When Traffic Victims Were Public Losses
For more than 90 years, there has been a tacit agreement in the US to treat the right to walk as dispensable, and to treat each death in traffic as an individual loss to be grieved privately, behind closed doors. These responses to the dangers of walking and biking have kept deaths among pedestrians and cyclists out of public view. They have promoted a tendency to attribute such deaths to individual failures for which individuals alone — reckless drivers or careless pedestrians — are responsible.
But a century ago, judges defended pedestrians’ rights in city streets. The convenience of drivers was no grounds for infringing these rights. Any motorist driving too fast to avoid injuring or killing a pedestrian was regarded as speeding. Deaths to pedestrians, and especially to children, were regarded as intolerable public losses to be publicly grieved by the whole community.
These ceremonies made public issues out of private losses, and committed whole cities to making walking safer, even at a high cost to drivers’ convenience. They also signified that pedestrian safety was not to be secured at the cost of pedestrian rights; a city had to accommodate walking at least as much as it accommodated driving. From this perspective, a pedestrian’s death was never just the fault of a careless walker or a reckless driver. It reflected the failure of a city to defend the right to walk.
The Monument Movement
Baltimore’s monument was neither entirely local nor spontaneous. The National Safety Council, a nonprofit membership association, served as a consultant for Baltimore’s No Accident Week and advised similar campaigns in other cities. Industries and insurance companies had established NSC in 1913 to find ways to prevent injuries to workers, which grew costly to their employers as states introduced worker compensation laws. By the 1920s, NSC was extending its efforts into public safety campaigns to curb the growing number of injuries and deaths caused by motorists.
The participation of NSC and its local affiliates in the public safety campaigns of the 1920s indicates a practical, dollars-and-cents motive. Some automotive interest groups, especially local automobile clubs, joined in because traffic casualties threatened to lead to stricter regulation of driving. Auto clubs in cities like Cincinnati also marked the sites of fatal crashes, as a warning to motorists to drive carefully. But the public campaigns were not driven entirely by NSC or its members’ business interests: Local volunteers mobilized to turn them into moral demands to protect the rights of pedestrians.