Right of Way Quotes

“In a single quarter in 2017, for example, eight states—Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Oregon, and Wisconsin—transferred a total of $29 million out of their transportation alternatives funding and moved it to other programs: namely, roads and highways.23 Margo Pedroso, deputy director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, said that about 20 percent of the $850 million the federal government provides to states for walking and biking projects gets transferred to roads projects. “The largest offender is Texas,” she said. “They get so much money and they transfer 50 percent pretty regularly.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Twenty-two US states have amended their constitutions to forbid any gasoline tax revenues at all from being spent on sidewalks.37 Many of these laws were passed in the 1960s with the financial backing of highway construction lobbyists.38 At the federal level, bicyclists and pedestrians now represent about one in five traffic deaths, but they receive less than 1.5 percent of all federal infrastructure funding.39 Increasing political polarization may also play a role. Just as the pedestrian death crisis was beginning to present itself in 2012, and in an era of loud and renewed interest in active transportation, the Republican-led US Congress substantially reduced federal funding support for walking and biking programs. In addition, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the newly regulation-averse US Department of Transportation slow-walked reforms that could have, for the first time, made automakers more accountable for their design impacts on pedestrian safety.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Pedestrian victims also contend with an American culture of complacency around traffic deaths more generally. The general acceptance of these deaths as tragic but inevitable has headed off the necessary work of recognizing solutions and finding the will to implement them, even as the numbers have soared.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Had eleven people been shot by a mass shooter in Phoenix, it would have made national news. By contrast, routine pedestrian deaths do not inspire furious press conferences or congressional hearings. Three of that week’s victims were never even identified by name in the press. Nevertheless, their deaths represent an alarming—and until very recently, largely unexplained—trend.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Early in the crisis, many right-wing figures, including President Trump, used traffic deaths—some 37,000 annually—to make the case that some amount of loss of life is an acceptable price to pay for a strong economy. (In the case of the pandemic, we’re talking truly staggering figures.) It was a bad analogy in a lot of ways, but it helped emphasize the strange tolerance we have in our culture for traffic deaths and how they can desensitize us to other forms of cruelty and injustice.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Smart Growth America recently named North Carolina the seventh most dangerous state in the country for pedestrians and cyclists, and the loss of funding, said Lansdell, “hurts dramatically.”22”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“In contrast to modern media accounts, the news at the time was unflinching about where to lay the blame: on drivers. The St. Louis Star, for example, referred to drivers involved with pedestrian fatalities as “killers.” In 1923, an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said that even in the case of “a child darting into the street” in “the excitement of play,” the “plea of unavoidable accident in such cases is the perjury of a murderer.”18”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“In Sacramento in April 2017, for example, a twenty-four-year-old black man, Nandi Cain Jr., was stopped by police for jaywalking. The stop ended with an arrest, but not before a bystander had filmed police punching Cain eighteen times.7 The beating made national headlines. To make matters worse, it turned out that Cain was not even jaywalking; dash cam footage later showed that he was crossing legally in an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. A follow-up investigation by the Sacramento Bee found that in the year prior to this incident, black residents had received 50 percent of the city’s jaywalking tickets, despite making up just 15 percent of the population.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America