Dying for Walkability

Last week the non-profit group Transportation For America released a study documenting pedestrian deaths in American cities. Dubbed Dangerous by Design: Solving the Epidemic of Preventable Deaths (and Making Great Neighborhoods), the study posits that our roads are deadly not by accident, but intentionally, insofar as our modern streets are more often than not designed for speeding cars, not walking or bicycling.

The good news offered by the work is that these pedestrian deaths are preventable by rethinking the design of our roadways. Traffic calming (or measures that reduce the speed of traffic in intersections), complete streets (or streets that are designed for walking, bicycling, mass transit and cars), and walkable neighborhoods (or places to live that aren’t predicated solely on auto transport) are a few of the solutions they advance.

There is obviously a long way to go, however, and for one state, a larger distance to travel than others.

Florida’s four main metropolitan regions rank as the top four most deadly cities for walking or bicycling. As Chicago’s Daily Herald puts it: “Florida’s Orlando is no magic kingdom for walkers.” Beyond Florida, the top ten cities are in the South. Fast growing Southern regions (both east and west), in fact, dominate the list, implicating our most “modern” patters of development as the most unsafe. That is ironic considering the modern obsession with safety, but it follows from the modern dependence on the car.

Not content to wait while the Nation’s Southern cities make the transition to calmer traffic, more complete streets, and walkable neighborhoods?

This week, that pulpy ranker of things, the US News & World Report, ranked the top 15 cities for “people who hate driving and long commutes”. Don’t worry, none of the top 15 are on the “deadly by design” list.

In fact:

“The list is heavy on college towns, for a few good reasons: Such places are good fits for nondrivers because they are often compact and dense, and they often have liberal populations that demand more investment in public transportation.”

The top cities include: Cambridge, MA; Pittsburgh, PA; Boulder, CO; Davis, CA; Ann Arbor, MI; New Haven, CT; Chapel Hill, NC; Minneapolis, MN (lowest ranked on the Deadly by Design list); Portland, OR; Ames, IA; Madison, WI; Honolulu, HI; Provo, UT; Eugene, OR; and Syracuse, NY.