Last week DC-based television station WJLA/ABC7 published an article titled, “7 pedestrians killed by vehicles in Mont. County since June 1, laziness a key factor.” The victim-blaming continues beyond the lazily-reported headline.

Reporter Kevin Lewis writes:

Seven pedestrians have been hit and killed while crossing roadways in Montgomery County this summer, and police explain jaywalking is the highest common denominator. “They're being lazy not getting to the crosswalk,” said Capt. Tom Didone who heads Montgomery County's Traffic Division. “When you're a little kid, the first thing you learn is, don't play in traffic it's dangerous. Yet people are blindly walking across the street, not paying attention to these cars. It violates 'mom's law' as I like to say.” Of the seven incidents, four occurred in Wheaton, two in Rockville and one in Silver Spring. A handful of the victims were walking to or from a bus stop. At least one is believed to have been intoxicated.

Besides being totally insensitive, calling pedestrians who were killed in a crash “lazy” ignores the responsibility of drivers and the role of the built environment. Narratives that attribute crashes to cars rather than drivers, or that detail how a pedestrian was walking in the roadway when they were killed, prioritize cars over people and contribute to a notion that people walking bear the responsibility for the carelessness of those wielding rapidly-moving, 4,000-pound vehicles.

This framing also ignores the fact that car crashes are something we can largely prevent with better-designed infrastructure and proper enforcement — something the county lacks. Maryland law says pedestrians must yield to drivers outside of crosswalks, which is the opposite of what most states require. On top of that, advocates say there aren't enough clearly-marked crosswalks in the Montgomery County, and many of the roads that people are trying to cross are extremely wide.

“The entire idea of sticking to the crosswalk on super-sized arterials just totally ignores what it's like to be a (usually lone) pedestrian in a sea of vehicles,” contributor Canaan Merchant says. “Even at intersections with dedicated pedestrian signals I have to keep my head on a swivel to account for the people who want to turn right on red and never even bother to look my way before pulling into the street. The whole idea of crosswalks and such is just ridiculous when this is the road [shown below] you're trying to cross.”

The intimidating crosswalk at 2698 Glenallan Avenue to get to the nearby Metro stop in Silver Spring, Maryland. Image created with Google Maps.

This car-centric mindset is deeply embedded in American culture, though many are unaware of its origins. For example, 'jaywalking' was a concept that auto companies invented to shift blame for motor vehicle deaths from drivers onto pedestrians in the 1920s so they could sell more cars at a time when public sentiment was firmly on the side of people walking. Unfortunately, that shift has persisted, as this latest example of uncritical “windshield perspective” from police and journalists demonstrates.

GGWash has been covering this issue for awhile. Back in February 2013, contributor Ben Ross wrote a very similar story about three pedestrians who died within three weeks in Montgomery County. In this case, one was walking on the sidewalk and the other two were in crosswalks when they were struck by drivers and killed.

Nonetheless, Captain Thomas Didone, then-director of the county police department’s traffic division, didn't see a problem besides people having the audacity to walk around at night without reflective gear. Didone told Patch reporters at the time: “The only thing that I see that could be newsworthy is advice to pedestrians to make sure that they have or wear reflective clothing or items when they walk at night to increase their visibility.”

Trying to force people to wear reflective or brightly-colored clothing whenever they want to walk outside (and blaming them when they're hit by drivers) not only doesn't work, it also demonizes totally normal human behavior.

Montgomery County has gotten flack in recent months for not taking its Vision Zero committment to ending road deaths and serious injuries by 2030 seriously. Its near-term goal is a 35% reduction in severe injuries and fatalities by November 2019. Action Committee for Transit, a local group which advocates for safer roads for people using all modes, released a statement Monday calling on the county to get serious about preventing further road deaths of people walking.

“Montgomery County’s residents are at risk, and the State of Maryland has authority over the deadly high-speed roads where most of the pedestrians have been killed,” said ACT president Ronit Aviva Dancis in the press release.

Here's what our contributors have to say:

First, Jared Alves satirically points out that people driving sneering at people walking is a bit ridiculous.

The idea that you are lazy when walking is ludicrous. We should reserve the term for people sitting on cushy seats in climate-controlled vehicles powered by long dead animals. These drivers are truly unwilling to expend energy… well, at least their own. People crossing before a crosswalk are behaving efficiently. These walkers are burning calories with each step and are simply seeking the shortest distance between two points to conserve their energy. The location of white paint stripes be dammed. Sadly, our built environment favors and rewards the lazy drivers who go on to kill these hardworking walkers. (Of course not everyone who drives is lazy, and many people who drive do so because they have no realistic alternative.)

Tracey Johnstone says she attended a meeting with the county's department of tranportation officials where they discussed getting a crosswalk put in next to a school and hazard busing. (That's where school districts bus children even though they live close to school because their route to school is considered too dangerous for walking or bicycling.) There she learned the county doesn't like to create marked crosswalks — even adjacent to school properties — because they “create the illusion of safety” that is not there. She adds:

Everyone is NOT equal when it comes to responsibility. The Nautical Rules of the Road differentiate between vessels under power and those under sail because they are NOT THE SAME, and do not have the same abilities to react. For example: There is the “burdened” vessel and the “privileged” vessel.

The vessel under power is “burdened,” or having MORE responsibility, than a sailing vessel.

A sailing vessel becomes the “burdened” vessel when it encounters a vessel being towed, etc.

The terms “give-way” and “stand-on” vessels now often substitute for “burdened” and “privileged” respectively. Why can our traffic rules not follow these nautical rules that acknowledge fundamental differences between those using the pathways?

Gray Kimbrough noted another dubious aspect of the MoCo police's choice of words:

Just spitballing here, but what's the racial breakdown of these “lazy” pedestrians? Not that this language could be at all racially charged or anything.

Indeed, racist 1800s-era tropes about African-Americans frequently included depicting them as lazy, among other dehumanizing stereotypes, and this practice continues in various forms today. For example, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said young immigrants eligable for DACA were “too lazy to get off their asses.”

Recent media reports have confirmed what black activists have been saying for awhile: police in many cities use minor violations like jaywalking charges to harass and harm black citizens, while cloaking the practice in victim-blaming language. One promenant example is Ferguson, Missouri. The New York Times wrote about Justice Department findings about policing tactics in the city following the death of Michael Brown:

Ferguson, Mo., is a third white, but the crime statistics compiled in the city over the past two years seemed to suggest that only black people were breaking the law. They accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests. In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of all arrests. The racial disparity in those statistics was so stark that the Justice Department has concluded in a report scheduled for release on Wednesday that there was only one explanation: The Ferguson Police Department was routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.

This and similar practices are by no means limited to Missouri. The Chicago Police Department recently admitted that they target black neighborhoods for sidewalk bike-riding citations, and Florida is guilty too.

Edit Board member Joanne Tang says:

Pro Publica did a lengthy series on pedestrian fines being levied disproportionately against black people in Jacksonville, Florida. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, if crossing against a red light makes sense, or if you’re in the road and not a sidewalk and there's no traffic.

Readers: what do you think?