Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Angie Schmidt. She is a writer on sustainable

transportation. She served for a long time as the national editor at Streets Blog. Her commentary

has appeared in New York Times, The Atlantic, and on NPR. She now runs a planning and consulting

firm focused on pedestrian safety,

and she is the author of the book, Right of Way, Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America.

Angie Schmidt, nice to talk to you.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So your book is about a, well, you call it a silent epidemic because it is something that

we don't talk about nearly enough in the United States.

And perhaps we could start with you laying out just exactly the scope of the problem that we're

talking about. Before we get into the causes, all the structural factors, you know, what is it that

essentially we are turning our attention away from and need to start looking at more?

Yeah. It's sort of interesting just coming out of COVID because this has been sort of a mass

death, traffic deaths in general are sort of a mass death cause that we've become sort of accustomed

to in the United States.

And it's considered, I think it's considered really kind of unsexy. So I made up this term pedestrian safety crisis to describe there's been an escalation

in pedestrian deaths over the last roughly 10 years. They've increased about 50%. And the problem

actually got a lot worse during the pandemic.

So, and there's a lot of reasons for that, and that's what I try to lay out in the book.

But essentially a lot of pedestrians in the United States, a lot more than used to be hit by and killed by automobiles.

I mean, the numbers are just going up and up over time.

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