Safe Routes to Schools and Incoherence on Safety: At the MPO

The Policy Committee for the Metropolitan Planning Organization meets on Tuesday the 27th, and Mayor Hoy will be a special guest as they talk about the lack of proportional representation at the MPO and how to incorporate Ausmville.

There's not really much new to say on that, and it is more interesting to consider a program that reports up into the same org chart as the MPO staff. It is formally separate, but very related.

In the paper yesterday was a nice feature on Safe Routes to School.

Yesterday's paper.

It's great to see more visibility for the Safe Routes to School program, which has struggled for traction here over the years.

It is important to teach kids how to walk and how to bike. Especially if they do not have parents modeling walking and biking, how will they learn? We might think of walking as some "natural" activity, and it is that, but there are also a number of conventions for the urban environment that need to be learned and are usefully taught. An anthropologist from Mars who happens to be bipedal would need to learn quite a bit for walking in a city.

Of course, the piece has some limits from genre constraints. Formally it's a feature on a person, not an analysis of a system.

Even so, the profile's frame also perfectly encapsulates what is wrong about so much of our conversation and approach to safety. Its balance is really off.

On Feb. 8, a Parrish Middle School student was hit by a car in a crosswalk outside the school, near where a student had been hit 10 months earlier.

A week later, Beth Schmidt was at the same intersection handing out safety bracelets to students.

This lede not only erases the driver in the "hit by car" trope, but also draws a problematic relation between cause and solution: A driver hits a student in a crosswalk, and the solution is to hand out safety bracelets to students. Who is the problem here? This mismatch characterizes so much of our safety conversation and analysis.

Punch Feb. 2nd, 1927

At then end the piece discusses the death of a coworker, and again employs the "hit by car" trope:

But the job has been sobering as well.

In December of 2022, when she was two months into the job, Schmidt’s co-worker was hit and killed by a car as she was crossing the street in front of their downtown Salem office.

Denise Vandyke, 54, had entered a crosswalk when the signal changed for her, but was hit by a van turning right, according to police reports. Vandyke was taken to Salem Hospital, where she died.

Was the problem that Vandyke lacked a safety bracelet? Again, who is the problem here?

via the former Twitter

It's drivers and cars, not the lack of special pedestrian gear. Focusing on the gear as the primary safety response puts the burden for safety on victims and potential victims and removes the burden for safety from those who actually employ lethal force.

• "The High-Viz Jacket won't Save You: Vision Zero Plan must focus on Drivers and their Cars"
• "Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan should focus more on Speed"
  

The focus needs to be on cars, drivers, and speed, not on better defensive walking practices by kids or adults, and not on more special pedestrian safety trinkets or high-visibility jackets and vests.

Teaching kids better walking practices, including defensive walking, is incomplete without a corresponding focus on the primary problems of driving and speed and jaydriving. Right now our approaches are very one-sided.

As for the actual meeting agenda, see previously on proportional representation:

• Protest from Aumsville last month, "Funding Pie Slices and a Front Street Project: At the MPO"
• A bit of a summary from November, "What is Equitable and Proportional Representation? At the MPO"

The MPO meets on Tuesday the 27th at noon, and the meeting agenda and packet is here in the meeting notice.