Neighborliness vs. Car Culture: Traffic Violence, Pedestrian Deaths in Philadelphia, and Vision Zero’s Concept of Equity

By Regina Austin November, 2025

Vision Zero (VZ) is a transportation policy adopted by major cities like Philadelphia that aims to reduce or eliminate traffic violence, primarily through improvements in the transportation infrastructure. VZ prioritizes engineering (over enforcement), community engagement, and perhaps most importantly, equity. In the battle for superiority among users of land-based travel modes in America, automobile drivers have benefited from arterial highways that speed traffic flows around and through urban enclaves to reach center city business districts and from a car culture that encourages dominant behavior behind the wheel. Pedestrians have been among the losers.

In Philadelphia, as elsewhere, pedestrians who are killed are disproportionately Black and Latino/Hispanic. Moreover, the traffic violence that befell them occurred disproportionately on roadways in communities that are occupied by lower-income people and described as being “disadvantaged” or “underserved.” What more can we learn about the victims? Focusing on fatal traffic violence inflicting walkers in in 2023 and relying on granular data from police department databases and print and on-air media reports, research reveals that the vulnerable walkers included public transit riders; people with a range of physical, mental, and emotional abilities; night and swing shift workers; people who are marginally employed and marginally housed; and travelers on foot in communities with high rates of street crime. Furthermore, the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of a community can negatively impact the incidence of hit-and-run driving, a significant causal factor in pedestrian injuries.

Vision Zero’s goal of traffic violence abolition and greater traffic safety for pedestrians and other non-driving users of the transportation system will require not only engineering fixes, but also empowered community engagement and participation. Communities may favor positive reinforcement of safe behavior over law enforcement and negative sanctions. In contrast to car culture, communities are likely to promote “neighborliness,” not dominance, as the ethical or moral basis for pursuing social justice in the operation of automobiles.

Introduction

“American Road Deaths Show an Alarming Racial Gap.”¹ So read the headline of an April 2023 opinion piece in the New York Times about the relationship between pedestrian traffic deaths and equity. According to its author, Adam Paul Susaneck,² pedestrian deaths from automobile collisions “spiked across the board during the pandemic…Black and Hispanic pedestrians are killed at significantly higher rates than white pedestrians.”³ Susaneck went on to say:

The design of our cities is partly to blame for these troubling disparities. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries are concentrated in poorer neighborhoods with a larger share of Black and Hispanic residents. These neighborhoods share a history of under-investment in basic traffic safety measures. . . , and an over-investment in automobile infrastructure to speed through people who do not live there.⁴

Thus, the locations where the disparate pedestrian deaths occur are characterized by challenging walking conditions that include arterial highways carrying high volumes of traffic at high speeds thorough the community or near commercial areas within the community that are designed for automobile access only.⁵

Accounts of pedestrian deaths and injuries on America’s urban streets typically point to risky behavior by drivers⁶ or walkers⁷ as the cause. Generally, the structural features of the roadways are ignored as contributory factors. However, their design can encourage or discourage dangerous driving and walking. For example,

[C]learing the visual space in front of a vehicle . . . [is] actually associated with drivers going more quickly. If drivers don’t see trees in front of them, have straight curves in front of them, have generous space along the sides of streets, what they see is a faster roadway, and they’ll drive more quickly. So you can reduce the speed limit all you want, but in those circumstances, you really need to redesign the street as well to encourage slower speeds.⁸

Regarding pedestrians, “[a] hostile infrastructure,”⁹ with, for example, intermittent sidewalks, bus stops providing no protection from traffic, intersections without curb ramps, and traffic signals that do not indicate when it is safe to walk, challenge vulnerable pedestrians to resort to dangerous “walkarounds,” as it were.¹⁰

Thus, addressing deficiencies in the transportation infrastructure might substantially reduce various group disparities in pedestrian deaths and injuries. Building safety into the system by anticipating, correcting for, or discouraging unsafe driver behavior might reduce crashes more than deterring or penalizing dangerous conduct through traffic enforcement. The former alternatives would be significant to socially and economically marginalized communities that fear the inequities associated with direct police activity (such as racial profiling, violent vehicle stops, and excessive fines), even in the face of a greater exposure to the hazards of automobile collisions.¹¹ Traffic deaths and injuries would also be reduced if the traffic infrastructure accommodated physically vulnerable pedestrians, bikers, and users of mobility aid devices rather than forcing them to adapt their behavior to the limitations of the infrastructure.

Concentrating on the transportation infrastructure shifts responsibility to municipal leaders, urban planners, civil engineers, and transportation professionals to make streets safe for pedestrians “who should be able to walk or bike through their neighborhoods without fearing for their lives.”¹² Indeed, as Susaneck notes, “[m]any American cities have already introduced what are known as ‘Vision Zero’ campaigns based on the idea that even a single pedestrian death is one too many.”¹³ They put the focus on infrastructure fixes as the means of achieving traffic violence abolition.

Vision Zero is an aspirational abolitionist policy for achieving transportation safety. It was developed in Sweden in the late 1990s and has been adopted in over 60 jurisdictions in North America.¹⁴ It is “visionary” in its goal of stopping traffic violence by prioritizing road design and infrastructure improvements above modifications of individual behavior. It is grounded in the moral principle that it is “ethically unacceptable for people to be killed or seriously injured” by “structural shortcomings . . . [that subject] road users . . . to a form of external violence that significantly exceeded what a human being, purely physiologically, was capable of withstanding.”¹⁵

The Vision Zero approach, which is also referred to as a “safe system approach,” was initially encapsulated in three “E’s”: “education, enforcement, and engineering.” They were later supplemented by three additional “E’s”: “evaluation,” “encouragement,” and most important in the case of Vision Zero adoption by American jurisdictions, “equity.”¹⁶

Equity is a core element of Vision Zero, although its dimensions are unclear. Equity is associated with judgments or conduct that is fair, impartial, honest, unbiased, even-handed, and just to all parties.¹⁷ Transportation equity as discussed herein has geographical, social/cultural, and procedural elements.¹⁸

Geographic or Locational Equity: “Transportation decisions may have distributive impacts (positive and negative) that are geographic and spatial.”¹⁹ Equity requires that “outcomes (such as the diversity and quality of services and the allocation of resources and investments or facilities and infrastructure) that disproportionately favor one geographic or spatial location over another” be addressed.²⁰ “Environmental” might be another descriptive term applicable to this category of land use related effects, which in turn implicates public health concerns.

Social/cultural equity: “The distribution of transportation benefits [in the form of investments, enhancements, and financial resources] and burdens [in the form of physical isolation, pollution, gentrification, and poor road conditions] is not randomly distributed across population groups.”²¹ Equity questions distributions of scarce transportation goods and services based on groups’ social or cultural capital. Social capital consists of the “networks and ties,” “the connections, loyalties, and mutual obligations,” that result in favors . . . [and] preferential treatment.”²² Cultural capital is linked to the habits and values that produce social distinction, prestige and recognition.²³ It also results in financial or economic capital.²⁴ Concern arises when wealthier and better educated communities fare better at securing transportation amenities than communities inhabited by people of color and of the poor and working classes.²⁵
Procedural equity: Procedural equity depends on whether transportation decisions involve “diverse public stakeholders” and are made and executed “in a uniform, fair, and consistent manner with the involvement of diverse public stakeholders.” Political capital has the biggest impact on procedural equity. Equity and social justice would support the engagement of diverse groups of stakeholders to ensure that road safety decision-making incorporates the values, concerns, and interests of politically marginalized groups.

America, of course, is not Sweden. The population of our country is diverse in terms of social, cultural, economic, and political classes which engage in both internecine and exogenous or internal conflicts, including over the meaning and pursuit of equity.

Thus far the discussion has considered pedestrian-involved traffic violence in terms of policies and programs that are formulated, operationalized, and assessed by governmental bodies, corporate entities, and nonprofits operating at system-wide levels. From here on, this Article will consider what inequity regarding traffic violence and traffic safety looks like for pedestrians from a bottom-up perspective, i.e., at the levels of individuals, social/cultural groups, state and local officials, and transportation professionals. Who are the actual fatal pedestrian victims, how did traffic violence come to impact their lives, did inequity contribute to the traffic violence that caused their demise, and what difference would the Vision Zero approach, with its emphasis on infrastructure and equity, have made in the lives of people like the victims? The inquiry will also extend to indirect victims of traffic violence: the surviving relatives, friends, neighbors, and the full range of users of the transportation system. Whom do they blame for the pain and loss fatal traffic violence causes? Are the auto industry, the drivers’ car culture, or the transportation infrastructure on anyone’s radar as being responsible? What difference does Vision Zero make?

To identify the systems, organizations, actors, processes, and philosophies that have or have not advanced the equitable interests of pedestrians and other non-driver road users in traffic safety necessitates critical “concrete, context dependent” analysis.²⁶ Only such analysis will reveal the “institutions, regimes of knowledge [or expertise], and social practices that limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities” at risk from traffic violence.²⁷

This Article will address the questions raised by considering a concrete example: the Vision Zero program of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (hereinafter “Vision Zero PHL”).

In choosing to focus on Vision Zero PHL, I make no claim that it is representative, exceptional, or peculiar relative to other Vision Zero programs. Nor do I contend that the selection of Vision Zero PHL for study is “objective” or unbiased. I aim to be forthright, however. I would describe my position regarding the subject matter of this essay as follows. I am a Black woman over 70 and a lifelong pedestrian. Philadelphia is my hometown. I do not drive and indeed never learned to drive. I take public transit, taxicabs, and Ubers to get around. Mostly, I walk. Tree roots, construction, loose paving bricks, and uneven sidewalks create obstacles for pedestrians like me. During the day, the streets are congested with buses, delivery trucks, and cars. I recently retired as a law professor and a member of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations (PCHR). My interest in the disparate deaths and serious injuries of pedestrians as matters of equity and social justice stems from my self-interest and that of the groups of which I am a member, my service as a PCHR Commissioner, and my teaching and writing on economic and environmental justice issues.²⁸

The analysis, which will cover locational, social/cultural, and political equity, begins with inequity as reflected in Philadelphia’s demographic and dangerous road statistics. Then I will provide greater contextualization of pedestrian deaths by recounting, in narrative format, granular facts about several representative pedestrian victims, the circumstances of their lives, the contexts of the deadly crashes, and the histories of the streets and neighborhoods where they had fatal encounters with street violence. The stories and analysis will draw on a range of sources: Philadelphia Police Department data, news media accounts, and qualitative and quantitative empirical studies. Hopefully, viewing inequity through stories using a social/cultural lens will illuminate the efficacy of Vision Zero.

The research reveals that in Philadelphia vulnerable walkers include transit riders; disparately physically, mentally, and emotionally able people; night and swing shift workers; people who are marginally employed and marginally housed; and travelers on foot who live, work, or play in communities with high rates of street crime. Inequity is reflected not only in the faulty transportation infrastructure, but also in the behavior of hit-and-run drivers, and the risks arising at the interface of the highway/streets and public transit systems.

There is not a great deal of evidence about the identities and motivations of the actual drivers involved in pedestrian fatalities, in part because the closure rate in traffic cases is not high. As an alternative, the discussion turns to car culture, the dominant social/cultural factor promoting the supremacy of drivers over pedestrians and other users of the highways and a motivator of traffic violence. Car culture is the legacy of the highway boom of the last half of the 20^th Century; it is embedded in the infrastructure of the arterial roads that were constructed around and through socially and politically marginalized communities without due regard for the people living there. Consideration of that history shifts the focus of attention to the current generation of professional urban planners and transportation experts who Vision Zero suggests can be counted on to make the roads safer. However, Vision Zero also supports the right of communities to demand safety measures based on their lived experience with traffic danger and to participate in traffic infrastructure decisions. Vision Zero should trigger the start of a renewed quest for equitable political treatment of pedestrians and non-driving users of the roadways.

Under Vision Zero, the social and cultural norms and attitudes of drivers that support traffic violence, particularly the predominance of car culture, are ignored which leaves unaddressed a significant source of inequality in traffic safety efforts. Car culture prioritizes the interests of drivers over walkers, rollers, and peddlers of various kinds. There is a role for communities to play in righting the unbalanced consideration given to the interests of pedestrians and their fellow nondriving travelers in traffic safety decision making. The piece will end with an argument in favor of the promotion of the community-friendly value of “neighborliness,” as a substitute for car culture that will equitably protect communities from traffic violence.

Vision Zero in Context and as Applied: A Philadelphia Story

Philadelphia is a “Vision Zero” City. Its per capita fatality rate is three times greater than New York City’s and nearly identical to that of Los Angeles, “a more car dependent city.”²⁹ Philadelphia was also among the cities cited by Susaneck as exhibiting racial/ethnic disparities in pedestrian deaths and inequities in its transportation infrastructure.

On November 7, 2016, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney issued an executive order adopting Vision Zero as city policy.³⁰ In support of his decision, he said that “traffic crashes resulting in lives lost and severe injuries are preventable . . . . It is our shared responsibility to build a transportation system that prioritizes safety on our streets. By focusing on system-wide improvements, we can stop traffic-related deaths. We can save lives.”³¹ In implementing Vision Zero, the City “looks beyond individual crashes and behavior and addresses risks on a system-wide level. The City is actively working to reduce traffic speeds, design and build safe roads, and encourage[e] safe and healthy modes of transportation.”³² According to Mayor Kenney, “[t]hrough an equitable approach to changing our transportation system, changing the way we design roads, educating our residents, and judiciously applying traffic safety enforcement, traffic-related deaths can be eliminated.”³³

Traffic violence is an explicitly acknowledged equity issue for Vision Zero PHL, as Mayor Kenney stated in the City’s 2022 Vision Zero Annual Report.³⁴ “Individuals and communities of color, older adults, people walking, biking, or riding a motorcycle, and neighborhoods living on lower incomes all face disproportionate traffic deaths and serious injuries.”³⁵ Thus, equity is implicated with regard to not only the identities of pedestrian victims but also the neighborhoods where traffic violence occurs.

A. Inequity Based on the Group Identities of Philadelphia’s Dead and Injured Pedestrians

Statistics compiled by Philadelphia indicated that crashes involving pedestrians are more injurious than others. Philadelphia’s 2023 Annual Vision Zero Report concluded that, in 2022, pedestrians were involved in 15% of all crashes but were 34% of persons killed or seriously injured. The Report speculates that “[m]any crashes occur at night when visibility is lower,” “roads are emptier, and speeding is more likely;” speeding was “a factor in nearly 40% of pedestrian crashes resulting in death or serious injury.”

Statistics published by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (“PennDOT”) also suggest that Philadelphia pedestrians involved in traffic crashes are more at risk than drivers and passengers in cars.³⁶ PennDOT’s annual report of crash data on pedestrian and vulnerable users fatalities for Philadelphia County for 2022-2024 was as follows:³⁷

	2022	2023	2024
Total Fatalities	143	135	137
Pedestrians	64	58	57
Vulnerable Users	67	67	61
% P/TF	45%	43%	42%
% VU/TF	47%	50%	44%

PennDOT’s annual report of crash data on suspected serious injuries to pedestrians and vulnerable uses for Philadelphia County for 2022-2024 was as follows:³⁸

	2022	2023	2024
Total Seriously Injured	419	485	395
Pedestrians	137	145	115
Vulnerable Users	147	161	141
% P/TSI	33%	30%	29%
%VU/TSI	35%	33%	36%

Note that pedestrians constitute a higher percentage of those who died than of those who incurred suspected serious injuries.

According to the City, between 2020 and 2022, Blacks were 50% of traffic fatalities, and Hispanics were 20%, in each case a higher percentage than the group’s representation in the City’s population in 2021 (40% and 16% respectively).³⁹ Whites were 26% of deaths, which is below their representation in the population (34%).⁴⁰

Relying on data from PennDOT and the City’s Department of Public Health, the City reported in 2024 that “[t]raffic related hospitalizations and deaths continue to disproportionately affect Philadelphia’s pedestrians, its Black and Hispanic residents, and those living in areas with high rates of poverty.”⁴¹ The conclusion was supported by the following specifics: Between 2019 and 2023, the age-adjusted rate of deaths per 100,000 residents by race and ethnicity was 10 for Hispanics, 7 for Blacks, 5 for whites and 2 for Asians/Pacific Islanders.⁴² “For Black pedestrians, the traffic crash hospitalization rate was 59% higher than the rate for white pedestrians.” ⁴³

The Crash Investigation Unit (“CUI”) of the Philadelphia Police Department (“PPD”) maintains a Fatal Crash Database that is posted online and updated monthly.⁴⁴ It contains granular data for each fatal traffic crash; that includes short narratives of the events surrounding the crash and whether it was a hit-and run. There is no comparable publicly available PPD CIU database on injured or seriously injured victims of auto violence in Philadelphia.⁴⁵ While the Database does not identify the race or ethnicity of the victims, it does contain data with respect to gender and age. For example, in 2023, male pedestrian fatalities outnumbered female fatalities, 42 to 17 or 71% to 29%. Statewide statistics were nearly identical.⁴⁶ The gender disparity may be attributable to the fact that in the Commonwealth and elsewhere most pedestrian fatalities occur during darkness when males are more likely to be on the street than females.⁴⁷ This may also be the result of a risk factor impacting victims whose existence involves life on the street, such as with homelessness or panhandling.

B. Inequity Based on Philadelphia’s Most Dangerous Crash Locations

In Philadelphia, some of the disparate harm experienced by Black and Latino pedestrians is undoubtedly due to their living or traveling within the Philadelphia’s High Injury Network. The Vision Zero Three-Year Action Plan, issued in 2017, designated the roads where 50% of traffic deaths and severe injuries occur the “High Injury Network” (“HIN”).⁴⁸ An updated HIN “accounts for 80% of fatal and serious injury crashes on just 12% of Philadelphia streets.”⁴⁹

Philadelphia’s High Injury Network is evidence of geographic or locational inequity. The roadways included in the HIN were evaluated in terms of equity using criteria indicative of potential social and economic disadvantage developed by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC).⁵⁰ The conclusion was that “disadvantaged communities have 40% more road miles of the HIN than non-disadvantaged communities.”⁵¹ More extensive mileage translates into a greater risk of death and serious injury for those involved in collisions occurring in disadvantaged communities.⁵² According to the 2022 Annual Report, “[t]raffic violence is felt unequally by underserved communities in Philadelphia, with fatal and serious injury crashes three times more likely to occur in areas . . . where most residents are on low incomes.”⁵³ According to the 2024 Annual Report, “40% of all traffic crash hospitalizations between 2028 and 2022 occurred among Philadelphians living in the 20% of zip codes where poverty was highest.”⁵⁴ Action Plan 2025 further acknowledged that “[t]he concentration of traffic safety problems in lower income communities and communities of color is not accidental but reflects disinvestment,” “infrastructure needs exceed the available funding” in many parts of the City, and equity has not been achieved despite “efforts, . . . to make more equitable investments in streets and transportation infrastructure.”⁵⁵ Whether this admission amounts to a justification or an excuse depends on the nature and extent of the contribution the inequitably built environment makes to the hypervulnerability of the impacted communities’ pedestrians and non-driver users.

II. Considering Vision Zero PHL’s Pursuit of Equity Through Enhanced Stories of Pedestrian Deaths and Injuries

The statistics just outlined provide little information about the context in which Philadelphia’s pedestrian-involved traffic violence occurs and its inequitably distributed impact. The data says little about the victims’ circumstances; the aftermath of the violence on them, their survivors, neighbors, and communities; the identities and conduct of the involved drivers; the transportation infrastructure where the traffic violence occurred; and other factors, including institutional actors implicated or associated with the deaths or injuries; and the response of Vision Zero PHL, if any, to the particular incidence of violence. Approaching pedestrian crashes holistically and keeping the victims and potential victims and the communities involved in the foreground are important to searching for the root causes of inequity and prevention measures.

Beyond the statistics, however, local Philadelphia news media reports on traffic violence contain stories about the lives of seriously injured and killed pedestrians. The stories provide qualitative, nonstatistical information about the social world, i.e., the human interactions, lived experience, understandings, values, and social structures⁵⁶ of ordinary individuals and groups of people caught up in the tragedy of pedestrian-involved vehicle crashes. The coverage sometimes extended beyond the direct victims to friends and relations (including children, partners, and other kinfolk who lament their loss), neighbors (who encounter the same risks the victims did), witnesses to the violence, and community members (some more organized than others to take their concerns to the streets in protest). The drivers who harm them often inhabit the same or similar social world. The stories not only illustrate the context in which pedestrian-involved auto violence occurs but also reflect the content of the competing narratives about pedestrian-involved traffic violence that are abroad in the society. Moreover, taken as a whole they are useful for illuminating the basis in equity and social justice underlying Vision Zero’s approach.

The stories told herein begin with accounts from local Philadelphia print and television news sources that routinely report on crashes involving pedestrian deaths and severe injuries. The accounts were discovered through internet searches and relate to crashes that occurred between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023.⁵⁷ As a general matter, the reports begin with headlines situating the auto crashes within the city’s diverse “fabric of neighborhoods,”⁵⁸ neighborhoods with names like Mayfair,⁵⁹ Wissinoming,⁶⁰ and Tioga-Nicetown,⁶¹ that convey geographical and socioeconomic information to native Philadelphians. The stories portray people going about their routine activities (e.g., walking the dog,⁶² changing a tire for a stranded motorist,⁶³ or stopping at a deli on the way home from work⁶⁴) when they were struck by a vehicle or two and their lives abruptly changed or ended. The accounts usually provide the date, time, and geographic location of the crash; the age and gender, but not the name, race, or ethnicity, of the dead or wounded pedestrian; and the make and model of the colliding vehicle or vehicles. Videos of some collisions, captured on surveillance cameras and played on television and online (by the news outlets or on the PPD blotter), provide additional details.

Some of the reporting, however, is more expansive. Informed by Vision Zero, it goes beyond the single incident to connect multiple crashes, disclose crash statistics, point out limitations in the transportation infrastructure as contributing factors, and include input from community members who have considered the traffic risks in their environment and ways to reduce or eliminate them.⁶⁵ If the victim or the nature of the traffic violence sparks more than the usual attention among the readership or viewership, the media may do follow-up coverage disclosing the names and additional details about the direct victims, the loss incurred by their survivors and others who knew them, accounts by eyewitnesses and neighbors and the efforts of community activists and organizations to make the streets where the victims live, work, and play less dangerous. The names and images of the people and locations associated with traffic crashes included in the expansive coverage are a source, if not the only source, of relevant demographic or socioeconomic information.

Consider the following summary of a news item from a local television station that provided more details than the usual coverage and challenged the notions of fault and individual responsibility generally attributed to pedestrians. It illustrates that accidents that are blamed on pedestrian fault can be prevented by changes in the transportation infrastructure, such as by installing speed bumps or changing the timing of red lights.

A. Scene: January 4, 2023. Roxborough. Wendover Street and Henry Avenue. Appx. 8:45 pm.

The headline read “Roxborough Residents Fed up with Speeding Drivers on Henry Avenue after Another Fatal Crash.”⁶⁶ A 61-year-old woman from Bucks County was struck and killed by a speeding Chevy Malibu as she crossed Henry Avenue in the middle of the block.⁶⁷ She had just left Dalessandro’s, a popular restaurant “where people from throughout the Philadelphia Region and beyond flock for cheesesteaks. Crowds often pour out onto the sidewalk along Henry Avenue.”⁶⁸ The driver remained on the scene.

The owner of a seafood establishment on the street said it was “time for a strategy to slow down the traffic” because “crashes happen too often.” He and a pedestrian who had crossed mid-street suggested that speed bumps should be placed after the lights on that section of Henry Avenue. A third resident, however, voiced the opinion that it would be challenging to slow traffic on such a major artery. She suggested that pedestrians should “walk down to the light and cross legally” and it “‘helps . . . [t]o wear light-colored clothes at night.’”⁶⁹

The report specifically refers to a similar January 2022 fatal crash on the same stretch of road involving an adult pedestrian and child who had just left the cheesesteak restaurant.⁷⁰ Bryanna Gallagher of 6ABC reported then that:

People say Henry Avenue is dangerous, and with two popular cheesesteak spots on either side, people are always crossing and dodging traffic.” [A resident who walks his dog] said he does what he can do to keep them both safe. . . .“I pick her up, look both ways, and wait until after the light turns green. You have to really look[;] they’re going through the red lights too.”^{⁷¹Bryanna Gallagher, Car Hits Woman, 9-year-old Child Crossing Roxborough Road; Driver Runs from Scene, 6ABC Phila. (Sept. 23, 2022), https://6abc.com/roxborough-hit-and-run-henry-avenue-woman-stuck-child-injured/12256780.}

It should be noted that the site of these fatal traffic crashes is not in a “disadvantaged” community. Henry Avenue, which borders Fairmount Park, runs through East Falls and Roxborough. The population of each is majority White.⁷² The racial or ethnic identities of the victims in the accidents described above are unknown. Henry Avenue, however, is included in the HIN and has been the subject of road calming renovations.⁷³

Henry Avenue presents the quintessential equity or social justice issue facing Vision Zero programs. That is the conflict between, on the one hand, the interests of drivers in individualized motorized mobility and a transportation infrastructure that smooths traffic flow and, on the other, the interests of pedestrians in a walkable environment and a transportation infrastructure that protects their bodily integrity and provides the physical connections (like sidewalks and crosswalks) that make for livable communities.⁷⁴ Pedestrians have, by and large, lost out to motorists, which leaves the former with the burden of self-protection.⁷⁵ Vision Zero, which elevates the importance and contribution of infrastructure to traffic violence, should change how we view that burden. Flipping the script, as it were, pedestrians’ vulnerability is a restraint on their right to safely navigate the streets and the imposition upon them of a nonreciprocal risk in drivers’ favor.⁷⁶

Thus, Vision Zero suggests that we reconsider the fault attached to pedestrians’ jaywalking or crossing mid-block. Crosswalks were invented because of cars.⁷⁷ “Jaywalking” is a concept promoted by the auto industry in the 1930s and 1940s to combat the perception that cars were dangerous.⁷⁸ “A hostile infrastructure” may account for risky pedestrian behavior.⁷⁹ A pedestrian who is injured or killed crossing a road illegally may have chosen a safer or more efficient route given the built environment. Pedestrians “need crosswalks at locations where pedestrians really want and need to cross, not just where it is expedient for drivers.”⁸⁰

As we continue the search for factors accounting for vulnerable groups’ disparate experience of traffic violence, news stories reveal that in 2023, there were a number of instances where danger befell pedestrians/passengers at the interface of the transportation system and the transit system.

The following story from the Philadelphia Inquirer has the expansive coverage the communication critics recommend, describes a single incident involving the death of a passenger/pedestrian, relates it to others in the immediate area and citywide, and thereby alerts the readers to a systemic public safety issue that affects public health. It implicitly references Vision Zero, indicates that professional safety experts have been consulted, describes an infrastructure fix, and includes a price tag for corrective action.

B. Scene: April 18, 2023. North Philadelphia. Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. Appx. 9 am.

A 52-year-old female exited a SEPTA bus that pulled up on the right-hand side of the westbound lanes of Cecil B. Moore Avenue.⁸¹ The pedestrian crossed in front of the bus as the light for westbound traffic turned from red to green and walked into the path of a tractor-trailer that had been stopped to the left of the bus. The truck driver stayed at the scene. The pedestrian died later at Temple University Hospital. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

[T]he area of Cecil B. Moore Avenue and Broad Street draws foot traffic from surrounding shops, restaurants, and nearby Temple University, and has had a high concentration of accidents involving pedestrians. Along the corridor between Willington Street and 10th Street, nearly a third of total crash injuries are suffered by pedestrians, and half of all serious or fatal collisions involve pedestrians, according to a city study on traffic safety.⁸²

The article cites a study commissioned by “city transit officials” who are seriously studying the matter. “Among a range of safety proposals [advanced by the study] was the suggestion to add three to seven seconds of extra time to traffic signals for pedestrians to cross intersections before vehicles, reducing collisions by as much as 60%.” Concrete measures to reduce deaths would cost $4.15 million.

Pedestrians’ status as users of public transit systems may put them at risk of traffic violence. To the extent that Blacks and Latinos disproportionately rely on public transit relative to Whites, the former may suffer disparate rates of death and injuries as pedestrians. The discussion that follows supports that assumption.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin conducted a multivariate statistical analysis of potential factors contributing to the disparate impact of crashes involving Black pedestrian in Houston, Texas.⁸³ They reviewed the then-existing literature on pedestrian crash studies and identified the following four categories of “crash frequency determinants” that are associated with residential areas such as census block groups and race and ethnicity:⁸⁴

Built Environment Features (Including transportation-related land usage, schools, road design, and intersection types),

Crash Risk Exposure Attributes (Variables reflecting the distance, time, and modes of travel of pedestrians),

Sociodemographic Factors (Characteristics by which residents are categorized such as income, age, education, and racial diversity), and

Cultural Variables (Risk-related sociological, cultural, and behavioral differences).

The authors of the Houston study concluded that built-environment factors “[h]ave the most influence on the total number of pedestrian crashes.”⁸⁵ Furthermore, “transportation inequity in infrastructure provision . . . is a reason for the elevated pedestrian crashes in [majority Black census block groups]. The relative contribution of this category of variables also explains 36% of the total variation of crash-relevant characteristics between [majority Black and non-majority Black census block groups].”⁸⁶

Pedestrians’ exposure to crash risks comprised the second largest “contributing category” after the “Built Environment” category.⁸⁷ “[E]xposure (by way of population, employment, even transit use and walk mode use) by itself has only a moderate impact on pedestrian crashes, but it is exposure when also combined with [the built environment variables] that is key.”⁸⁸ The authors highlighted the significance of the “‘% commuting by public transit’ variable to the total number of crashes.”⁸⁹ When considered with “the ‘# of bus stops per 10 acres’ variable,” the second highest contributor of any other variable, “the importance of transit-related pedestrian safety investments” became clear.⁹⁰ “[C]onflicts around transit-embarking and transit-disembarking points [appear to be] substantially more of a determinant of pedestrian crashes than the act of walking itself.”⁹¹

Racial and ethnic differences in car ownership because of higher financing and insurance costs increase public transit usage.⁹² “Blacks without cars are exposed to vehicular violence as pedestrians because they make higher use of public transit accessed by walking; also “public transit stops/stations are significant pedestrian gathering places.”⁹³ A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Research Department concluded that, based on data available in 2019 before the COVID pandemic, Black commuters in Philadelphia spend more time commuting than their White counterparts. “Residential patterns play an important role in generating these differences, but commute speed is also important. Even when using the same mode [that is, car or transit, as their White counterparts], Black workers’ trips are substantially slower . . . . “⁹⁴ “This finding suggests that “Black commuters are driving in places that have slower speeds on average, or are served by transit that provides less access or has slower service.”⁹⁵ Finally, “the lower-income Black workers’ commutes were 20 percent longer than those of their White counterparts,” and “commutes for Black bus and subway riders have been growing longer than the commutes for White bus and subway riders.”⁹⁶

Traffic is not the only risk that pedestrians might encounter as they traverse the terrain required to access public transportation. Street crime, particularly gun violence, may be a compounding factor in the disparate outcomes Black and Latino pedestrians experience because of its effect on the behavior of both drivers and pedestrians.

C. Scene: June 19, 2023. Tioga-Nicetown. Broad Street and Erie Avenue. Appx. 11 pm.

A 52-year-old male, waiting for a bus on a corner near an entrance to SEPTA’s Broad Street subway, was hit by a white Ford after its driver, traveling at a high rate of speed, made an illegal left-hand turn, collided with an oncoming car, lost control, and traveled onto the sidewalk.⁹⁷ The collision demolished a newsstand, knocked down a light pole, and damaged the subway entrance. The man was pinned by the car for 10 minutes. He was hospitalized in critical condition. The PPD Fatal Crash Database indicates that he subsequently died.⁹⁸ A 47-year-old male waiting at the bus stop at the same time suffered minor injuries, as did the driver of the speeding white Ford, the driver of the second car, and his four passengers, two of whom were children five and six years old. Bystanders interviewed indicated that the intersection was dangerous for pedestrians. (In fact, three weeks earlier, at 1:29 am on May 28, 2023, a pedestrian was struck at Broad and Erie by the driver of a black Chrysler 300 who left the scene; that victim also died hereafter at Temple Hospital.)⁹⁹

In July 2023, the City announced plans for a $7.5 million makeover of Butler Triangle in the area where Broad Street, Erie Avenue, and Germantown Avenue intersect.¹⁰⁰ The improvements call for a transit plaza with an elevator to the Broad Street subway, bus shelters, “[s]idewalks with trees,” and “[c]rosswalks with shorter pedestrian crossings.”¹⁰¹ The corridor coordinator pronounced the area “an eyesore” and “blighted;” she added that blight causes “negative things” to happen.¹⁰² According to the Action News Data Journalism Team, there had been “95 shootings in a two-block radius of the intersection since 2015” and “72 crashes, including four fatalities within 500 feet of the intersection.”¹⁰³ Mayor Kenney declared the project “an important step in meeting [the City’s] Vision Zero goals.”¹⁰⁴

Indeed, the authors of the Houston study found that (a) Black census block groups had more reported crime, (b) there was a “higher reported crash risk when there is a higher reported crime rate,” and (c) “a higher fraction of Black pedestrian crashes [occurred] in locations of high reported crime rate.”¹⁰⁵ In explaining their findings, they noted that the higher crime rate was “linked to . . . historical structural racism . . . [as reflected in] the rampant growth of poverty, unemployment, low educational attainment, and police surveillance of minority neighborhoods.”¹⁰⁶

The PPD Fatality Database contains additional information that suggests there is a relationship between pedestrian deaths and injuries and street crime in Philadelphia. The Database includes the addresses or street locations of fatal crashes and the police districts in which the crashes occurred. The city has 21 police districts (not including the airport) divided into six geographical regions: South, Southwest, Central, East, Northeast, and Northwest.¹⁰⁷ The East Districts, which are east of Broad Street in North Philadelphia, were the site of 24% of the pedestrian-involved fatal crashes. They were followed, percentagewise, by the Southwest Districts, which are south of I-76 in West Philadelphia (22%), the Northeast Districts (19%), and the Northwest Districts, which are west of Broad Street and north of I-76 in West Philadelphia (19%). In 2023, the districts that were considered the “core four” districts where the then acting police commissioner said more than 40% of the city’s violence had occurred (i.e., the 22nd, 24th, 25th, and 39th) also accounted for 34% of pedestrian deaths.¹⁰⁸ The three districts that experienced the highest number of pedestrian deaths had the following racial/ethnic compositions: the East’s 24th is 15% Black and 47% Latino; the Northwest’s 35th is 71% Black and 14% Latino; and the Southwest’s 12th is 81% Black and 6% Latino.¹⁰⁹

In attempting to identify the source of the association between racialized space, crime rates, and pedestrian crashes, the Houston authors relied on their assertion that “[s]ociological, cultural, and behavioral differences can contribute to racial disparities in pedestrian crashes.”¹¹⁰ The high crime rate, they surmised, may have produced in pedestrians “discomfort” or fear of being either a crime victim or a victim of “aggressive racial-profiling based policing” (which could itself be responsible for the high reported crime rate).¹¹¹ “[C]rime, fear of crime, or fear of being accused of a crime is a social stressor influencing behavior.”¹¹² “[P]edestrians may attempt to reduce [their] exposure risk even if through unsafe pedestrian behaviors (such as jaywalking or crossing at an unmarked crosswalks).”¹¹³ Thus, residents of minority neighborhoods in negotiating the streets must deal with policing that is under protective and overly aggressive at the same time.

The authors also suggest crime rates are a proxy for intentional risk taking by Black pedestrians, that is to say, a form of “social resistant behavior” or defiance of the traffic laws of the state.¹¹⁴ While the effort to identify cultural determinants of pedestrian-involved crashes is correct, their analysis based on a generalized “social resistance theory” is weak. Determining the role that social/cultural factors play in this area requires qualitative research and a deeper dive into the actual disparate traffic experiences and cultures of the groups to which the pedestrians and drivers involved belong. For example, there are studies that show that racial bias in driver yielding behavior might account for the disparate vulnerability of Black pedestrians to death and injury.¹¹⁵ Nonetheless, the Houston study has importance because it opens lines of inquiry regarding the relevance of socially/culturally determined behavior in regard to pedestrian-related traffic risks and the possible impact of community engagement and involvement, if not resistance, in responding to dangers in the transportation environment. This Article will have more to say on those subjects.

The next segment considers how the demographics of a neighborhood and the conditions of its roadways influence drivers to engage in conduct that contributes to pedestrian deaths, i.e., hit-and-run driving.

D. Scene: March 14, 2023. Parkside. West Philadelphia. Lancaster Avenue & 49^th Street. Appx. 8:18 pm.

A 58-year-old female was crossing the street when she was struck by a speeding white Mitsubishi that continued westbound on Lancaster.¹¹⁶ The woman, sans her shoes, landed in the eastbound lane where she was struck by a silver Nissan that partially pinned her. The second driver stayed at the scene where she was pronounced dead. The Mitsubishi was soon found wrapped around a smashed pole near the 200 block of Belmont Avenue in Fairmount Park, approximately 2 miles from the accident scene. The victim was later identified as a mother who made her living by buying and delivering groceries to people with different abilities. She was on her way to a deli and then home. Philadelphia Police indicated that as of mid-March 2023 there had been a total of 914 hit-and-run crashes with the victim being the fourth fatality.

According to the PPD Database, in 2023, hit-and-run drivers were involved in crashes that killed 32 pedestrians (56% of the total). Unlike speeding, the role of hit-and-run driving is not mentioned as a significant risk factor in pedestrian deaths and injuries in PHL Vision Zero pronouncements and publications. The importance of hit-and-run driving to Philadelphia’s traffic violence, however, has been noted in news headlines about pedestrian deaths and serious injuries.¹¹⁷

Hit-and-run crashes are “collisions where the driver of the striking vehicle flees the scene before offering information or aid to the victim.”¹¹⁸ They leave pedestrians in greater jeopardy than the driver might realize. “By fleeing, the driver increases the risk of harm for the victim because the flight often results in delays in emergency service. It can also increase the victim’s exposure to being struck again.”¹¹⁹ In removing him or herself from the scene along with the striking vehicle, the driver may be removing the best evidence of what happened, and information needed in enable the victim to recover private insurance for their personal injuries.¹²⁰ Finally, leaving the scene of a crash that has resulted in personal injury to others is considered a moral failing according to the norms of ordinary people on the street.¹²¹

There are no doubt numerous variables that contribute to fatal hit-and-run collisions, some relating to the motives of drivers. The authors of a UK qualitative study based on interviews with 50+ persons convicted of hit-and-run driving identified six categories of drivers based on their motivations.”¹²² Some drivers feared stiff sanctions if their involvement in a collision were disclosed because they were illegally operating a motor vehicle or feared that their insurance premiums would increase. Bolting seemed the “rational choice.” Hence, the authors tagged them “rational escapists.” Other drivers were described as being “panicky,” “impaired,” “intimidated,” “uncertain,” and “oblivious.”¹²³ Not all the reasons motivating flight, then, are amenable to infrastructure fixes.

In addition to their motivations, drivers’ actions take place in the context of environmental factors that impact the decision to flee. A statistical study relying on U.S. national data assessed factors associated with fatal hit-and-runs and reached the following conclusions:

“[D]rivers were most likely to leave the scene of crashes that occurred at night, on weekends, on lower-speed local streets or roads, in higher-density areas (with the exception of the very densest ones), in areas where people walk to work, and in areas with higher rates of unemployment.”¹²⁴
“[D]rivers are more likely to leave the scene of a fatal crash in Census tracts in which a greater proportion is non-white.”¹²⁵
“[A]mong those drivers who left the scene of a fatal crash, those who crashed in areas with poorer economic indicators were also more likely to remain at large.”¹²⁶

The safety of the physical transportation environment, particularly the built infrastructure, is assumed to vary with the socio-economic status and political influence of habitants of the community in which it exists. As previously discussed, negative assumptions about the threat posed by people traveling in cars and on foot in enclaves characterized by social and economic inequality might fuel risk taking behavior by both drivers and pedestrians and responsibility avoiding behavior by drivers. Social and economic inequality might also impact the effectiveness of law enforcement in the area, and the quality and quantity of the evidence community resources provide toward the identification of hit-and-run drivers.

Lighting, cameras, traffic calming devices, and other improvements in the physical environment that heighten the visibility of pedestrians and vehicles, illuminate the crash scene, or slow drivers down might prevent collisions and flight, as well as reduce the odds that exiting the crash scene will be successful. Moral scruples might or might not kick in. For the rational driver, the effectiveness of any deterrent may depend on the costs of fleeing exceeding the benefits.

The next section discusses a widely held cultural orientation of drivers that affects their regard for the safety of other categories of users of the roadways and the people who inhabit the communities in which those roadways are located.

III. Car Culture, Car Counterculture, and the Freedom of “Social Resistance”

Americans have a car culture, albeit with a number of subcultures, that links automobiles with mobility, personal autonomy, wealth, status, prestige, and power.¹²⁷ It is a culture in that it is “a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of a community use to define themselves and guide their daily understandings, interactions, and expectations.”¹²⁸

Cars embody physical energy in their capacity to achieve high speeds harnessed in an individualized and privatized form of transportation.¹²⁹ Cars are independence “materialized” and commodified. Enthusiasts alter the exteriors of their cars to showcase their sense of style and creativity and modify the internal mechanics of their cars to reflect their technical prowess. Cars play a role in the “ritualized entry into adulthood” and the psychological differentiation of “gender and generation.”¹³⁰ Cars were integral to the suburbanization of the white population; according to cultural commentator Paul Gilroy, “White flight from urban centres was not just accomplished by means of the automobile, it was premised on it.”¹³¹

Car culture is just one contributor to what has been characterized as “automobile supremacy.”¹³² In post-WWII America, the automobile was a key element in numerous areas of the economy, including manufacturing, finance, labor, housing, consumer safety, insurance, advertising, land use, health care, law, and of course, transportation. This triggered movements in opposition to the dominance of automobility. Although automobiles’ material significance may have declined, their supremacy lives on in car culture. Car culture influences the actions of drivers, including behind the wheel. Although traffic laws and enforcement sometimes adopt the norms of car culture, car culture more importantly sometimes diverges from and challenges traffic regulation.

For Black people, America’s car culture has had both a positive and negative impact. Historically, Blacks have endured various forms of transportation discrimination and restraints on their mobility, beginning during slavery with fugitive slave laws, continuing through Jim Crow segregation, and persisting up to and including the present. All the while, Black people have resisted restraints on their freedom of movement, as exemplified by the Underground Railroad, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters headed by A. Phillip Randolph, the Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Boycott, and the Freedom Riders.¹³³ Against the backdrop of Blacks’ history of material deprivation, which impacted both their wages and their wealth, and social and political subordination, large-scale post-WWII Black car ownership meant that they would finally be able to enjoy some of the status and freedom associated with car culture. Private automobiles provided Blacks more privacy and fewer indignities than public transportation and were an alternative mode of travel with which to sustain the fight for civil rights.

Today, Blacks, along with Latinos and drivers from other disfavored groups, suffer disparate treatment in terms of police surveillance on the roads and the revenue-raising traffic fines and costs that result when they are cited and ticketed for infractions.¹³⁴ “Driving While Black” is a widely understood euphemism for a form of racial profiling in traffic enforcement that too often results in deadly consequences,¹³⁵ and “Driving While Brown” refers to the illegal targeting of persons of Latino/Hispanic American ethnicity for immigration-related investigatory stops.¹³⁶ In addition, for many drivers of color and of limited economic means, the intangible benefits of participation in car culture come with additional individual and collective costs in the form of predatory car loans, inadequate public transit systems that immobilize those without private automobiles, harmful environmental pollution from proximity to traffic and fossil fuel production and storage facilities, a system of laws that make driver’s licenses the equivalent of national identity cards, and the denial of the privilege of legally driving to immigrants.¹³⁷ “[T]he availability of a car . . . [is not merely] a sign or consequence of inequality . . . it is one of its key sources.”¹³⁸

Furthermore, material and legal impediments that prevent some drivers from legally participating in American car culture may be fueling traffic violence and the disparate impact of death and injuries incurred by Black and Latino pedestrians. Consider the following activities that are common in urban areas like Philadelphia:¹³⁹ stealing or carjacking automobiles to joyride, commit other crimes (like drive-by shootings), or sell either whole or chopped up, either locally or for shipment abroad; illegally riding and performing stunts, often en masse, on dirt bikes and ATVs which the police may destroy if they are confiscated; and drag racing on public highways, often in the presence of spectators informed of “the meetups” by social media and positioned close enough to the action to capture it on cellphones and post online, if they are not run over. These activities (1) involve groups sharing a common car counterculture, (2) clearly violate the law, (3) put the drivers and others in proximity at risk of being killed or seriously injured, (4) are not easily thwarted by changes in the transportation infrastructure or educational campaigns, and (5) are guaranteed to frustrate law enforcement. These activities do not undercut the oppressive and exploitative aspects of American car culture for those concerned about protecting civil and human rights. These activities do not threaten the economic, political, cultural, or social interests of powerful and influential institutions with a stake in car culture and the people who control them.

The label “resistance” should be reserved for critical “oppositional behavior” with the potential to be “transformative.”¹⁴⁰ “Real resistance would represent ‘an element of difference, a counter-logic . . . [a] rejection of those forms of domination inherent in the social relations against which it reacts,’ and a move that threatens to disrupt the operations of the material infrastructure.”¹⁴¹ As sociologists Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey wrote in a seminal article on resistance to legal authority, “Resistance entails a consciousness of being less powerful in a relationship of power” and “a consciousness of . . . an opening in the situation through which one might intervene and turn matters to one’s advantage.”¹⁴² Resistance, by word or deed, exposes “the structural bases of power,” constitutes “a political act of making a moral claim on power,” and reflects an “insistence on human agency and dignity.”¹⁴³

Freedom of mobility or transportation justice requires opposition to the harms car culture produces and the pursuit of alternatives that embrace people and community. Culture is a determinant of traffic violence and must be an aspect of the resistance to car culture mounted by groups, associations, and networks willing to put their economic, political, social, and cultural capital, which is to say, their sources of power, to beneficial use. The inclusion of community engagement within the mission of Vision Zero programs provides an opportunity for those concerned about transportation-related inequities, particularly those involving traffic violence, with an opening to challenge car culture.

IV. The Link Between a Concern for Equity and Input from Community Engagement

Residents of disparately impacted communities often recognize that infrastructure improvements might have saved a neighbor, and they protest and petition for changes in the built transportation environment. Expansive reporting shows that crashes can generate community engagement, but it does not always result in the improvements communities want, as is illustrated by the following summary of media accounts of two crashes in the same vicinity in Philadelphia, both involving hit-and-run drivers, albeit roughly three years apart.

E. Scene: April 13, 2023. Southwest Philadelphia. Cobbs Creek Parkway and 70^th Street. 10:46 am.

The driver of a white Ford Mustang convertible was traveling westbound on Cobbs Creek Parkway when he hit a 58-year-old female in the middle lane as she crossed the street.¹⁴⁴ The driver fled the scene, but the car was later found. The victim was hospitalized in critical condition. According to 6ABC’s Digital Staff and on-air reporter Sharifa Jackson, the victim was said to be “a well-known panhandler who has been in the same area for years.”¹⁴⁵ The victim died 10 days later.¹⁴⁶

A resident of the area pronounced the road “one of the craziest . . . Even with the speed bumps, people still drive crazy.”¹⁴⁷ A person who worked at a restaurant across from the crash site described it as follows: “‘This is a tough intersection because it goes five different ways and then the traffic light. Not a lot of people see that one there. If you don’t wait a couple of seconds when the light goes green, it can get tough.’’¹⁴⁸

The report further indicated that “[s]peeding has been an ongoing issue for years” and that “[i]n September of 2020, an advocacy group started a petition demanding . . . [that state and local agencies] implement better safety plans for pedestrians and bicyclists along the parkway.”¹⁴⁹ Traffic violence had long provoked community mobilization in Cobbs Creek.

On August 21, 2020 , a 25-year-old woman suffered fatal injuries while crossing Cobbs Creek Parkway at Catherine Street.¹⁵⁰ Avante Reynolds, the mother of a then two-month-old baby, was struck by a hit-and-run driver and wound up in the southbound lane, where she was struck again by a Kia whose operator stayed on the scene.¹⁵¹ Shortly thereafter, the community organized a public protest.¹⁵² The petition followed as well.

According to a 2020 story about Ms. Reynolds by Michaela Winberg of WHYY Plan Philly, the block captain and numerous neighbors reported making efforts for decades to secure improved pedestrian safety on the Parkway. In their view, lobbying resulted in “only tiny improvements that . . . haven’t made much of a difference. It’s an example of a troubling national phenomenon: Communities of color don’t get access to traffic safety measures with the same ease as predominantly white neighborhoods.”¹⁵³ Winberg noted that Cobbs Creek Parkway, like many arteries considered among the most dangerous in the City, is located in a community of color that has “struggled[d] with higher rates of poverty and lower property values that trace back to the redlining practices that diverted investment in the 20^th century.”¹⁵⁴

Recall that in Philadelphia’s Vision Zero Action Plan 2025, the City acknowledged that “[t]he concentration of traffic safety problems in lower income communities and communities of color is not accidental but reflects disinvestment” and that “demonstrated infrastructure needs exceed the available funding.”¹⁵⁵ Underinvestment and disinvestment in such areas may have begun with redlining, but it continued as an aspect of the building of the national interstate highway system which was championed by President Dwight Eisenhower and gained momentum with federal funding authorized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Cities were experiencing deindustrialization, the White population was moving to the suburbs, roadways were too congested for smooth commuting, and poor Black people were occupying “slums” near central business districts that, if redeveloped, would benefit the economy. In Philadelphia, plans for what became the Schuylkill Expressway, Roosevelt Boulevard, the Vine Street Extension, and the Delaware Expressway were finally executed during this time.¹⁵⁶ After 1960, “housing, redevelopment, and expressways” came to be “critical to the renaissance of the city” in the view of “planners and business and civic leaders.”¹⁵⁷ The highway program in Philadelphia impacted Black and White poor and working class people although Blacks may have borne the brunt of the destruction of homes, businesses, and the benefits of communal life.

An approach similar to Philadelphia’s was taken in Detroit, St. Paul, Houston, and elsewhere throughout the country. Highways were built to speed the movement of suburban drivers to work and shopping in city centers.¹⁵⁸ In addition, minority neighborhoods were declared “blighted,” cleared, divided, surrounded, or destroyed. The residents were moved into public housing built elsewhere or forced to live in circumstances of increased segregation and concentrated poverty. In addition, funding for public transit favored light rail, over buses and subways, with the aim of enticing suburbanites to leave their cars at or near home.¹⁵⁹ As a result, communities of color and/or of lower income were confronted with a transportation infrastructure of highways and arterial roadways that produced public health disparities attributable to, among other environmental harms, air and noise pollution and threats to traffic safety.

The roadway projects met with community resistance that sometime succeeded. Despite protests from the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation and the “Save Chinatown” movement, the expansion of the Vine Street expressway shrunk the community which had already lost ground to an expansion of Independence Mall.¹⁶⁰ Both the working-class community of Southwark (Philadelphia’s first settlement, long the home of longshoremen) and the middle-and-upper-income redeveloped community of Society Hill challenged plans for the Delaware Expressway.¹⁶¹ Society Hill got a below-grade roadway with two covers, while Southwark lost 2,000 row homes and access to the Delaware River, a source of employment.¹⁶² There was a successful organized community resistance to the construction of the Crosstown Expressway which would have run along South Street and connected the Schuylkill and Delaware Expressways.¹⁶³ However, by the time the decision was made to abandon the South Street project, property values along the corridor had fallen and businesses had failed. South Street became a barrier between the upscale, predominantly White Center City/Society Hill neighborhood to the north and the Black middle and lower-class neighborhoods to the south.¹⁶⁴ According to one commentator:

Of course no racist agenda was ever cited in the official documents, and the pro-Crosstown public officials were not viewed by their opponents as having racial motives; but still, that effect was quite real to the landlords and real estate agents who explicitly cited the Crosstown and its barrier effect as a selling point when pitching the northern neighborhoods to white perspective renters.¹⁶⁵

The neighborhoods to the south of South Street, Queen Village and Point Breeze, were eventually gentrified.

In the building of the national highway system, there were instances of blatant intentional racial discrimination and others where the disparate negative impact on urban minority neighborhoods was obvious.¹⁶⁶ One legal expert has described the transportation boom of the last century as a failure to deploy civil rights laws as “tools for community equity.”¹⁶⁷ In fact, because the interstate highway infrastructure is aging and needs replacement, the inequities that permeated its beginnings, as well as contemporary concerns about “healthy, cost-effective, livable” transportation options, are generating “an expressway teardown movement.”¹⁶⁸ Parts of the highway system are being removed and rerouted. Urban of communities that were divided by highways are being reconnected or “stitched” backed together. Unlike their counterparts during the initial building stages, today’s planners and policymakers should know to involve “community stakeholders,” consider “community values,” and pursue equity.¹⁶⁹

V. Vision Zero Equity and a Way Forward with Greater Emphasis on Community Engagement

Vision Zero contemplates community engagement as one tool for achieving traffic violence abolition. For example, Philadelphia’s Vision Zero Ambassadors Program is an initiative to involve well-connected citizens as active participants in the effort to abolish traffic injuries and deaths. The ambassadors are charged with fostering community relations with residents of Philadelphia’s diverse neighborhoods by “promot[ing] education around Vision Zero and pedestrian safety” and providing Philadelphians with the tools they need to advocate for safer streets in their neighborhoods.” The ambassadors also share their impressions of the Vision Zero Program internally and identify dangerous intersections within their own neighborhoods.¹⁷⁰

Additionally, Philadelphia’s Slow Zone Grant Program offers a funded opportunity for a community to address its speeding problem. Slow Zone awards provide traffic calming improvements, such as curb extensions and S-shaped roadways, for an entire sector of residential streets.¹⁷¹ Communities must submit applications and compete for funding based on a scoring system that considers their crash history, population demographics (age, income, and BIPOC), public spaces, and evidence of community support.¹⁷² However, the window for submissions is narrow, the number of grants is limited, the selection process is competitive, and because the projects involve substantial community input, actual completion may take a couple of years.¹⁷³

As these examples suggest, though, there are limits to the ability of Vision Zero programs to achieve effective community engagement. Community engagement is a two-way street, no pun intended. A community may not be receptive to outreach efforts if its prior complaints about transportation issues via calls to 311, the local police precinct, or the relevant city or state agencies were ignored or produced inadequate responses.¹⁷⁴ Residents might be reluctant to point out risky or reckless driver behavior for fear of provoking increased traffic enforcement, which might lead to more racial profiling by law enforcement or excessive, regressive traffic fines for themselves and their neighbors.

Attention might also be paid to pedestrians’ risky behavior. That requires sensitivity; residents are unlikely to be interested in decontextualized discussions of pedestrians’ conduct that do not also address a transportation environment with built-in structural inequities, government agencies unresponsive to complaints, and a public transit system that is considered dangerous and inefficient. Conversely, neighbors may be wary of improvements affecting traffic that are implemented in the absence of their request or without their being fully informed beforehand.¹⁷⁵ They may also fear that improvements in the transportation infrastructure will open the neighborhood up to gentrification, which can cause the displacement of residents and destroy the community’s cohesiveness and quality of life.¹⁷⁶

Organized communities have two choices. They can focus on the perpetrators of traffic violence and do what they can to change behavior through education and support for legal mandates or enforcement of punitive sanctions with the goal of directly altering drivers’ calculation of the risks and benefits of driving recklessly, breaking traffic laws, and endangering the lives of their neighbors and others utilizing the community’s road.¹⁷⁷ For instance, one commentator has argued that “greater efforts should first and foremost be made at increasing motorist awareness of and respect for vulnerable users.”¹⁷⁸ Social media, public hearings, ceremonies of commemoration might be employed to shed light on the suffering of victims and co-victims of traffic violence and the activism of community voices around the issue.¹⁷⁹ Video, a powerful medium for generating understanding and empathy among diverse populations, has been used to educate the public in general and young people in particular about the harms associated with stealing cars, running over vulnerable walkers and bikers, and leaving pedestrians lying in the street, seriously injured or dead.¹⁸⁰

Alternatively, communities might take a more positive or affirmative approach by directing tangible resources to support preferred conduct, promoting norms that define the preferred conduct, and extending their social capital to back organizations and groups that participate in the preferred conduct.¹⁸¹ The effort should serve as proof of the community’s commitment to upholding the rights of all to transportation justice. These approaches are likely to be more effective in changing conduct and building resistance to the harms car culture inflicts on socially, politically, and economically marginalized groups.

Communities might enlist role models or grassroots activists who employ modes of transportation or mobility to escape the myriad forms of injustice and discrimination associated with the dominance of car culture. They might offer social and financial support for bicyclists and walkers through, for example, holding free sneaker giveaways or making safety vests, reflective sashes, and blinking lights readily available to them. Other alternatives include promoting clubs and support groups to enhance the mobilization of residents asserting their rights to transportation equity. Community groups should delve more deeply into the many iterations of “Bike Life” and figure out ways to turn the defiant practices of young bike, dirt bike, e-bike, and ATV riders into resistance.¹⁸² In response to mass “ride-outs” that create traffic hazards which anger other users of the roadways and disturb the peace of residents, the police in urban locations like Philadelphia are confiscating and destroying such vehicles,¹⁸³ which seems like an awful waste given that the riders may be persons whose transportation, recreational, and occupational options, not to mention funds, are limited. Communities need to engage in discussions with young people about switching to alternative forms of transportation, such as cheaper pedal-powered or motorized bikes, scooters, unicycles, and skateboards, which may be lawfully ridden on public streets or raced on tracks, safer from physical and carceral risk.¹⁸⁴

Biking represents a cheaper, healthier, environmentally friendly alternative to driving a car. However, biking is associated with a culture that is perceived as being “exclusionary”: “The dominant image of cycling is [that of a] white, young, well-off, able-boded male activity.”¹⁸⁵ Yet many people who do not match the stereotype are relying on bikes to satisfy the most utilitarian transportation needs. They are doing so in a transportation environment hostile to biking (sans bike lanes) and without access to bike sharing options. Biking for serious transportation purposes “requires three elements: the ability to cycle in local traffic, the availability of a suitable, working bicycle, and the skills to use it.”¹⁸⁶ Children, seniors, and persons with disparate abilities also need vehicles and a transportation infrastructure that accommodate them. Underserved communities might encourage biking by their residents through demands for an improved biking transportation infrastructure, as well as greater access to government supported bike sharing programs, riding lessons, instruction in vehicle maintenance and repair, and opportunities for group recreational riding experiences. They might find allies among cycling advocacy organizations that have pledged to promote diversity in the activity, like the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia.

It is impossible to predict if these measures will lead to effective resistance to, and transformation of, car culture and the spread of transportation justice. More research and experimentation are required. In an article entitled “The Community in Criminal Justice: Subordination, Consumption, Resistance, and Transformation,” legal scholar and qualitative sociologist Monica Bell calls for more participatory action research involving communities as co-producers of data.¹⁸⁷ The goal of such research would be to generate, in addition to important information, “narrative sharing, community organization, and democratic power-building.”¹⁸⁸ According to Professor Bell, participation increases communities’ “collective sense of efficacy,” “cohesion,” “social and political solidarity,” and “political organizing and expressions of democratic power.”¹⁸⁹ Participatory research would put more communities in a position to contribute to a transformation movement: “A transformative community demands change, harnesses democratic power to shift leadership, learns about the inner-workings of the power structure in order to change policies and budgets, and models change by developing community-based alternatives [to the status quo].”¹⁹⁰

Israeli professor Roni Factor participated in a study “test[ing] a public participation process aimed at reducing traffic offenses, using two sets of Israeli Arab communities.”¹⁹¹ Israeli Arabs are overrepresented in both traffic crashes and traffic violations.¹⁹² They are described by the author as “experience[ing] higher rates of poverty and discrimination, and they suffer from both under-policing within in their communities and over-policing outside them.”¹⁹³ They report having less trust in, and receiving harsher treatment from, the police. Two pairs of Israeli Arab localities were chosen for the study; each pair included a control group and an experimental group.¹⁹⁴ The hypothesis to be evaluated was as follows: “A public participation process for dealing with traffic violations within a minority community, and implementation of an enforcement program and communication campaigns designed during the process, will reduce traffic violations in the locality, compared to a control group.”¹⁹⁵

The public participation process included ten individual in-depth interviews, a dozen-member steering committee, and deliberative forums with 25 participants that met three or four times for two-and-a-half hours with a professional mediator as the leader.¹⁹⁶ The forums identified new locations or hot spots for enforcement activity which was to be maintained at a moderate level. The forums also proposed communication campaigns that included posters, leaflets, social media announcements, a parade, and a public gathering. Once the enforcement plan was implemented, driver behavior and police ticketing were monitored.¹⁹⁷

The author stated the results as follows:

[A] true public participation process to analyze local traffic problems and to design a customized enforcement program can meaningfully involve the community in solving local problems, while spotlighting dark hot spots for enforcement can lead to real reductions in traffic violations. This is so even though the overall intensity of enforcement was kept at a moderate level.¹⁹⁸

In attempting to explain the results, Professor Factor first suggested that the participation process and the communication campaigns may have “change[d] the community’s attitudes toward law-enforcement authorities, increasing trust in and legitimacy of the police.”¹⁹⁹ This accords with the theory, identified with Yale Law Professor Tom Tyler, that the legitimacy of, and compliance with, the law depend on procedural justice.²⁰⁰ Then again, Factor writes, “[B]y actively involving minority groups in the decision making process (and thereby giving them ownership of the process), the intervention may encourage behavior change from within (in contrast to traditional educational or public-awareness campaigns, which may be perceived as paternalistic and so only deepen alienation from the authorities and the larger society.)”²⁰¹ Finally, he proffers a third speculation: “[A] combination of the customized enforcement program, which focused on particularly problematic and previously ignored locations, and the associated communication campaigns themselves reduced traffic violations across the entire community, whether by generating an increase in trust and legitimacy or through deterrence.”²⁰²

While the experimental communities did not design the participatory component of the research project and were not in control of it, the project offered them the opportunity to gain experience with community empowerment in a situation where there were resources to support their efforts. Participation in projects to assure transportation justice is a device for building strong communities. This is where human relations commissions like the PCHR can play a useful role. They are not “criminal law” enforcement agencies but are “civil rights” or antidiscrimination enforcement agencies. The goal of their community relations work is promoting “neighborliness” between competing or contentious communities or competing or contentious factions within a community.

Cooperation, thoughtfulness, concern, helpfulness, tolerance, and civility–the values associated with expressions of “neighborliness” toward those living near one’s home–have been invoked in connection with traffic safety campaigns.²⁰³ Car culture posits “driving as an adversarial and individually focused activity.”²⁰⁴ The “cocoon” or protective bubble design of contemporary cars and the pro-driver transportation infrastructure make some drivers feel as if they own the road and that other road users are “adversaries and their behavior aggressive or even hostile.”²⁰⁵ But driving is “a social activity”²⁰⁶ that “clearly requires coordination and anticipating what other road users might be doing, as well as paying special attention and concern to those who might be vulnerable in the event of a crash.”²⁰⁷ Other road users include “a wide range of people, who have names, personalities and families just like drivers.”²⁰⁸ Some might be the drivers’ actual neighbors. Despite the teachings of car culture, “no one [user group] has ownership or exclusive rights to the road.”²⁰⁹ Equity affirms “access to the roads, the safety accorded each type of road user and values and social norms regarding mutual consideration and even altruism.”²¹⁰

In the name of transportation justice and equity, as broadly understood and as directly invoked by the Vision Zero campaign for abolition of traffic violence, communities might pursue neighborliness by, for example, undertaking their own on-the-ground road safety audits of their transportation infrastructure including its intersection with the public transit system; providing a forum or conducting an outreach effort so especially vulnerable community residents (senior citizens, the disparately abled, night workers, the marginally housed and employed) can raise their traffic safety concerns; investigating the post-crash emergency medical care and survivor support services available to community residents; demanding the collection and dissemination of data by the appropriate government bodies, police and civilian, of incidents of traffic violence resulting in personal injuries, not just death, within the boundaries of the community; and appealing for the creation of vehicle-free zones where requests for traffic calming infrastructure improvements have been denied or implementation has been delayed in favor of other communities.²¹¹ There is much that communities empowered by values of both neighborliness and social justice can contribute to the goals of Vision Zero.

Equity’s relevance to the push for road safety, like road safety itself, is not limited to the prevention of crashes, injuries, and deaths. The intent of invoking equity here is not to promote or restore primacy to the assignment of individual responsibility or traffic enforcement as a way of preventing traffic violence. Vision Zero has moved us beyond that. Rather, the aim is to acknowledge “the social and complex cultural context of driving and road use”²¹² and to focus attention on the “pertinent road and safety issues, policies and norms that concern road safety directly and those that are embedded in broader areas.”²¹³

Consider the range of negative public health effects attributable to a transportation system deeply rooted in car culture, such as air and noise pollution, urban heat island effects, sedentary lifestyles, restraints on the mobility of disparately able road users, and the strains caused by the absence of long-term support systems for survivors of traffic crashes. The umbrella of constituencies impacted by the politics and policies supporting road safety is quite broad. It includes unions, employee collectives, and even employers who are interested in the welfare of workers who, lacking private cars, commute by walking or taking public transit in the dark; victim support service providers who work with co-victims and survivors of violent crime; and communities fighting for physical reconnection because they were “harmed, isolated, and cut off by transportation infrastructure” from jobs, education, food, and recreation during the highway boom of the last century.²¹⁴ The quest for road safety impacts public health, environmental justice, civic engagement, and community empowerment. Social justice and equity are “core arguments for road safety” and should provide a basis for mobilizing support from activists and organizations working across civil society that are wedded to the same fundamental values that should support transformative resistance to the dominance of car culture, namely equity and transportation justice.

Conclusion

In the jurisdictions where it is adopted, Vision Zero programs aim to abolish death and serious injury from traffic violence primarily by focusing on engineering or reengineering the transportation infrastructure with the safety concerns of all users of the roadways, including pedestrians, in mind. Eschewing the usual focus on individual accountability, Vision Zero takes the systems approach and puts the onus to professional experts to take human fallibility into account. If engineering is ineffective, traffic enforcement, aided by speed and redlight cameras and other technological fixes, is an alternative.

The data shows, however, that some users of the roadways are more endangered by traffic violence than others. These users are burdened by social, economic, political, and cultural/educational disadvantages that contribute to their disparate exposure to traffic-related harm. These users belong to groups that are subject to marginalization and discrimination on account of their race, ethnicity, gender, class, or physical, mental, or emotional abilities. Not only are they at greater relative risk than their majority opposites, but the roadways in the communities in which they reside, work, and play are higher risk too. Thus, where pedestrians are concerned, societal injustice is reflected in the disparate and unfair allocation of the burdens and benefits of our transportation system they bear.

Thus, inequity, or, to put it affirmatively, equity, is a concern for Vision Zero programs. This Article addresses the role inequity plays in producing disparities in pedestrian deaths and injuries and what Vision Zero programs can do to eliminate them.

One conclusion that should be drawn from the Article is that there needs to be more research and more data regarding the social and cultural context and life circumstances of the nondriver users of our roadways who wind up victims of traffic violence. For example, the analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department data from 2023 showed that male pedestrians were overrepresented among those killed by traffic collisions and that a surprising number of those males were in their prime wage-earning years. However, the data does not indicate the social/cultural group membership, employment, or family connections of those male victims. The significance of the limitations of the available information is evident in the analysis of the impact of street crime and law enforcement profiling on how male pedestrians navigate the streets during hours of darkness.²¹⁵ Qualitative research should be employed if the information cannot be collected quantitatively. Furthermore, impacted groups should participate in this research.

The granular details of news stories about pedestrian deaths and serious injuries reveal patterns of causality and connections. The stories illustrated the importance of hit-and-run driving as a contributing factor to pedestrian injuries²¹⁶ and the vulnerability of people, especially commuters, who are pedestrians vis-á-vis the transportation infrastructure and passengers vis-á-vis the transit system. The interplay between the two systems is an important contributor to the serious harm befalling pedestrians and should be studied and addressed.²¹⁷

This Article’s most important contribution relates to its analysis of the role of car culture in legitimizing and fueling traffic violence and contributing to the disparate impact of death and injury experienced by pedestrians, particularly those belonging to historically marginalized groups. Participation in car culture – the love of cars and the freedom and status car ownership and licensed driving can produce – varies across the broad spectrum of groups in America. However, for many, the burdens exceed the benefits. Indeed, the detriments can be severe. Financial debt to the banks and the courts. Criminal justice system involvement. Harm from environmental pollution. License denials based on immigration status. Death and injury to oneself and one’s neighbors.

Finally, car culture must be addressed on the ground and by means specific to the context. Communities, the places where the norms of neighborliness are an element of everyday people’s lives, are an underutilized resource in the effort to bring about traffic violence abolition and road safety. Communities possess information about hot spots where traffic violence occurs or is likely to occur. Communities can supply information about inadequacies in the transit system that interact with deficiencies in the transportation infrastructure to put pedestrians/passengers in danger. Community participation is empowering; it creates cultural, social, and political assets that the community can exploit to address a range of issues.

Transportation justice grounded in Vision Zero’s concept of equity should be invoked to stop the violence in the streets that car culture has normalized. Transportation justice is supported by an honored history of resistance to biased restraints on mobility, a commitment to right historical wrongs, and a route to the achievement of Vision Zero’s goal of eliminating traffic violence.

* Professor Emerita, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. The author thanks Matt Blaszczyk, Managing Editor of the Journal, for his stewardship of this article and Professor Gregory H. Shill for his insightful feedback. The author’s exploration of the issue of pedestrian deaths in Philadelphia began while she served on the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations (PCHR). I am grateful to my then fellow commissioner Rebecca Alpert and then Executive Director Kia Ghee for conducting background interviews right after Adam Paul Susaneck’s Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times in April of 2023. I thank them both for believing that the project was worth pursuing. This Article represents my research and views, and not necessarily the views of the PCHR, my former colleagues, or the City of Philadelphia.