Policy's Place in Pedestrian Infrastructure

Angie Schmitt’s Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America delves into the complex, multi-layered phenomenon of how traffic infrastructure and policy systematically disadvantages pedestrians and contributes to thousands of deaths and injuries each year. Despite the breadth of the problem and its often-technical aspects, Schmitt presents the problem in an engaging and approachable manner through a step-by-step approach combining background, statistics, and anecdotes.While Right of Way tends to focus on infrastructure design, it offers much for legal scholars, lawyers, and policymakers. Schmitt addresses several policy issues at length in the book. But this discussion raises new questions and illuminates potential connections to other areas of the law—particularly recent criminal law scholarship regarding the interplay between traffic policy and criminal law enforcement, and scholarship regarding the scope of the misdemeanor and infraction criminal justice system and its impact on communities. This review parses out several of these issues and presents the beginnings of a research agenda inspired by Schmitt’s discussion. Finally, this review runs with one of these ideas through a brief discussion of how Right of Way exemplifies a phenomenon of laws as half-measures—policy measures that are politically appealing or cost-effective that fail to meaningfully address social problems, yet are presented as solutions. These half-measures flourish in the policy space devoted to pedestrian infrastructure, and this review identifies and critiques examples of these policies, while identifying more comprehensive solutions