We are who we are--for better or worse, I might add--because of who and what we celebrate. Bellah, writing during the Vietnam War, concluded the American civil religion is:
...genuinely American and genuinely new. It has its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places, its own solemn rituals and symbols.... It does not make any decision for us. It does not remove us from moral ambiguity, from being, in Lincoln's fine phrase, an "almost chosen people." But it is a heritage of moral and religious experience from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead (1966: 18-19).
As a visitor, I am regularly reminded that I am part of an ongoing American project... I don't know if residents get used to it?
There were other things to notice as I walked around with Frommer's. Franklin Square, northwest of downtown Washington, features these whimsical seats:
Of course, I had to try them out!... even though they were wet and muddy from the rain:
I passed the Hungarian Embassy, which I include because I'm obsessed with embassies:
Embassy of Hungary, 1500 Rhode Island Ave NW
My son Eli starts work here next week:
Resonance, 1121 12th St NW
SOURCES:
Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Publius (1966): 1-21
Frommer's 24 Great Walks in Washington, D.C. (Wiley, 2009), ch. 13
Gail Gehrig, American Civil Religion: An Assessment (Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1979)
As exciting as Promontory Point must have been, the Cemar Trails joins existing trail near 29th St and B Ave NE
The Cemar Trail, which will eventually be a seven-mile direct route from the center of Cedar Rapids to the center of Marion, has made an important connection to the broader trail system in town. The trail under the bridge at 1st Avenue East has been completed...
Note also connections to wide sidewalks on both sides of 1st Avenue
...and joins a completed spur by Arthur School.
Crossing 29th Street by A Avenue
The previously constructed portion of the trail runs along an old railroad right of way to 16th Street; from there it's not terribly difficult to connect to the Cedar River Trail by Cedar Lake. (See Linn County Trails Association map here.) For the record, there are a couple of awkward junctures on the way:
at the edge of Daniels Park, where H Avenue meets Oakland Road, the trail rather dumps you into traffic, but it looks like crossing at the sidewalk might be an alternative
from there it's bike lane to Cedar Lake, which can involve some negotiation with traffic entering and exiting I-380 (my solution, to take the interstate down, might be too radical for some)
From there you can go a long, long way, to Elk Run Heights near Waterloo to the north, and to Solon to the south. Eventually you can go ever farther; it's part of the Great American Trail project.
Meanwhile, in the direction of Marion the Cemar Trail still stops at 3rd Avenue and 33rd Street SE, adjacent to Mount Cavalry Cemetery.
Marion's completed its portion as far south as Highway 100, so there's just 1.3 miles to be built, with completion expected in fall 2025 (Warner 2022). Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds just announced a Destination Iowa award of $3 million to Marion towards completion of the trail as well as a plaza planned for Uptown. (The Destination Iowa program is funded by federal COVID relief funds; such is the condition of American government in 2022.) The City of Marion recently announced trail construction “will begin after easements have been obtained
and construction of a sanitary sewer trunk line is complete.”
I wonder if this modest apartment building...
293 34th St Dr SE
...can then publicize and monetize its proximity to the trail network!
I recently learned of a horrific ordeal undergone by a New York resident that began with an act of... jaywalking? I'd missed this event when it happened in December 2019, and only found out about it thanks to Shakira Solis, a guest speaker at a recent event on the DACA program at Coe College. Perhaps you knew about this at the time. If you are undocumented, or love someone who is, you surely did.
Javier Castillo Maradiaga is one of many people caught in the web of America's byzantine immigration policy. The short version of his story, from Correal and Shanahan 2021: He came to the U.S. from Honduras as an 8-year-old child in 2002, and received legal status under DACA in 2012. During the chaos of the Trump administration, his DACA authorization lapsed. Thus he was undocumented when he was arrested by New York City police. Against city policy, particularly since his offense was nonviolent, he was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in whose custody he remained in various locations until a court ordered his release in March 2021. Last week at Coe, Solis used him as an example of how even DACA protection is far from airtight.
The story struck me, not just as another example of immigration policy gone wrong, but because he was arrested for jaywalking. I am pretty much pro-jaywalking. A Strong Towns article by Daniel Herriges (2020) cites the legal definition as crossing mid-block or against a traffic signal. I do this all the time. In an environment built for (ever-growing) motor vehicles, the main way pedestrians arrive safely at their destinations is by avoiding interactions with them. Whatever it takes to avoid interactions with cars is what you should do. The greatest danger in even semi-walkable areas is from traffic turning at intersections, so if you can cross mid-block, you should. If vehicles are stopped at a traffic light, and you have a clear shot to cross, you should do it.
Herriges adds that jaywalking is "extremely common" on truly walkable urban streets, which also happen to be the most financially productive; commenter Thomas B. adds, "In NYC, jaywalking is practically a birthrite." Herriges's article includes links to a Streetsblog study showing vastly disproportionate jaywalking arrests of blacks and Latinos, and a video by "Adam Ruins Everything" explaining the origins of criminalized jaywalking in efforts by auto manufacturers to take over city streets from other users.
Jaywalking is often the best choice for pedestrians. Its stigma is borne out of political power shoving the less powerful out of the way, and is mostly enforced in a racist way. U.S. immigration policy is bad enough without using this against them.
"The beef I have with the airbnbs in my neighborhood is EXTREME," tweeted a friend and civic stalwart who lives in the Oakhill Jackson neighborhood in the core of Cedar Rapids. This came mere days after I started noticing fancy doorways like the one above in Czech Village. A friend who lives just outside of Czech Village adds that there are two Airbnbs on his block, one directly across the street (though, like most Airbnb spaces, they come without labels on the doorways).
Airbnb, the online marketplace for short- or long-stay housing, has arrived in a big way in the emerging core neighborhoods of Cedar Rapids, and perhaps your town, too. This summer I've been pondering the center of town--including downtown, the planned New Bo Extension, Czech Village and New Bohemia--but I hadn't pondered this trend. As it turns out, a lot of people around the country have been pondering this very thing.
Airbnb, similar to Uber, began as a way to help people clear a bit of cash by renting spare rooms or even their entire house or apartment if they weren't using them. The website facilitated the meeting of buyers and sellers who might not otherwise meet each other. Jane and I frequently used Airbnb when we visited our son in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose entire collection of motels is on I-35 miles from where we wanted to be. Airbnb put us in a variety of comfortable houses in and around the Macalester-Grande neighborhood. They were more convenient and even more comfortable than a motel, so they were clearly filling an unmet need, which is how the economic marketplace is supposed to work.
Market innovations, however ingenious, can bring market failures. (See Kemmis 2022 and Fallon 2022 for examples of disappointed buyers and hosts, respectively.) Even when both buyer and host are happy, there can be externalities. Loud parties can be annoying to fellow guests at hotels, but are even worse to experience when you're at your actual home; Airbnb recently announced an algorithm to try to reduce such incidents, which has reportedly been effective in Australian trials (Braga 2022). There have been complaints that hosts don't pay taxes hotels do (Sheppard 2022), or comply with regulations faced by traditional apartments (Cortright 2019). Particularly in tourist areas, conversions to lucrative short-term rentals can raise real estate prices overall, and price people out of housing. (See Lemke 2022 for the math in Seattle, and Frishberg 2022 for an effort to counteract this in Sedona, Arizona.)
In an interview with US News and World Report, Breonne DeDecker, program manager at a New Orleans housing nonprofit, asked:
One of the big questions that we have is, 'How much of an outsize role do we want tourism to have in our city--do we really want just to turn the entire city over to like basically being a simulacrum of New Orleans? How much are we asking of our residents to give up in order to make space for these tourists? (Bach 2019)
The markets for real estate and tourism in Cedar Rapids, like most American towns, is nothing like that in New Orleans or New York City or Sedona. Yet we have a stake in the future of our city center, including the ability of a cross-section of people to reside there. The oldest neighborhoods in town went through the typical 20th century trajectory until it was suddenly interrupted by the 2008 flood. As an urbanist, I'd like to see walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income development rise from the muck, but that may not be where private investors see the highest return. It may not be in housing at all. What then? Drive-to urbanism for shoppers and tourists, far flung mobile home parks and apartment complexes for the struggling, car dependence for the rest of us?
Czech Village mixes housing and shops in historic structures
Kea Wilson of Strong Towns reminds us that Airbnb is not a monolith; the properties offered represent a variety of circumstances and opportunities (Wilson 2019a, Wilson 2019b). She and her partner listed one part of their St. Louis duplex on Airbnb, using the fees to pay for an improved office and more space for their dog. Some Airbnb rentals fund other good things, like keeping this historic New Bohemia house viable:
211-213 13th Av SE
It's likely that the Czech Village Airbnbs help maintain the rest of the funky apartments on the block, a sharp contrast to the condos in New Bohemia and Kingston Village. Other Airbnbs surely displace residents, although Kea Wilson reminds us that some of that may be forced by public policy.
If you're in the area, join Corridor Urbanism to discuss the complexities of this issue at our next gathering, Wednesday, September 17, at 6:30 p.m., location to be announced. (Watch our Facebook page, or request in the comments section to be added to our e-mail list.)
That was then, looking north (Google Earth screen capture)
(8/17/2022) This week's demolition of the mid-century convent building at the corner of 4th Avenue and 10th Street SE is a seminal example of the tension between individual rationality and collective irrationality. Save CR Heritage, our local historical preservation warriors, documented the demolition on their Facebook page. Cindy Hadish, Save CR Heritage secretary--and author of the Homegrown Iowanblog--said the organization had sought a 60-day hold on demolition through the city's Historic Preservation Commission, but the commission had not acted on the request before the building was demolished.
This is now, looking east
There is no mention of the demolition on the Immaculate Conception Church website. According to Save CR Heritage, the church had deemed the building a "liability" because it had been unoccupied for some time, and that plans are to use the space for additional parking. The convent was added to the church campus in the 1950s; the present building and adjoining Scotus Hall were built in the early 20th century ("The First 100 Years--1858 to 1958").
It may be that the church can use the parking. Their current parking lot is small; when I've attended Sunday events at the church, people park across 3rd Avenue in the Physicians Clinic of Iowa lot, but that may not be practicable during the week. Others among Cedar Rapids' historic 3rd Avenue churches, including my own, have over time taken down buildings to expand parking. Most of these churches draw members from all over the metropolitan area, and most of those members need somewhere to put their cars while they worship. The city has a stake in the success of all its institutions, and the churches, medical facilities, and businesses along 3rd all need parking for their driving visitors.
On the other hand, Cedar Rapids' core, and in particular the area designated as the MedQuarter in which many historic churches reside, is awash in surface parking. It is particularly noticeable along 4th Avenue:
4th Avenue, looking downtown from 10th Street (Google Earth screen capture)
And this is not a case where 4th Avenue is "taking one for the team," handling the parking so other streets can be great, like Heivly Street in Decorah or 2nd Street SE here (Kaplan 2016a); the parallel streets through the MedQuarter are also laden with parking lots and unfriendly buildings.
The city has a stake in the vibrancy of its core, too. And the way parking competes with all other uses makes it the enemy of good development. (See Shoup 2005, Kaplan 2016b, or really any published urbanist.) Save CR Heritage argues the convent building could have been used for housing. Surface parking puts destinations farther apart, making walking less desirable, the neighborhood less interesting, and adding to the city's infrastructure maintenance load (paid for by you, whether you're driving or not). The more driving is accommodated, the more cars are brought into the area, the less safe it is for everyone else, and the more the planet suffers.
The conflict between parking and other community interests is not symmetric. If all the churches, medical facilities, and so forth want more parking, we have seen they will get it, even demolishing buildings or buying adjoining properties to obtain it. But who speaks for the countervailing interests? Organizations like Save CR Heritage (and Corridor Urbanism) can advocate, but have no power to back it up. Only the city government can act for collective interests with long-term, widely diffused benefits. Can they limit, through zoning, the amount of land devoted to parking lots? Block sales of homes to institutions without a plan for using or replacing those structures? Broker parking lot-sharing agreements?
Governments, of course, are far from perfect. They are far from perfect advocates for collective goods. They have their own incentives. Often they respond to the loudest, most powerful voices in the room, which is the main reason Adam Smith didn't like public spending. Governments like flashy things, like a new casino, or a spiffed-up Field of Dreams, which is getting showered with public money in spite of accumulated evidence the return on investment is likely to be disappointing (Ionescu 2022, Welch 2022). They would rather build new roads than fix the ones we've got (Marohn 2022). Meanwhile, Iowa is ending a program of rental and utility assistance; outsiders like the poor don't have the political heft of insiders.
And yet, without someone to balance the scales by standing up for public interests, the community is merely the pursuit of private interests. Private interests are not all bad--Smith also points out that the brewer's and the baker's private interest in living well gets me beer and bread--but if that's all we have to go on, we get short-term thinking and long-term desolation.
The American Prairie project is planned on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, near Kirkwood Community College (source: cedar-rapids.org)
I think one thing we will see is that successful suburbs of the future will get that way by becoming more urban in their orientation, not less. More density, more mixed use, more diversity of housing stock, a reimagining of the auto-oriented, shopping-center-and-big-box model that’s dominated for decades.--Pete Saunders (2022)
(8/8/2022) What happens to suburban development in a world of economic uncertainty, environmental concern, and exotic contagion? However you define suburb, the area and population and importance of American suburbs surged between 1950 and 2000, and they now represent a great deal of American capital. Their resources alone mean they have the wherewithal to respond in interesting ways to our era's stressors, but the truthful bottom line is: We don't know. But stay tuned!
I first looked at this topic six years ago, in the wake of a widely-publicized return to the city, particularly among the young and/or affluent. Businesses, too, were relocating their headquarters to central cities in search of benefits from clusters of talent (Florida 2008). Energy was cheap, but economic inequality was widening and the future of careers was anxiety-producing. (But then, when is it not?) I surmised that suburbs that were located or had been primarily designed such that they were not entirely auto-dependent would prove resilient; "the future is murkier," I said then, "for edge cities, new traditional suburbs, and whatever the hell Bedford Park is."
Village of Bedford Park (pop. 580) near Chicago (Source: Wikimedia commons)
Since I wrote that, the return to the city appears to have ebbed; it's early to judge, but it's certainly not proceeding at the pace of 2005-2015 (Frey 2022, Cortright 2020). Meanwhile, American society has been shaken by a series of earthquakes. The governmental tantrum that was the Trump administration had impacts on immigration, social trust, and local-state-national relations. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis continues to ripple through the practice of public safety in complicated ways. The sudden arrival and slow receding of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in remote work and, however unfairly, demonized population density (cf. Badger 2021). Dislocations created by the shutdown and restart have created even greater uncertainty around the economy than before. Burgeoning changes to the global climate have proliferated heat waves, droughts, floods, and other such disasters. "I've been thinking a lot about doom," a friend told me last weekend.
Urban and suburban areas are both relevant, whatever's coming next. A Brookings Institution analysis of 2020 U.S. Census data found the largest metropolitan areas--56 metros have populations of more than a million--grew faster in the 2010s than their smaller relatives, while nonmetropolitan parts of the country shrank (Frey 2022, cf. also Brasuell 2022). In a decade of historically low national population growth, the largest metros actually grew nearly as much as they had in the previous decade (9.6% vs. 10.7%) [Frey's Fig. 1]. Individual experience varied, though: metros in the south and west mostly grew a lot faster, with those in the northeastern quarter growing more slowly [Frey's Fig. 2].
Cedar Rapids MSA grew 5.3 percent between 2010 and 2020, below the nationwide average for small metros (7.1) (Google Maps screen capture)
Within the metros, central cities grew faster than they had, while suburban growth slowed relative to the 2000-10 decade [Frey's Fig. 3]; "However," cautions Frey, "it should be kept in mind that the bulk of city growth occurred in the first part of the decade. In most metro areas, suburban growth began to re-emerge to some extent as the economy picked up in the latter half of the 2010s." None of this leads "to a straightforward forecast about their future prospects," he concludes.
Lisbon, Iowa, 19 miles east of Cedar Rapids, grew 13.4 percent between 2010 and 2020 (Wikimedia commons)
The pandemic has tilted the metropolitan scales back to the suburbs, according to crack urbanist writer Addison Del Mastro (2022). This is particularly pronounced in coastal cities, where high housing costs are worth less if you're not commuting anyway. But, as Del Mastro points out, "The demand for something like urban living is real." New suburban developments are often mixed-use and denser than what had been typical a few decades ago, and the suburbs are radically more diverse. Over 60 percent of immigrants live in suburbs, for instance (Del Mastro cites Bochsma and National Journal 2014). The result is "diverse and evolving places, still distinct from the big city but just as distinct from their own 'first drafts' a few decades ago." He cites "vibrant dining scenes... nightclubs, taller buildings, and walkable developments" in New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia. The Chinese cultural center of Greater Washington, D.C. used to be around 6th and H Streets NW; now it's Rockville, Maryland.
And there's more:
Bensley, a first-ring suburb of Richmond, Virginia, is adding an "agri-hood," mixing affordable housing and urban agriculture (Gordon 2022)
Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, an hour's drive from New York, is adding residences and amenity services to a 1980s office park, while 40 miles to the south Holmdel has seen the conversion of Bell Labs' campus into a "metroburb" (Berg 2021)
Columbia, Maryland has moved its downtown towards smaller establishments and more residences, with improved transit service, over the last ten years
Of course, it's not hard to imagine how retrofits can fail. (For a satirical example that strikes uncomfortably close to the truth, see Oleary 2022.) Cedar Rapids has done some great things in its core, but the suburban areas are stuck in the 1980s and 90s. Ten years ago, the city opened its coffers to help turn Westdale Mall into... a bunch of strip malls. Development around the Highway 100 extension may some day produce walkable multi-functional neighborhoods, but so far its biggest accomplishment has been... a bunch of strip malls. The casual approach to suburban development taken by Cedar Rapids, and indeed pretty much all of Iowa, is not going to be viable in the future.
Fleet Farm on Cross Pointe Blvd NE, Black Friday 2021
Even where suburban retrofit is seriously attempted, Daniel Herriges at Strong Towns notes that a lot of such projects "get the density and the height, without much action at all. Some of the form, none of the function" (Herriges 2020). They're building what is perceived to be fashionable right now, but neither the developers nor the municipalities "actually understand or care about the purpose."
"What would you even walk to?" Herriges asks about a Florida development he profiles. Outside the attractive-looking apartments, auto-dependent suburbia persists, as much as it ever did. "The main street onto which the Harrison [apartment complex] empties is a six-lane divided stroad.... The adjoining businesses are all entirely auto-oriented, many with drive-thrus." Residents don't get the community/ health/lifestyle benefits of true urbanism, municipalities don't get the financial benefits, and the planet doesn't get the environmental benefits if everybody still has to drive.
I grew up in a western suburb of Chicago. Significantly, it had been its own town until the metro area grew to engulf it. There was (and still is) commuter train service to downtown Chicago, and I could walk less than a mile to school all the way through 12th grade. We could walk to a small grocery store three blocks away, and there was a large city park four blocks away, albeit both required crossing a state highway that gave our parents palpitations. That development approach might have proven sustainable, but decades have passed, and it doesn't speak to the experience of suburban life today even in that town. My town more than doubled in population between 1960 and 1990; the town to our south grew sevenfold in that same period. Both towns accommodated the growth through annexation, building and widening streets, and weirdly-laid-out subdivisions. The good bones remain in the cores, but most of both towns is predominantly auto-dependent. This is the present of the suburbs with which the future must work.
The future of at least some suburbs includes much more diversity and density and multimodal transportation. Small projects can start this process (cf. Steuteville 2022). One challenge for suburban areas, as opposed to traditional city design, is connectivity; it's difficult to plot transit on an area not built for it. Another issue is timing: will suburban municipalities act proactively or will they wait until their hands are forced, until it's too late to respond effectively to challenges? Potentially radical change to the world of work (Korinek and Juelfs 2022, sec. 2) would present challenges to places at all levels of median family income. But, no question, sustainable suburban development is in everyone's interest. What makes any part stronger and more resilient makes the whole metro stronger.
The souped-up black car squealed its tires as it turned left from 2nd Street onto 4th Avenue. As the driver accelerated into the turn, the car began to slide to the right, towards the sidewalk where I was walking. The car skidded to a halt in front of the woman the driver was meeting. I trust she was impressed. (I doubt he ever saw me, much less was auditioning for the lead paragraph in this post.)
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).
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.
.png "4th Avenue SE adjacent to former convent building")
.jpg/1280px-Chicago_Rail_Yards_South_of_Chicago-Midway_International_Airport%2C_Bedford_Park%2C_Illinois_(14024033980).jpg "Village of Bedford Park")
