In this Telegraph file
photo, Walter Kulash speaks with Richard
Webb and his mother Martha Webb about the
Northwest Parkway during a public meeting
Monday at the Greens Tabernacle Baptist
Church.
Likewise, a 2009 report from the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation found that, nationwide,
pedestrian-friendly infrastructure is much more
prevalent in higher-income neighborhoods.
In high-income areas, 89 percent of streets have
sidewalks on one or both sides of the streets,
compared to 59 percent of streets in middle-income
areas and 49 percent in low-income areas,
according to the report.
The result is that people who are less able to
afford cars live in places where there is less
infrastructure for safe walking.
In part, this is because of the recent spread of
poverty from inner cities to suburban areas that
were never meant to be traveled solely on foot,
said Benjamin Ross, a transit advocate and author
of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of
American Urbanism.
“They built these suburbs with the idea that
you’d basically get around with cars, that the
main roads were for cars only,” Ross said. “The
main roads were built totally not for walking, and
now we’ve evolved to the place where lots of
people are walking there, and so you have a built
up system that’s designed to favor the driver.”
While poverty has historically been associated
with urban and rural areas, national census data
show that the number of poor people living in
suburban areas overtook the number living in urban
areas shortly after the turn of the millennium and
is growing much more rapidly.
THE PROBLEM WITH SUBURBS
To illustrate the difference between suburban
poverty and urban poverty, Ross tells a story
about baseball legend Willie Mays.
“After the game was over, he would go out in the
streets of Harlem and join in stickball games that
they played in the street,” Ross said. “For a long
time, poor people lived in the center city and
played there.”
But few people today would consider playing in
the fast-moving suburban roadways that crisscross
many low-income suburbs.
Jim Thomas, executive director of the Macon-Bibb
County Planning & Zoning Commission, has led
an effort to map pedestrian and bike-related
accidents that have occurred since 2000.
“If you look at the map, you’ll see a
concentration of incidents in downtown, but that’s
where our best sidewalks . . . and crosswalks
(are),” Thomas said, alluding to the fact that
incidents in the downtown area are rarely fatal,
likely because frequent stops cause people to
drive slower.
A 2011 study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic
Safety found a clear link between vehicle speed
and whether a pedestrian strike results in death.
“The average risk of death for a pedestrian
reaches 10 percent at an impact speed of 23 mph,
25 percent at 32 mph, 50 percent at 42 mph, 75
percent at 50 mph, and 90 percent at 58 mph,”
study author Brian Tefft wrote.
Those figures are borne out in Macon-Bibb, where
deadly accidents tend to happen in the immediate
or outlying suburbs, on such roads as Gray Highway
and Pio Nono Avenue, where vehicles typically
reach and sustain higher speeds than they can in
the more tightly packed street grid of the
historic downtown.
Amanda Clark is a 30-year-old mother of two who
lives in an apartment complex near Gray Highway,
where long stretches of the road are without a
crosswalk. The major thoroughfare that cuts
through the area isolates residential
neighborhoods on either side of it. Getting around
without a car, “I’ve had a few close calls” Clark
said. “I gotta walk to the store just to get food,
and it’s not fast. It’s not easy to cross the busy
roads.”
Ross said the shortcuts that people in Clark’s
situation often take, such as crossing where it’s
convenient instead of taking a lengthy detour to a
crosswalk, are behaviors built into the
infrastructure.
“People who cross the street, sometimes legally,
sometimes illegally, are just doing what people
are naturally going to do when there’s stoplights
a mile apart,” Ross said. “They’re doing the same
kind of thing a driver does when, for example,
when they get to a stop sign in the middle of
nowhere, where they can clearly see there’s no
cars coming, and they roll through it.”
THE PROBLEM WITH ROADS
The trend toward infrastructure that favors cars
over people is not unique to Macon; it happened
nationwide starting in the mid-20th century.
However, Macon-Bibb officials have in more recent
decades approved several major road expansion
projects in residential areas, despite warnings
from some transportation experts that such
infrastructure is inherently dangerous to walkers
and cyclists.
For example, in 1994, voters passed a local sales
tax to fund the Road Improvement Plan. The project
was designed to widen such roads as Forest Hill
Road, Northside Drive and Log Cabin Drive to
funnel traffic efficiently to and from the
then-bustling Macon Mall. Once the local tax was
established, state funding was secured for lane
expansions.
A group of local residents protested the plan,
arguing that wider, faster roads weren’t entirely
necessary and would make the surrounding
neighborhoods less safe and desirable.
Moreland-Altobelli, the engineering and program
management firm in charge of carrying out the Road
Improvement Plan, contracted with veteran
Florida-based traffic engineer Walter Kulash and
his colleague, Wade Walker, to look at the plan
and see if it could be altered to address
residents’ concerns.
“I remember it being fairly tumultuous, to say
the least,” Kulash said. “It was something that we
saw a lot of then, which was a major road program
-- state-funded I believe, as most road programs
are -- with no intention of doing anything other
than simply widening roads.
“This was at the beginning of this era that we’re
well into now, where there’s a lot of
understanding that we can’t just keep paving our
way out of problems, and that there are a lot of
other ways to improve roads other than simply
widening them. This was big news. This was an
early instance of trying to do something about the
existing paradigm, and there were very involved
citizens.”
At first, Kulash said, he and Walker seemed to
have success convincing Tom Moreland, the chairman
and CEO of Moreland-Altobelli, that wider was not
necessarily better.
“This was, of course, after we and the citizens
leaned on them, saying, ‘We don’t need five lanes
here. We do need, for example, a nice rebuilt road
with sidewalks, street trees, things like that.’ I
can remember (Moreland) taking on his own staff
who simply didn’t understand why you wouldn’t
build the most lanes when you have the money for
it,” Kulash said.
But differences in vision and disputes with
county officials ultimately led to Kulash leaving
Macon without having done much to alter plans. He
said he’s not surprised to hear of Macon-Bibb’s
high pedestrian death rate, considering the nature
of the roads that existed when he worked in Macon
and those that have been built since.
The vehicle-heavy, multi-lane roadway is one of
the worst environments for pedestrians, Kulash
said. “And then the type of commerce that it
attracts . . . is the most auto-dependent of all.
The combination of hostile atmosphere and type of
destination that is not really meant for anything
other than automobile is a mix that’s going to
lead to . . . fatalities.”
‘INSTITUTIONAL INJUSTICE?’
The Bibb County District Attorney’s Office is
tasked with prosecuting many of the drivers
accused of criminal offenses that lead to
pedestrian deaths, giving District Attorney David
Cooke a firsthand look at the incidents.
Cooke views the correlation between poverty and
pedestrian deaths as an unfortunate but largely
inescapable reality.
“There may be strategies that would make it
easier for (pedestrians) -- even if they were
intoxicated -- or to make it easier for people to
comply with the law, or be safer that is, (with)
more sidewalks and other, more pedestrian-friendly
areas,” Cooke said.
But in most accidents, individual behavior such
as jaywalking or walking while drunk “seems to be
the cause, not whether or not someone is poor,” he
said. “I think the lack of money may be why they
are a pedestrian instead of a driver.”
Ross said
he believes the dangerous juxtaposition of poor
people who lack transportation and big, fast roads
is an example of “institutional injustice.”
Prevailing road designs outside of urban cores
are predicated on the assumption that everyone
living in those areas will be well-off enough to
own cars, he said.
“And then when circumstances change and everybody
isn’t well-off, you have a whole system that’s
rigged against anybody who walks.”
Clark, the 30-year-old mother who lives on Gray
Highway, said, “It’s hard living here.”
“It’s not easy having to walk everywhere, but I
gotta do what I gotta do.”