by Nick Chiles
African-Americans who sense they sometimes are putting themselves at mortal risk when they attempt to cross the street now have scientific evidence to validate their fear: A new study suggests that drivers are less likely to stop for Black pedestrians waiting at a crosswalk than white ones.
The clever study, conducted by the Portland State University-based Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC), had three Black and three white men of similar age, height and build — dressed in identical neutral outfits and “without any obvious social or socio-economic characteristics”— cross an unsignalized, marked crosswalk in downtown Portland. The researchers had each pedestrian cross 15 times while observers recorded the reaction of drivers — whether the first car to approach yielded for the pedestrian, how many cars passed before someone yielded and the number of seconds that passed before the pedestrian could cross the street.
Observers found that Black pedestrians got passed by twice as many cars as white pedestrians and had to wait 32 percent longer to get across the street. Such a finding is especially relevant in municipalities like Atlanta that have passed laws giving pedestrians the right-of-way to cross the street at designated, unsignalized crosswalks that are sometimes created in the middle of a long street rather than at an intersection. This results in drivers sometimes having to screech to a halt to stop for a pedestrian who has decided to walk out in front of oncoming traffic, expecting all drivers to stop automatically. Based on the study, the Atlanta system might be especially precarious for African-Americans pedestrians.
“We wanted to test this hypothesis to see if pedestrian’s race would influence driver’s yielding decisions at crosswalks,” lead researcher Kimberly Kahn told The Huffington Post. “For this first initial study, we wanted to see if the effect was even there, and even with the relatively small sample size, we saw a significant variation between races.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pedestrians account for 13 percent of all motor vehicle traffic-related deaths across the country. But a 2014 study by the community development nonprofit Smart Growth America found that African-Americans die at a rate 60 percent higher than non-Hispanic whites.
“These implicit racial attitudes and biases are more likely to influence our behavior when we have to make split-second decisions, when we’re distracted and when we have a lot going on — like when we’re driving,” Kahn said.
About Nick Chiles
Nick Chiles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. He has written or co-written 12 books and won over a dozen major journalism awards during a journalism career that brought him to the Dallas Morning News, the Star-Ledger of New Jersey and New York Newsday, in addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief of Odyssey Couleur travel magazine.
