Walkable neighborhoods are desirable real estate these days, as more Americans value the ability to get around without always needing a car.

Navigating our neighborhoods on foot has the added benefit of being really

good for our health, unless, of course, it gets us killed. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris

Boyd. Over the last decade, a number of U.S. cities have adopted a strategy called Vision Zero,

which is supposed to make streets safer and has helped

hundreds of cities in Europe go a year or more with no pedestrian fatalities.

So my guest wanted to understand why the number of walkers and cyclists killed by motor

vehicles in the U.S. has actually been rising. Rachel Weiner covers the subject of local

transportation for the Washington Post, where you can read her article, America's plan to protect pedestrians failed. A young woman's death reveals why. Rachel, welcome to think. Thanks for having me. We all understand the tragedy of pedestrian deaths on roadways, but the term is sort of abstract and clinical, which is why I think

you share the story of a young woman named Cecilia Milborn to put a kind of human face on this.

Tell us a little bit about her life.

Yeah, so, you know, she was 29. She was living in Los Angeles, which is where she wanted to be.

She'd always wanted to live near the beach.

And so that's why she left college on the East Coast.

She went out to LA where she had family.

She was working as a hairdresser and her colleagues say she was just a lovely person.

She'd been approached multiple times to model and so she'd been doing some of that.

She liked walking on this particular beach.

It's where she had scattered the ashes of her uncle when he died a year prior.

It's like it's where she would like to be photographed.

It's where she would meditate and, you know,

think out problems in her life.

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