Drunk tourists staggering down Spanish
streets at night might need to pay more attention this summer.
In a crackdown on dangerous walking, Spain’s Directorate General
of Traffic plans to introduce breathalyser tests for
pedestrians. They also suggest introducing an off-road speed
limit for joggers. The proposals, buried among other road safety
suggestions, would give pedestrians responsibilities akin to
drivers – and ought to inspire other new laws in their
footsteps.
Might we see other similar laws follow on their heels?
Shortsighted people could be charged for leaving the house
without their glasses, for instance. Walking and texting (and
the associated crime of “moving like a robot”, as one Australian
study described the result) might see you fined. You could get a
ticket for wearing any clothing that is eye-catching enough to
distract drivers – something Rome already gamely tried to
introduce in its aborted 2008 miniskirt ban.
To ensure a properly monitored quality of walking, meanwhile,
pedestrians could be required to undergo a full MOT, with anyone
whose physical equipment isn’t in suitable condition banned from
leaving the house until essential repairs are made. Taking their
cue from motorways, the pavements of major streets could be
barred to parents pushing buggies, because they’re just too
slow.
A closer look at the small print of Spain’s plan (itself heavily
criticised by other sectors of Spain’s government) reveals that
it isn’t going that far just yet. It can’t do, because there’s
still no official level of alcohol intake in Spain after which
you’re banned from using your legs. What the plan does suggest
is that when pedestrians are charged with an already existing
legal infraction – such as jaywalking – or involved in a car
accident, then they could be given a drug or alcohol test.
Again, it’s not entirely clear what the authorities would do
with this information: a high reading for either test could lead
to a reckless jaywalker getting a stiffer sentence, perhaps.
Looked at this way, the plan comes across as a little more,
well, sober. If pedestrians (and cyclists, for that matter) are
capable of causing harm through neglect, then perhaps they
should indeed be held to the same standards as motorists – not
least for their own preservation.
It might seem obvious that drunk pedestrians get up to more
risky behaviour that sober ones, but some experts in the field
have gone to the trouble of backing up that assumption
empirically. A 2011 study published in the evocatively named
Journal of Trauma found that 55% of pedestrians who had consumed
alcohol ignored designated crosswalks, compared to 22% of sober
ones. When things went wrong, the drinkers also did themselves
(and possibly others) far more damage: on average, they stayed
two days longer in hospital than sober accident victims, with
injuries that were typically almost twice as severe. If there’s
a legal nudge that could curb reckless behaviour, it might not
be such a bad thing.
But it’s still quite a leap from what is effectively a hunch –
that legal curbs on drunks crossing the street could actually
improve road safety – to the specific change that Spain’s
Directorate of Traffic is proposing. If the plan goes ahead,
pedestrians would be reclassified, just like drivers, as “users
of the road”.
This suggests an equality of responsibility between pedestrian
and drivers that just doesn’t bear up. At the risk of stating
the obvious, pedestrians are not as closely controlled as
drivers because they are not, for the most part, encased within
a motor-propelled steel-and-glass bone-cruncher. Classifying
pedestrians as road users is also disingenuous, unless being
obliged to face an unavoidable gauntlet of cars whenever you
need to cross the street is going to be deemed as “use”. If
pedestrians really were “users of the road” on the same footing
as motor vehicles, our roads would soon be not grey but red.
In fact, Spain’s plans can be read as part of a long history of
attempting to shift responsibility away from drivers on to those
they hit. As this article by Sarah Goodyear points out, prior to
the mid 1920s it was taken pretty much as a given that vehicles
should always take responsibility for road accidents. It was
only intense lobbying by the car industry that saw jaywalking
classified as a US offence. This lobbying was in itself a
fight-back against public campaigns to cut accidents by fitting
cars with compulsory speed limiters. The drive to normalise and
shift blame for the high road death and injury toll on to the
un-armoured pedestrian was thus a turf war, one powered as much
by the bottom lines of car companies as by safety concerns.
Trying to overturn this bias towards victim-blaming is an
ongoing and arduous task. Proposed laws like Spain’s that
attempt to spread responsibility away from cars would only make
things worse, by releasing the pressure to create, say, lower
urban speed limits and better signage. Though if they find a way
to imprison people who text while strolling, they might not be
such a bad thing entirely. |