Category Archives: International

By Tom Vanderbilt, slate.com

This is the location where Raquel Nelson's son was killed. As shown here, there is no crosswalk directly across from the sidewalk. Courtesy Sally Flocks.

The plight of life on foot in America was nowhere more poignantly expressed than in the conviction, just last year, of a Georgia woman for vehicular manslaughter. What brought the case to national prominence was a single, Kafka-esque detail: She was not driving.

What happened? Raquel Nelson, having just disembarked from a bus across from her apartment complex, was crossing busy Austell Road with her four children when a driver—who admitted to having consumed a “little alcohol,” was on prescription painkillers, and is partially blind in one eye, and who already had two hit-and-run charges on his record, but a very active driver’s license—struck the group, killing her 4-year-old son.

The bus stop from which she’d alighted was directly across from the apartment complex that represented, in essence, its user base. And yet, transit users like Nelson were asked to walk one-third of a mile to the nearest traffic signal, on a narrow sidewalk abutting a street on which cars regularly drive 60 mph; to wait to cross at the intersection; and then to return another third of a mile. (To see for yourself just how daunting this is, head north from the apartment entrance on Google Street View.) At the time of the accident, Nelson and her family had been crossing directly at the bus stop, where there is no crosswalk. For this, Georgia prosecutors charged her with second-degree vehicular homicide. The driver, who was initially charged with “hit and run, first degree homicide by vehicle and cruelty to children,” later had his charges dropped to hit and run.

The charge against Nelson—akin to being accused of armed assault for stepping into the path of a bullet—raised the disturbing specter that she would face more jail time than the driver, Jerry Guy. On the strength of a chorus of outrage, a national petition organized by Transportation for America, and a sudden bout of judicial common sense, Nelson instead received a year’s probation and a chance at a retrial.

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By Tom Vanderbilt, slate.com

This is a Walk Score walkability heat map of Washington, D.C., the seventh most walkable city in the country according to the company's calculations. The green areas are most walkable and the red areas are least walkable. Courtesy Walk Score.

The first thing to note about Walk Score—the company that tracks the “walkability” of locations around the world—is that its office, in the Laurelhurst section of Seattle, is not exactly a paragon of pedestrianism. Its address, 3503 NE 45th St., garners an 80 on the site—“very walkable.” No question, this is quite respectable, and in some cities would register at the higher stratum of walkability. But in Seattle terms, it’s no Belltown (97) or Capitol Hill (91). It’s just a few notches better than that seeming archetype of postwar suburbia, the Brady Bunch house. “We don’t have quite the Walk Score we would like,” says Josh Herst, the company’s CEO, as we sit in a conference room. “We often talk about moving to Capitol Hill,” adds Matt Lerner, Walk Score’s CTO. Like many startups, Herst notes, Walk Score’s location is based largely on the home address of its founder, Mike Mathieu, for whom the offices are an easy walk.

What does an 80 (and a transit score of 45) mean? For my afternoon visit, it meant I had to take a cab to get there, but that we were able to walk to lunch (to a Thai restaurant whose familiarity with the Walk Score staff hinted at a somewhat limited range of options). It meant that there was a nice multiuse path nearby, but that to get there I had to cross busy 45th Street—I waited so long for a “walk” signal that I jaywalked. It meant that the multiuse path led past a few tricky intersections down to University Village, a self-described “open-air lifestyle shopping center” (useful if you’re shopping for a lifestyle), a place everyone else had seemingly driven to, in order to walk around.

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