I believed that my efforts to plan, design, and engineer transportation systems were a service to society, that I was part of creating a prosperous America that could be shared by everyone, and that the only real impediments to success were a lack of funding and the political courage needed to stand up to naysayers.
In all these beliefs and more, I was wrong. Utterly and shamefully wrong.
What follows here is my confession, along with my insights and recommendations for making things better by using a Strong Towns approach to transportation.
1 Embedded Values
Sagrario Gonzalez was at the Central Library on State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, near closing time on December 3, 2014. As many loving adults are prone to do, she brought her niece and daughter to enjoy the library's children's section. Springfield was the home of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. It has a great children's section.
It was lightly raining when they left the library, the December kind of rain that stings when the wind whips it against your neck. Their vehicle was in the library's parking lot, directly across the street from the front door. As Gonzalez walked down the front steps, two small children in tow, she made a fateful decision.
At the bottom of the library steps was a sidewalk. To get to her vehicle, Gonzalez could walk the 275 feet south to the traffic signal, push the button and wait for the light to turn in her favor, cross the four lanes of State Street, and then proceed back up the street another 275 feet to the parking lot.
She could do that, or she could do what most people seem to do when they leave the library. She could follow a well-worn path through the grass, step over a small decorative fence erected along the side of the street, wait for a gap in the traffic, and then quickly walk, maybe run, across State Street to the parking lot.
The quickest path between two points is a straight line. With the rain coming down, darkness well established, and the bedtime hour fast approaching on a school night, Gonzalez chose the quicker route. It was the wrong decision.
The group was struck by a vehicle while crossing State Street. Sagrario Gonzalez's daughter and niece were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. Gonzalez survived, as did her niece. Tragically, Destiny Gonzalez, the seven-year-old daughter of Sagrario Gonzalez and her husband, Luis, was killed.
I will never forget that night. I was in Springfield, having just given a public lecture on behalf of the nonprofit Strong Towns. I was homesick for my family, especially my two daughters, who were roughly the same ages as the pair of young girls who had been struck. It was 10 days before Christmas. My heart ached, and it still does, for Sagrario Gonzalez.
It was not her fault.
The Crossing
What happened that night on State Street seems obvious. In a karmic world where we all, to one degree or another, must live with the consequences of our decisions, it's easy to see how Gonzalez made a series of bad choices.
She could have walked to the traffic signal, but she didn't. Traveling four feet per second with two kids in tow, it would have taken her roughly one minute and ten seconds to get there. Depending on her luck, she might not have had to wait at all to cross if the light happened to be green in her direction. If it was red, she might have been there another minute, perhaps longer. It would have taken an additional minute and ten seconds to walk back along the opposite sidewalk. To walk to the signal instead of crossing directly meant it would take an additional two to four minutes to get to her car.
Two to four minutes. That is what was saved by crossing directly in the middle of the block instead of walking to the signal — one dead, one seriously injured, and lives forever damaged. It seems like an extraordinarily high price to pay for what could casually be described as impatience.
That's not to suggest that crossing the street mid-block was effortless. To cross in front of the library, Gonzalez had to walk around a row of shrubs. To reach the street, she also needed to step over a small fence, nothing more than a couple of decorative chains hanging between posts. These obstacles were put there to discourage people from crossing in this location, a fact that is self-evident to anyone who chooses that route.
We can think of these obstacles as a warning: DO NOT CROSS HERE. Gonzalez did not heed this clear warning.
From curb to curb, State Street is 40 feet wide in this location. At a normal walking speed, the three of them would be exposed to traffic for at least 12 seconds, assuming that they could proceed in one smooth crossing.
That is 12 seconds in an area where Gonzalez knew that a traffic signal would not be stopping oncoming traffic. She also had to have known that at least some of these drivers might not anticipate people crossing mid-block, especially at that hour. Those drivers would not be alert for the possibility that she and the girls would be there.
Of the four lanes on State Street, two convey traffic to the north and two to the south. Crossing safely here requires one to time a gap within the multidirectional traffic flow, a task made more difficult at night. What often happens in these situations is that the person crossing can anticipate the gap only in the two nearest lanes. They venture out and often find themselves trapped in a traffic lane, fully exposed, waiting for the furthest two lanes to provide the gap that they need to finish the crossing.
Sagrario Gonzalez had done this crossing many times. She knew all of this. Everyone in Springfield knows this, and most of us, if we visited the site and looked at it, would intuitively understand it as well.
What Gonzalez did was very dangerous. She did it despite the clear warnings. She did it to save a couple minutes of time. She did it despite having two small children in her care, young people who would face the risk with her and pay a heavy price.
This was Gonzalez's choice. It is easy to say this was Gonzalez's fault.
Too easy. It wasn't her fault.
Hidden Values
That night Sagrario Gonzalez made fateful decisions about how to navigate an environment where her existence was, at best, an afterthought, and at worst, a nuisance. The options she had available to her were the result of the underlying values applied to the design of State Street — values reflected in similar environments across North America and wherever around the world American design practices are being emulated.
The professionals who design streets follow a practice codified in the decades since the Great Depression. Engineers who do this work learn it as a practice, as a body of technical knowledge that has been amassed over generations. While one book or another of engineering standards is often referred to as “the bible” by those who use them, that reference is due more to their centrality to the practice of engineering than to the type of wisdom imparted.
While the religious debate passages of the Bible, contrasting different teachings in a search for deeper truth, the codes of an engineering manual are more like a cookbook. If you wish to make a certain type of chocolate cookie, a cookbook will provide the common ingredients found in cookies and the specific way to arrange them for a particular recipe. Likewise, if you wish to build a certain type of street, an engineering manual will explain the way to assemble all of the components so that you get the desired outcome.
What is expected in a religious text, but not in a cookbook, is deeper meaning. Few people question the underlying values contained
