Sunday, February 9, 2025
CyclingMichiganMobilityPublic Safety

Repeat After Me, Class: Better Data Will Not Solve It.

I attended a meeting of this volunteer committee on MSU’s campus that convenes monthly to talk about alternative transportation. Safety is a big focus on a campus with a truly staggering number of pedestrian and cyclist collisions. No, I’m not talking about collisions with each other– I’m talking, of course, about cars hitting pedestrians or cyclists. It was a reminder of how, again, I can be on a walkable college campus and still be in Michigan. I had been directed to the committee by folks from the Department of Police and Public Safety, who have reminded me that they simply don’t have the ability to enforce traffic regulations in most places as a matter of staffing. The committee would love to see “better data.” I would love to see fewer people being hit by cars.

Attending a recent meeting of the All University Traffic and Transportation Committee, I confronted Jonathan Loree politics (shoutout to my boy from MDOT), where attendees seemed more interested in not rocking the boat and not offending the divine right of drivers than they did in actually solving problems of campus transportation safety.

So, the public safety folks say that they can’t do more enforcement. I guess they can’t install crosswalk signs, either.

Or traffic calming.

Or, you know, any number of things.

It’d be reductive to blame the institution, or individuals. It’s not the police’s fault. They have so much to deal with. Nay, It’s the fault of dreadfully underwhelming politics. It’s politics that reeks of thermoset plastics offgassing in the front seat of a brand new F-150 Super Duty, with a faint whiff of the trash left over from a recently consumed Culver’s Mushroom and Swiss Butterburger Value Basket, purchased at the Fifty-Six Mile and Monoculture Cornfield Road strip mall, tossed into the ample back seat. It’s flimsy cardboard Jonathan Loree Politics. Yes, I’m naming this concept after the MDOT engineer who said in response to the hypothetical narrowing of the I-375 redesign from 12 lanes to, you know, six lanes: “well, we can’t take away people’s right to get around.”

(God bless the man).

The data, more than one member of the committee suggested, is inadequate. We need more data! Anecdata, for example, were relayed by the on-campus bike shop, a charming place (even though they refuse to touch my eBike). Staff had said that dozens– if I’m recalling correctly, around fifty- of students had come in with bikes that had been damaged from crashes or accidents on campus. That’s in mid-October 2024 in the fall semester alone. Now, that means that 0.1% of the students on campus have had a crash that involves bike damage– there are, after all, around 50-60,000 students, staff, and faculty on campus at any given time.

Is that a high rate? I don’t know. Sounds kinda high.

But one thing I do know? None of those people deserved to have their bikes damaged. I’m sure that not every case involved a car being at fault. We can’t simplify these things to say “all cars are always at fault at all times, forever.” Perhaps one of the weirder suggestions from one of the attendees was the idea that maybe, if we lack good data about crashes, maybe we should give drivers the opportunity to report on the crashes themselves and be given amnesty by the enforcement powers. Like, if you hit a cyclist, you can report it to the police, but they won’t write you a citation.

Because… I’m not really sure, honestly. What an idea! 

The guy presiding over this committee is someone I know from the “new mobility but we really mean hi-tech cars” scene.

I feel like a crazy person sometimes for reminding people– as I did in this meeting- that we aren’t talking about “would-be-nice” innovation, we’re talking about a violent crime.

“Is it really a violent crime?” you might ask.

Yes. It’s a violent crime. Vehicular violence is a violent crime– a violent crime using a deadly weapon, by definition.

Wave a gun at someone, for example, and that is typically a misdemeanor and can be a felony.

Display a firearm and this can often be interpreted as a violent threat.

Cars are not different. 

But we treat them as such.

One attendee suggested interviewing the cyclists when they brought in damaged bikes to be able to get better data. This is perhaps a valuable thing to consider. Another thing I also appreciated was that another member of the committee suggested that this type of data gathering be conducted in a trauma-informed manner. It is really jarring to have your ass handed to you by a 3,500, 4,000, 6,000, 9,000 lb. vehicle.

Michigan State University boasts hundreds of miles of sidewalks and trails, plus a preposterously hostile car culture.

I have personal experience with this, both from bike crashes and from my car crash, in which I got T-boned by a red light runner. I had one bike crash where I wrecked most of my bike but managed to get out of it without much more than a few scrapes, miraculously. I had another one where I chipped a tooth (not my fault– was crashed into by a fellow cyclist). I had one minor crash where the driver was nominally at fault, but in which I should have been more careful (I wasn’t using a light and it was dusk, but the driver was on the phone– she was horrified and I was fine and it was a very low-speed incident).

I mention this because sometimes a crash is the cyclist’s fault, but it’s usually the fault of a society that prioritizes Room for Vroom rather than safety of human beings.

So, yeah. A trauma-informed approach would be good. Perhaps my own experience with trauma in this department is why I have such strong feelings on the subject. One thing that is for sure, though: it’s not enough to say “let’s get better data,” or to suggest pussyfooting around while people are literally dying. These safety improvements are not questions of completely reinventing the wheel. They’re basic, relatively simple, affordable, and fast. And we will very quickly be able to see improvements. Some things, like, say, driver education to effect the same kind of cultural shift that is implied by simple improvements in signage– what we planners call the legibility of the built environment– is a taller order because it’s more involved and more expensive. Things like signage, basic enforcement, though? Easy.

Let’s get it going.

 

Nat M. Zorach

Nat M. Zorach, AICP, MBA, is a city planner and energy professional based in Detroit, where he writes about infrastructure, sustainability, tech, and more. A native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he attended Grinnell College in Iowa, the Kogod School of Business at American University, the POCACITO transatlantic program, the SISE program at the University of Illinois Chicago, and he is also a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow. He enjoys long walks through historic, disinvested Rust Belt neighborhoods at sunset. (Nat's views and opinions are his own and do not represent those of his employer).

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