On Halloween, the scariest thing for parents isn’t tainted candy. It’s cars.
Every Halloween, there’s a sharp spike in the number of children killed by drivers. This is not an immutable fact.
After trick-or-treating is over this year, I’m going to sift through my kid’s candy haul looking for anything that might be unsafe to eat. I’m going to do this even though those stories about tainted candy we all grew up with are now understood to be mostly unsupported myths.
Parenting lends itself to a kind of vigilance not too different from paranoia. The truth is, by the time our kids are home that night, the biggest threat has passed: Every Halloween, there’s a sharp spike in the number of children killed by drivers.
The temptation is to let that information settle in as background noise, hold my kid’s hand tighter as we cross the street, and accept it as a tragic fact. After all, I’m not going to forbid trick-or-treating.
But kids getting killed by cars on Halloween isn’t inevitable and it isn’t immutable. Traffic deaths are a direct result of the built environment, which in turn stems from the choices that elected leaders, urban planners, and regulators have made.
These choices are political, a statement of priorities. Which means those priorities can be shifted. The built environment can be rebuilt. Our streets can — and must — be made safer for everyone, and not just on Halloween.
» READ MORE: When Halloween became America’s most dangerous holiday | Opinion
Committed activists have fought these battles for years. According to this year’s report by Vision Zero Philadelphia, the city’s initiative to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2030, commonsense safety initiatives like “Slow Zones” around schools are showing clear results. In many places, like Cobbs Creek, these changes arose from neighbors organizing to demand action from elected leaders. But there’s much more work to be done.
A good place to start is by looking down. Philly is full of broken and closed sidewalks that force people into the street: dangerous for everyone, but especially harmful — or deadly — to people with disabilities. Fixing this is not a matter of new legislation, but new urgency.
The Streets Department can step up enforcement of existing rules, particularly those that require developers to build pedestrian walkways next to sidewalks they’ve blocked, along with those that require property owners to fix sidewalks that have fallen into disrepair. It can also aggressively pursue the construction of additional curb ramps that disability rights advocates have fought for and won.
Our next mayor can and should make it clear to the Streets Department that their administration has high expectations for pedestrian safety. City Council members can do their part, too, and they will — as long as voters keep up the pressure by calling offices for these constituent services.
State leaders have a role to play here, too, by reducing the problems that come from too many drivers jockeying their way through traffic. That begins with providing reliable, comprehensive alternatives for the Philly drivers wasting time and money on our congested streets. It will require a robust reinvestment in public transit, including new funding solutions and an aggressive, long-overdue effort to make every inch of SEPTA fully accessible for riders with disabilities.
Elected leaders must also do everything they can to make the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard subway a reality. The proposal has many benefits, but one immediate impact will be to take drivers off of some of the most crash-prone stretches of the city’s roadways. This won’t be the only change needed to ensure pedestrian safety on the Boulevard, but it’s a crucial one.
Traffic deaths are a direct result of the built environment.
According to a driver survey from last year, Philadelphia has the worst commuting experience among 100 other cities. The success of initiatives like the Key Advantage program — in which SEPTA and employers partner to provide free fares for employees — shows that some commuters are ready to change how they get to work.
For children, the fun of Halloween is in pretending to be scared. But for the rest of us, the holiday brings real fears. Every time my kid and I cross the street on Tuesday, I’ll be thinking about the tens of thousands of traffic fatalities our country sees every year, and how we have come to expect them. I’ll be thinking — as I often do when I look at the world our children will inherit — what we can build instead.
Matt Sullivan is a transit advocate in Philly.