Angie Schmitt

This book, Schmitt's debut, had a great deal of buzz among planners on its release, and I see why. Drivers hit pedestrians every day in the US, often fatally, and while we have extensive records of these horrible crashes, until now there hasn't been a unifying story of what is happening and why.

Schmitt offers this story at the scale of the individual person, and we learn much more about the frequent victims of driver-pedestrian crashes: people in the growing "Sunbelt" states, poor and homeless people, people with limited mobility, and seniors. This is a helpful call to action, to note that so many crash victims are our vulnerable neighbors. Some chapters also touch on how self-driving vehicles figure into this, which is immediately relevant to me as a planner.… (mehr)

This is a topic I’ve read a fair bit about, so I don’t know how much of it was actually new to me, but it was well presented overall. I liked the focus on systemic issues and the analogies drawn to the nuclear power industry and aviation: both fields have evolved in their understanding of what causes accidents and are not so quick as they used to be in blaming humans. The traffic environment is a complex system and the more we can engineer the system to mitigate the risks of accidents, the better. We should not be blaming pedestrians for not wearing bright enough clothing or not crossing where they’re “supposed” to.

The global perspective was useful, demonstrating how woeful the U.S. traffic safety record is in comparison with other “developed” countries. The Canadian content was a bit insufficient though; Toronto may have a lot of transit, but in recent years the Toronto police seem to have stopped enforcing traffic laws. I wouldn’t necessarily hold the city up as a model of good design—it can and should do much better.

I also liked the chapter on autonomous vehicles and the solid analysis of why they aren’t a cure-all. (Also, why must we continue to perpetuate the individual vehicle? Invest more in better public transit, and in intercity transit so that people don’t need to have cars at all.) And the chapter about how cars have become bigger and deadlier over the years is especially well illustrated with photos of actual people (including the author and her son) beside cars to demonstrate how invisible a pedestrian is to a driver.

I raised an eyebrow at one line in the acknowledgements: the author stated that her mother proofread the early chapters, and then the author rejected all her changes. Given that this book contained a distracting number of typos (e.g., “censor” for “sensor”, “NSTB” for “NTSB” even though that was spelled correctly on the previous page), I would be curious to see the track changes that her mother made. I don’t normally comment on typos, because even the best proofreaders and editors will have only about a 95% save percentage, but the combination of this comment plus the typos gave me some pause.

Overall, I would recommend this book if you’re interested in urban planning that makes way for humans instead of cars.… (mehr)