Stop Excusing Pedestrian Deaths With Crosswalk Proximity
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Something that has cropped up in news stories nationwide — “pedestrian blaming” — is no stranger to Atlanta. The tragedy of the loss of life is bad enough without trying the added insult of someone unnecessarily pinning blame on pedestrian behavior. The worst part: the blame is often completely inaccurate. Recently, a 62 year-old man was killed on Metropolitan Parkway in southwest Atlanta. He was struck, while crossing the road, by a police car in regular traffic (meaning the officer was not in pursuit and no lights or sirens were on). Multiple local news outlets included this quote from the Atlanta police department in their brief stories about the tragedy: “The individual was not in a crosswalk and the officer was just on routine patrol,” said Atlanta police deputy chief Darryl Tolleson.Why point out that the man was not in a crosswalk? To pin the blame on him instead of on the officer? It sounds like an attempt to portray the man’s actions and illegal, as if to justify the death. Let’s take a look at the stretch of road where this occurred and find out how likely it was that the crossing was illegal.The above map shows where, according to the news reports, this tragic event happened. The man was crossing Metropolitan “near Fair Drive” but over 100 feet away from the crosswalk at its intersection with Memorial. On both sides of that sport are two non-signalized intersections.As a handy graphic (below) on the PEDS site shows us that it is legal for a pedestrian to cross a street at any point between a signalized and non-signalized intersection.If this tragedy happened anyplace near the intersection of Metropolitan and Fair, it certainly seems like the crossing was legal and that the mention of the crosswalk was unnecessary (also: witnesses report that the police car was speeding at the time).This reminds me of an AJC news piece from last year. It reported that a mother and child were walking across Durham Park Road in Dekalb County, just east of Atlanta, when they were struck by a truck. The mother was killed while she was walking her child to a school bus stop that was beside the entrance to the Indian Creek MARTA station.A DeKalb County police captain had this to say about the tragedy: AJC news piece about this tragedy.“There is a crosswalk on Durham Park Road further up, but the mother and child did not use it,” Fore said in an email.Which made me bust a blood vessel. Why mention the crosswalk when the crossing is legal? In the midst of this pedestrian blaming, there was no mention of the true culprit: a 45 MPH speed limit on a curvy residential street with bus stops and a train station entrance. That’s a road-engineering failure that is tailor made for tragedy — one like many others in the Atlanta region. Pedestrian blaming seems to goes unnoticed in this car-centric metro. It’s time to notice it and put an end to it.
