It's Halloween and (according to the US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) it's the final day of "Pedestrian Safety Month."

This overlap is not a coincidence:

Infographic based on NHTSA data in a Vox article titled "Forget tainted candy: The scariest thing on Halloween is parked in your driveway"

If you want to know what NHTSA is doing to address this, just go to trafficsafetymarketing.gov and you can browse all sorts of advertisements and infographics and sample press releases to help educate Americans to do a better job at not hitting people with our cars. For example:

If you were hoping the NHTSA would also use its regulatory powers to require automakers to design their SUVs and minivans and pickup trucks to minimize the potential risk to pedestrians when drivers accidentally collide with those pedestrians, or can't even see those pedestrians... well, let's just say that it's apparently easier within the bureaucracy of NHTSA to lecture dads to "choose the crosswalk." It's probably also easier to create infographics than it is to craft regulations that potentially impact the profit margins of automakers.

While cycling across the island today, I also saw an informational sign from the City of Alameda — but that scene was a welcome contrast with the NHTSA's make-believe-world of public-service announcements:

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Otis Drive (city-owned portion) at Grand Street

What's encouraging about this scene is that it's not just an "educational" approach to traffic safety attempting to stand on its own. There's also an "engineering" approach: parked cars are protecting cyclists in the bike lane, as well as pedestrians on the sidewalk.

Maybe our cars and trucks are getting too big, maybe we're looking too often at our phones instead of the road, but at least if we do crash, it'll probably be into a parked car, rather than into a person on bike or foot. We're probably also more likely to drive at the speed limit, given that we're driving next to parked cars, rather than next to a wide open "clear zone" of an unprotected bike lane.

↘️

Further east on Otis Drive, on the Caltrans-owned portion, this type of flashing sign has also been deployed to remind motorists to please not injure or kill people on roadways. Caltrans has also added additional "smart" signage to inform motorists when they are speeding (as if they even care).

However, Caltrans has so far refused to pair all those educational approaches to traffic safety with effective and physically hard engineering changes to their portion of Otis Drive. I eagerly await the potential alternative plans that Caltrans is reportedly bringing to the City of Alameda and the public...

The more our streets are designed to naturally encourage slow but steady speeds, the fewer signs and clever advertisements will even be relevant. Let's imagine a future in which "trafficsafetymarketing.gov" is neither seen as a useful idea or a necessary idea.

Have a safe — and a joyous — Halloween!

🙋

Growing up, one year we hit a max of ~30 trick-or-treaters come to our house. Many years, my parents had zero door knocks. (My dad is quite quantitative and kept a log!) My parents always bought full-size candy bars to reward the few who did brave our neighborhood and our street.

Halloween was such a bummer, in part, because of Proposition 13. For many years, my sister and I were the only kids on the street. Most of our older neighbors planned to stay in their large ranch houses, with their low property-tax assessments, fooooorever.

On the street where I now live with my own kids, we're likely to pass out candy to ~300 trick-or-treaters this evening.

Happy Halloween — and "Pedestrian Safety Month"