The other day, a fledgling street safety group in my city held a meeting to discuss whether it should commit itself exclusively to advocating for “non-carceral” solutions.
Not long into this conversation, a young man took the mic. He admitted that he was nervous to be there in front of this group, because he actually didn’t believe that non-carcerality was all that important. He was tired of fearing for his life every time he walked, biked, or waited for the bus. He wanted reckless drivers to experience consequences like police stops, and maybe even jail; maybe, fear of those consequences might even stop them from driving recklessly in the first place.
It’s the kind of thing I’ve heard a lot in the years I’ve spent covering mobility justice and the Vision Zero movement. But something about this young man’s comment made me realize something about my own advocacy that I’ve never quite articulated aloud.
When I advocate for non-carceral strategies, I’m not advocating for fewer consequences for motorists (or road designers, or policymakers, or anyone else who’s played a role in making our streets so deadly — but that’s a topic for a separate essay). I’m actually advocating for more consequences — and that difference is critical to me.
Meaningful consequences
Years ago, I interviewed the author Jessie Singer about the difference between a “punishment” and a “consequence” — two words that are often used interchangeably, but which can mean vastly different things in a street safety context.
Consequences, Singer explained, “are the direct effect of an action; they’re guaranteed, and they teach a lesson.” When a driver strikes a concrete bollard separating a bike lane from the driving lane, a mangled bumper and the steep repair bill that follows are both consequences, and they’re serious ones most sensible motorists will take action to avoid.
No matter who you are or how much money you make, the only way to avoid the irrefutable physics of stationary concrete vs. fast-moving steel is, simply, not to hit the damn bollard. And if you know that in your bones, you’ll pay a little more attention every time you’re behind the wheel.
Frankly, I want to live in a city where drivers know for a fact there will always be consequences for endangering themselves and others — and a whole lot more consequences than they experience right now.
If drivers choose to drive too fast down my street, I want them to know for a fact that the slightest miscalculation will leave them with a sheared-off side mirror at minimum, because the lane is narrow and lined with bollards or at least parked cars. If they rush too fast into an intersection, I want them to know for a fact that they will scrape their undercarriage on a raised crosswalk and shudder at the prospect of a trip to the mechanic. Someday soon, I hope drivers will know that if they get behind the wheel drunk, stoned, or so tired they can’t keep their eyes open, their cars will simply not start and they will have to take the bus.
I want motorists to be so acutely aware of these incredibly predictable consequences that they would never even think of doing the dangerous things that lead to them. And I want these consequences to make drivers uncomfortable, so that they can learn from their mistakes.
I don’t want these things, though, because I want bad drivers to suffer, or even for them to feel afraid. I don’t want anyone to suffer; that’s why I’m a street safety advocate in the first place.
And that’s why I just can’t support many of the punishment-based approaches that have become America’s front-line default.
‘Crime’ and Punishment
In our conversation, Singer defined the word “punishment” as a “retributive” action whose goal “is to inflict suffering and pain.”
“Consequences are for the offender,” she continued. “They teach the offender a lesson. But punishments are for the offended. It makes the offended feel better. Consequences teach you responsibility for your action; punishments make you feel shame.”
In theory, of course, that fear of shame, suffering, and pain should scare motorists into behaving more safely. And some evidence shows that theory is true, at least when enforcement efforts are highly visible, and motorists view those punishments like they’re consequences — which is to say, they know that they’ll be immediate, predictable and guaranteed. (When enforcement efforts are less visible, predictable and swift, the results are far more mixed.)
In car-dominated U.S. cities, though, pretty much everyone breaks at least a few traffic laws every single time he or she gets behind the wheel — in large part because our roads and vehicles are designed as if those laws were only suggestions. And relative to how often they offend, drivers are almost never caught (despite what they think).
It’s not that Americans are just a bunch of uncaring scofflaws, either. Motorists follow the ample visual cues that tell them it’s safe to go 40 miles per hour rather than the number on the sign that tells them to stick to 25. They fiddle with the infotainment screens that are embedded directly into their dashboards while they cruise past signs begging them not to drive distracted. They move through a world that was designed to accommodate dangerous driving, and profits off of that accommodation in innumerable ways.
We could put a cop on every corner and a camera on every traffic light, and 99 percent of us could still be confident that we would not be punished for doing dangerous things behind the wheel. We know it is a mathematical impossibility for cops to write that many tickets — and anyway, dangerous driving is so normalized in our society, that we have no reason to believe that anyone would care.
When a driver does hit someone in that unprotected bike lane, of course, the equation changes, because now someone’s gotten hurt. And our punishment-obsessed society will give that driver a powerful incentive to flee — and because our car-dependent streets have been thoroughly denuded of pedestrians, he’ll have plenty of opportunity to do it.
In 2021 alone, hit-and-run drivers were responsible for 24 percent of pedestrian deaths, a share that’s been steadily rising since at least 2009; in my city of St. Louis, 40 percent of crashes last year were hit-and-runs.
The problem is not just that the possibility of a ticket for driving in a bike lane isn’t as powerful of a deterrent as the certainty of a mangled bumper when a driver hits a bollard. It’s that punishment-focused systems create “suffering and pain,” whether or not the driver is caught — because that, by definition, is what they exist to do.
As many, many BIPOC advocates have said far better than I can, that “suffering and pain” isn’t equitably applied.
For a financially comfortable, white, or otherwise privileged driver, drifting into an unprotected bike lane without a bollard to stop them might mean a brief conversation with a police officer, a traffic ticket, and little less money in their checking account at the end of the month. (And, again: the operative word is “might,” because he will likely never be caught unless someone gets hurt, and even then, he still might get away scot-free).
For a person of color, if that same police stop happens, it’s disproportionately likely to escalate to police violence. That same ticket for a low-income driver is disproportionately likely to cascade into unpaid court fees, arrests, jail time, loss of a job, and the universe of other challenges that come with criminalization.
When we talk about decarceration in the street safety realm, we rightly tend to focus on these sort of spirals of negative outcomes, as well as how municipalities, the prison-industrial complex, and private interests profit off of their continued growth. We talk about fundamentally re-imagining our systems of public safety so that they might not be so plainly engineered to cause pain and suffering, not to mention to cause such wildly disproportionate harm to the vulnerable. These are vital conversations we need to continue to have.
But as we have those conversations, I hope we can also make it clear that we are not seeking a world without consequences — and we’re certainly not seeking a world where reckless motorists are simply allowed to kill again and again.
We can design our world so the consequences for dangerous driving are predictable, fair, wide-reaching, and so undeniably meaningful to each individual that after motorists experience them even once, they would never willingly experience them again.
We can design roads and vehicles with the understanding that humans make mistakes and good design can make those mistakes less deadly.
We can scale fines to income so they’re actually consequential to high earners, without being punitive to people in poverty.
We can unravel the structural reasons why meaningful deterrents are so expensive and slow to craft, but millions of dollars for retribution can be had with the stroke of a pen.
We can demand that our advocacy be motivated by a desire to reduce senseless violence in the world, rather than thirst for revenge, or the convenient opportunity to profit off the suffering of others.
It won’t be easy, and it won’t always be simple. But it also won’t be soft on reckless drivers, either — and don’t let anyone tell you it is.
