Livable cities start and end with safety in public spaces

More than any amenity, service, or feature, cities rely on people who want to be there. Lots of labor and spending supports a thriving economy. Diversity and growing resources lead to social and cultural vitality, which in turn appeals to more people. All good so far!

But most people don’t like spending time in places where they don’t feel safe, whether from traffic, community violence, or simply intimidation or abuse. That many of these factors are on the rise in DC and other cities should ring an alarm bell for policymakers and anyone invested in the post-pandemic recovery.

Once the coronavirus threat recedes, will people feel safe enough being in public space to generate the scale of re-investment, commercial, social and recreational activity that we need for a strong recovery? If we want our cities to come back better, we need to stop thinking about public safety in silos, learn from the successes of the coronavirus response, and put this fundamental public good at the center of urban recovery.

A tough year to be human

The last year changed perceptions of safety in public spaces. The coronavirus made it unsafe to interact, draining our public spaces of people. Traffic fatalities are at their highest in DC since the Vision Zero program was announced in 2015. Security agencies closed down access to many of DC’s most iconic places. Some recognized what it means that merely being Black in public space comes with substantially greater risk of intimidation, injury or death.

Without systematic improvements, it’s got worse in recent months despite there being fewer cars on the road. Drivers killed three people over this past weekend and injured others. On April 9 Jim Pagels was killed cycling hours after tweeting about the risk. One week earlier, four-year-old Zyaire Joshua lost his life walking just off Georgia Ave. Traffic violence doesn’t spare drivers: Washington Teachers’ Union President Elizabeth Davis was recently killed while driving in Prince George’s County.

The damage isn’t just about death. The culture of driver impunity for the lives of others also costs us in terms of injuries, and trauma that lasts for witnesses and families. Weeks ago, a driver crashed into one of our team members, throwing him from his bike, later realizing the police officers’ sympathy lay more with the driver. “Doesn’t feel good when@DCPoliceDept is just laughing with the guy who hit me, though.” Over this past weekend, a driver hurled racial slurs at our board chair, using his car to threaten her as she cycled with her young child.

The risks of any type of violence are highest in communities that suffer from under-investment in other ways. But they come from a broader disassociation from the need to ensure public space is safe for people to use it.

I’m focusing on traffic violence in this piece, but there’s a wider dynamic at play. The number of homicides in DC is 41% higher than in 2020. And the numbers have steadily risen since 2018, according to data from the MPD. Advocates and researchers alike call for a holistic approach that emphasizes public safety over enforcement, both on grounds of effectiveness and because law enforcement interactions can be a source of risk for people of color. As we saw over the weekend, we can’t afford a culture of enforcement that doesn’t make public safety its top priority without externalities that affect everyone.

Risky business

Public space loses its appeal pretty quickly when there’s a real risk of experiencing abuse or violence. Traffic and interpersonal violence cost the economy spectacularly (the World Health Organization estimates that 3.3% of US GDP is lost to community violence).

Frightened people don’t bike or walk around off the beaten track, spending money at local shops. They don’t linger over meals out after work, or pick up trash in their communities, or stick their necks out to support others. In a recovery situation, we need the reverse to happen.

Safety in siloes

Safety in public spaces is fundamentally a public good. Like all public goods, it’s characterized by non-rivalry (consuming it doesn’t mean there’s less of it for others) and non-excludability (it’s not possible to provide it for the few without providing it for all). Like water and air, safety in public spaces has to be equally accessible to all if it’s of any enduring value. And like water and air, cities simply are not livable without it.

As soon as safety in public spaces gets put into siloes and assigned constituencies, we’ve lost the battle for it entirely. Because a city where some of us feel scared to go about our business is one that simply doesn’t work.

Siloes have constituencies, whose needs can be dismissed or placed on a pedestal by decision makers. If “cyclists” want to be safe, they can ask for Vision Zero. If residents of communities horrified by interpersonal violence want to be safe, they can ask for action on guns. Who, after all, would be both of those things at once?

Are we content for the right to be safe in public space to be a matter of favor and whim?

Whether it’s traffic, community, or otherwise, violence rips the threads of our public spaces, making it impossible to use and enjoy these vast assets as they should be. It turns them into another arena for structural disparities to play out, one in which some feel welcome and others don’t. That means public spaces aren’t safe until they’re equally so for all users.

All deaths matter?

Is it “issue nihilism” to say that safety as a public good needs to come first? Not in our situation. People are not only dying, but also suffering because of injuries, or lost loved ones, in greater numbers in DC due to violence than before the pandemic.

Policymakers focus on what is feasible to enact, which is, well, policies. It’s appropriate to divide up responses into specific areas of expertise and resources. For instance, GGWash still focuses on transportation, housing and land use because we think these are deeply important, resonant issues that define our environments, social and physical.

Decisions are made every day about what kinds of public spaces we want. A planning professor recently noted, “infrastructure projects are our values realized in concrete and steel.” Why is the implicit expectation that you have to take a certain mode of transport; be a certain race; avoid giving signals about your sexual orientation; or simply not be in public space at all, to be safe?

Through the pandemic, DC leaders showed the District is capable of responding effectively to a multi-faceted public health challenge when it’s a priority, even at great cost and in extreme circumstances. An auditor’s report concluded of the District’s performance: “early action increases the success of public policy intervention slowing disease spread and saving more lives.” More could have been done, particularly to address racial disparities, but DC’s cases peaked at 47 per 100,000 as opposed to the American average of 71.

The analysts highlight public health measures like an early mask mandate and restrictions on activities that were proving harmful to health, but also “enabling” measures like eviction and foreclosure moratoriums, hazard pay and sick pay adjustments. We need that energy and focus applied to post-pandemic public safety every bit as much as we needed it in the year-plus that preceded.

Can our leaders show the same focus as they did on the coronavirus response, declare the right to be in public space safely as a universal human right, and therefore X, Y, and Z policies will be enacted to protect it? Like coronavirus, violence is a public health problem with public health solutions, focused on reducing dangerous behaviors rather than assigning extraneous values to who should and shouldn’t live, thrive, or suffer.

Safe for all, or safe for none

We’ve just been through a challenge no living generation has, spanning over a year, killing more than three million people worldwide and harming billions. Our society’s suffering from the need to stay away from human interaction for so long to save lives, and at the same time a long-standing car dependency culture that blows apart norms and decency. The right to be near each other again safely needs to be dead center in any recovery plan.

It’s time to take a page out of this past year’s coronavirus response book, which required us to take bold action in recognition of our common humanity among those we share our streets, offices, and schools with. Our public officials should build on what they got right in the coronavirus response; learn from what went wrong; and apply that same commitment to the post-covid recovery, and the safety in public spaces that we need to deliver it.