I really liked your observation about cupholders, consoles, and drive-thrus: “Every flick of the radio dial, every bite of the cheeseburger or sip of the Coke, is a millisecond in which tragedy can strike. In which doing the most mundane thing, in an extremely dangerous machine disguised and softened for its user, can turn you into an accidental killer or victim.” Have we collectively decided that this “living room on wheels” design is an acceptable risk?
In the past 24 hours I have found myself contemplating the ideas of fault, blame, cause & effect, earning, deserving and grace. I find that to function effectively in the world as it is, we need to have a sort of a both/and or all-of-the-above approach. Even when trying to recognize that we live in a state of grace, we need to recognize that there are physical objects in place and in motion.
I have a dear friend who for many years, when things would go wrong in his life, he would fixate on blame, whether blaming himself or blaming another. Trying to locate the blame consumed too much of his mental energy. I felt bad for him, though sometimes it was actually a bit amusing. There was nothing I could do. It seemed even the church could do little for him. Then he got into a kind of self improvement group, which I was initially pretty skeptical about, and over the course of a couple years I saw him letting go more easily and being a more relaxed and more successful person. The group he participates in puts a strong emphasis on seeing things as they are and figuring out how to take responsibility for your future path and making the best decisions for yourself. Perhaps it was my upbringing, perhaps my DNA, but that always came easily to me.
So ... moving through the built environment is full of challenges. Automobiles are very costly to fuel and maintain. Public transit outside of a few of our densest urban areas is often inconvenient and sometimes a bit expensive in the USA. Cycling requires a certain level of skill and fitness (less so now with e-bikes). Walking is slow and really not practical for most people's commutes or shopping trips. Prior to semi-retirement, for me walking was done mostly with dogs over short distances or done on vacation in the woods or in a foreign city. And of course for everyone, whether drivers, cyclists, pedestrians or people waiting for the bus, cars pose a mild threat when even when piloted properly, simply because of mechanical error or momentarily blocked vision. When drivers are incompetent, reckless or impaired, the threat is magnified many fold. I don't have an exact tally, but in my life I think only cancer and heart disease have killed more family, friends and acquaintances that automobile collisions. And then there are the injuries and the financial damage.
In recent years, the post-pandemic era I guess, it seems the frequency of utterly reckless driving has increased immensely. Things I used to find odd, like people exceeding the speed limit by 20 mph or more and people blowing through controlled intersections without even slowing to a crawl, much less stopping, have become commonplace. The more people do it and get away with it, the more common it becomes. Consequences are important to shape behavior. Do we need to throw elderly people in jail? Probably not. Of course much depends upon her repentance. If she will never get behind the wheel again, I think that solves the problem. But more generally, I think law enforcement needs to be a bigger part of the picture. With moving violations, the punishment should fit the crime better. Impoundment of vehicles, temporary or permanent, ought to be a bigger part of the picture than mere fines or even jail sentences. I also think careful choices with language can make a difference over time. Some while ago, I stopped referring to car accidents and switched to the terms crash or collision.
Ultimately, solutions to this deadly problem will be in better transportation planning more so than enforcement though. We need to take individual responsibility to behave in motion as best we can, but also collectively look to improve policy for the future. As much as possible we ought forgive ourselves and others for the past mistakes, but be better going forward.
I like this framing: "sort of blames everyone and no one for traffic deaths." The pointing of fingers ends up entrenching everyone in corners. I leaned on Mahrone's conceptions of street design in this case, too. Legislatively, the licensure and elderly debate is not solvable due to political impasses at the state and national levels. The only solution then is street re-design, which is already legal and available tactic locally.
My sister died in a traffic accident a few years ago. I am extremely cognizant of how dangerous driving really is. I can’t imagine how I will handle the end of my driving in another … 20? … years? Will we have better public transportation by then? I doubt it.
I think that those of us in our 50s and 60s need to plan ahead for not driving. How can we start to move away from car dependency? This may include moving to a walkable area, getting a bike/tricycle, learning to use public transport, etc. These changes are easier to make now than when we are in our 80s or 90s.
Sixty-three here. I sold what was probably my last car about seven years ago. My wife still has one so we are not car free. She still has six or seven years until retirement and with a 35 mile commute, the car is necessary. We will most likely keep a car for 15-18 years after she retires because phase one of us both being retired will mean living in a small rural community without good public transit. Eventually though, probably either when I turn 80 or when she turns 80 or some time in between, we will move to a senior living community, probably in a city, and we will go car free. I remember watching as my mother's car collected more and more dings and scratches as she approached 80. Finally, at 81 she gave it up. The whole family felt great relief.
It seems difficult to blame car-dependency when this occurred in one of the most transit-rich cities in the U.S. I had to take away keys from an elderly parent who lived in a small town with virtually no transit. It sucked, and I can be angry that there weren't more systemic supports, but that didn't change the fundamental risk calculus. This was a crime, and the sentence doesn't seem like justice to me.
This case...half of it is the San Francisco court system. The other half is kind of core to why "noncarceral" urbanism is such a hard sell-it can't acknowledge that sometimes everyone can't win. You plow through a family of 4 at 80 years old? License permanently revoked, house arrest, suspended sentence with probation until you're most likely dead. Can't live at home without a car? Time for a nursing home.
I think you've nailed it with the line, "What I also think is that while I would never want to kill anybody, I would also not want to go to jail if I (accidentally!) did." Everybody in a car understands (or should understand) that they're in a dangerous machine and that death or serious injury can result from what we appropriately call "accidents" precisely because they happen even to careful drivers. We don't want a rule that presumes criminality and resolves doubts in favor of jail because it really can happen to any of us. We *do* want rules that make drivers pay for the risk through mandatory insurance and coverage minimums - which we have.
I have *no* idea where you're coming from, however, with the idea that "on some level, driving and drivers are real, while walking and riding transit or biking are just…not quite real." I don't think anyone has that notion even at the most subconscious level, not even teenagers who play car-wreck video games for fun.
What I *do* find to be a real subconscious belief, however, is this weird idea of drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists as identity groups, even though most people are all three of those things, depending on what they're doing at the moment. (I have literally been annoyed by those damn bicyclists dangerously swerving in front of me even when I am on my way to go biking with a bike in the back of my car... but I'm one of the good ones, I swear!)
I’m writing in the aftermath of a major winter storm, so I’m a bit fixated on snow clearing right now.
But one look at the budgets of many cities will tell you that drivers are more “real” than pedestrians or cyclists. Far more money and attention is spent and priority given on clearing streets of snow than on clearing sidewalks and bikeways or even near transit stops.
And, then, curiously, is the notion, in many jurisdictions that clearing the roadway of snow is a public responsibility while clearing the sidewalks is a private one.
I am going to agree with you about the way drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and transit users are thought of as separate groups with separate needs. (Let’s not even think about the fact that most transit users are necessarily also pedestrians as they go to or from the transit stop.) And yet, if you’ll forgive me for reverting to snowclearing, there’s little public recognition that getting the pedestrians safely on the sidewalks, the cyclists safely on the bikeways, and the transit users safely on their ways also makes driving easier, less stressful and safer.
I don't think there's any sense in which municipal budget priorities reflect judgments about who or what is more "real." There are a lot of practical reasons why more money would be spent on road clearing vs. sidewalk clearing, beginning with the fact that plow trucks are more expensive than shovels. Also, as you point out, clearing sidewalks is an obligation of property owners while clearing roads is a government function, so of *course* the government is going to spend less on the former than the latter.
Her point is that the legal architecture of snow clearing responsibility is downstream of an assumption that clearing the roads for cars is obviously a matter of pressing public interest, while doing likewise for pedestrians is not.
I'd also say that identity grouping, which I agree very much occurs here, easily leads to "othering" people. I don't think it's that far off from seeing members of "those" groups as not quite equal to yours. I think many of us do this in many ways all the time.
No, that's silly. For one thing, just because something is considered a "pressing public interest" doesn't mean that the pressing nature is predicated on any judgment that any group of people is more "real" than any other group - a point I still don't understand or recognize anywhere.
Second, if clearing sidewalks was not considered a pressing public interest, then we wouldn't have laws requiring property owners to shovel their sidewalks. And yet we do. So obviously government policy recognizes the public interest in both cleared sidewalks and cleared roads, and has simply made the sensible judgment that the former interest is efficiently addressed by making homeowners grab their shovels and the latter interest needs to be addressed differently.
That would make sense if it meant the sidewalks actually got cleared, but often they just don't, and it's tolerated in a way that clearing the roads would not be. At least that's what I've observed with regard to sidewalks vs. roads and clearing speeds. I'm not sure what about my phrasing you're having trouble with. I think it's quite obvious that people who get most places by driving have some kind of "lesser" view of non-drivers, however you would phrase it.
I haven't noticed *any* of the things you're talking about here. I've never seen problems with uncleared sidewalks in any of the cities I've lived in, nor have I ever seen that supposed contrast between sidewalks and roads. If anything it's been the opposite. Just this month the DC government left massive snowcrete piles in the roads blocking traffic - including on major thoroughfares like Massachusetts Avenue - that were still there like 2 weeks after everyone had cleared their sidewalks, and this failure was perfectly "tolerated" by everybody as consistent with the baseline expectations about how governments tend to do their jobs (i.e., poorly). And I do not think you will see any improvements in sidewalk management if you shift this responsibility from homeowners to the government, either.
Oh, let me continue to be silly and suggest a thought experiment.
What would it mean if the city decided that property owners were responsible for clearing the streets while the city took on the responsibility of promptly and properly clearing the sidewalks?
Property owners have taken responsibility for clearing the streets by (correctly) deciding that the most efficient way to clear the streets is to make it a public service. That relieves them of the burden of having to spontaneously organize their neighborhood towards the retention of a private street-cleaner, collectively negotiate the terms of service, and figure out how to deal with free-riders who will enjoy the plowed streets but never get around to sending the check. Just like how we take responsibility for our garbage by having our taxes pay for garbage pickup instead of telling everybody to figure out on their own how to get their trash to the dump.
I don't think there would be many strong objections towards extending that service to sidewalks, but property owners don't tend to mind taking a few minutes to shovel the sidewalk, so there's been no movement towards replacing that ritual with a tax hike to pay for unionized government employees to do it instead.
Seniors in SF or NYC can realistically surrender driving. There are transportation options.
Other places in the US? Not yet. Let’s fix that.
I really liked your observation about cupholders, consoles, and drive-thrus: “Every flick of the radio dial, every bite of the cheeseburger or sip of the Coke, is a millisecond in which tragedy can strike. In which doing the most mundane thing, in an extremely dangerous machine disguised and softened for its user, can turn you into an accidental killer or victim.” Have we collectively decided that this “living room on wheels” design is an acceptable risk?
In the past 24 hours I have found myself contemplating the ideas of fault, blame, cause & effect, earning, deserving and grace. I find that to function effectively in the world as it is, we need to have a sort of a both/and or all-of-the-above approach. Even when trying to recognize that we live in a state of grace, we need to recognize that there are physical objects in place and in motion.
I have a dear friend who for many years, when things would go wrong in his life, he would fixate on blame, whether blaming himself or blaming another. Trying to locate the blame consumed too much of his mental energy. I felt bad for him, though sometimes it was actually a bit amusing. There was nothing I could do. It seemed even the church could do little for him. Then he got into a kind of self improvement group, which I was initially pretty skeptical about, and over the course of a couple years I saw him letting go more easily and being a more relaxed and more successful person. The group he participates in puts a strong emphasis on seeing things as they are and figuring out how to take responsibility for your future path and making the best decisions for yourself. Perhaps it was my upbringing, perhaps my DNA, but that always came easily to me.
So ... moving through the built environment is full of challenges. Automobiles are very costly to fuel and maintain. Public transit outside of a few of our densest urban areas is often inconvenient and sometimes a bit expensive in the USA. Cycling requires a certain level of skill and fitness (less so now with e-bikes). Walking is slow and really not practical for most people's commutes or shopping trips. Prior to semi-retirement, for me walking was done mostly with dogs over short distances or done on vacation in the woods or in a foreign city. And of course for everyone, whether drivers, cyclists, pedestrians or people waiting for the bus, cars pose a mild threat when even when piloted properly, simply because of mechanical error or momentarily blocked vision. When drivers are incompetent, reckless or impaired, the threat is magnified many fold. I don't have an exact tally, but in my life I think only cancer and heart disease have killed more family, friends and acquaintances that automobile collisions. And then there are the injuries and the financial damage.
In recent years, the post-pandemic era I guess, it seems the frequency of utterly reckless driving has increased immensely. Things I used to find odd, like people exceeding the speed limit by 20 mph or more and people blowing through controlled intersections without even slowing to a crawl, much less stopping, have become commonplace. The more people do it and get away with it, the more common it becomes. Consequences are important to shape behavior. Do we need to throw elderly people in jail? Probably not. Of course much depends upon her repentance. If she will never get behind the wheel again, I think that solves the problem. But more generally, I think law enforcement needs to be a bigger part of the picture. With moving violations, the punishment should fit the crime better. Impoundment of vehicles, temporary or permanent, ought to be a bigger part of the picture than mere fines or even jail sentences. I also think careful choices with language can make a difference over time. Some while ago, I stopped referring to car accidents and switched to the terms crash or collision.
Ultimately, solutions to this deadly problem will be in better transportation planning more so than enforcement though. We need to take individual responsibility to behave in motion as best we can, but also collectively look to improve policy for the future. As much as possible we ought forgive ourselves and others for the past mistakes, but be better going forward.
Accidents will happen
We only hit and run
I don't want to hear it
'Cause I know what I done
-Elvis Costello
Great comment, and yes, the insane dangerous stuff should be *really* cracked down on by law enforcement.
I like this framing: "sort of blames everyone and no one for traffic deaths." The pointing of fingers ends up entrenching everyone in corners. I leaned on Mahrone's conceptions of street design in this case, too. Legislatively, the licensure and elderly debate is not solvable due to political impasses at the state and national levels. The only solution then is street re-design, which is already legal and available tactic locally.
https://www.collegetowns.org/p/senior-driver-debate-winter-olympic
My sister died in a traffic accident a few years ago. I am extremely cognizant of how dangerous driving really is. I can’t imagine how I will handle the end of my driving in another … 20? … years? Will we have better public transportation by then? I doubt it.
She should have a GPS device that alerts authorities when she drives recklessly 😎land ideally disables it . Just like people with multiple DUIs
Yeah, that is a good idea
...I have literally never heard of any location using that system for multiple DUIs
I think that those of us in our 50s and 60s need to plan ahead for not driving. How can we start to move away from car dependency? This may include moving to a walkable area, getting a bike/tricycle, learning to use public transport, etc. These changes are easier to make now than when we are in our 80s or 90s.
Sixty-three here. I sold what was probably my last car about seven years ago. My wife still has one so we are not car free. She still has six or seven years until retirement and with a 35 mile commute, the car is necessary. We will most likely keep a car for 15-18 years after she retires because phase one of us both being retired will mean living in a small rural community without good public transit. Eventually though, probably either when I turn 80 or when she turns 80 or some time in between, we will move to a senior living community, probably in a city, and we will go car free. I remember watching as my mother's car collected more and more dings and scratches as she approached 80. Finally, at 81 she gave it up. The whole family felt great relief.
If you want to get away with murder, do it with your car.
It seems difficult to blame car-dependency when this occurred in one of the most transit-rich cities in the U.S. I had to take away keys from an elderly parent who lived in a small town with virtually no transit. It sucked, and I can be angry that there weren't more systemic supports, but that didn't change the fundamental risk calculus. This was a crime, and the sentence doesn't seem like justice to me.
70 mph, sorry but as an older person I say she should face probation anyway
Yeah, if this was on a stroad where 70MPH is fairly normal, that would be one thing.
But this is just recklessness that feels like it's hiding behind age, which itself is an insult to the elderly community.
This case...half of it is the San Francisco court system. The other half is kind of core to why "noncarceral" urbanism is such a hard sell-it can't acknowledge that sometimes everyone can't win. You plow through a family of 4 at 80 years old? License permanently revoked, house arrest, suspended sentence with probation until you're most likely dead. Can't live at home without a car? Time for a nursing home.
I think you've nailed it with the line, "What I also think is that while I would never want to kill anybody, I would also not want to go to jail if I (accidentally!) did." Everybody in a car understands (or should understand) that they're in a dangerous machine and that death or serious injury can result from what we appropriately call "accidents" precisely because they happen even to careful drivers. We don't want a rule that presumes criminality and resolves doubts in favor of jail because it really can happen to any of us. We *do* want rules that make drivers pay for the risk through mandatory insurance and coverage minimums - which we have.
I have *no* idea where you're coming from, however, with the idea that "on some level, driving and drivers are real, while walking and riding transit or biking are just…not quite real." I don't think anyone has that notion even at the most subconscious level, not even teenagers who play car-wreck video games for fun.
What I *do* find to be a real subconscious belief, however, is this weird idea of drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists as identity groups, even though most people are all three of those things, depending on what they're doing at the moment. (I have literally been annoyed by those damn bicyclists dangerously swerving in front of me even when I am on my way to go biking with a bike in the back of my car... but I'm one of the good ones, I swear!)
I’m writing in the aftermath of a major winter storm, so I’m a bit fixated on snow clearing right now.
But one look at the budgets of many cities will tell you that drivers are more “real” than pedestrians or cyclists. Far more money and attention is spent and priority given on clearing streets of snow than on clearing sidewalks and bikeways or even near transit stops.
And, then, curiously, is the notion, in many jurisdictions that clearing the roadway of snow is a public responsibility while clearing the sidewalks is a private one.
I am going to agree with you about the way drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and transit users are thought of as separate groups with separate needs. (Let’s not even think about the fact that most transit users are necessarily also pedestrians as they go to or from the transit stop.) And yet, if you’ll forgive me for reverting to snowclearing, there’s little public recognition that getting the pedestrians safely on the sidewalks, the cyclists safely on the bikeways, and the transit users safely on their ways also makes driving easier, less stressful and safer.
I don't think there's any sense in which municipal budget priorities reflect judgments about who or what is more "real." There are a lot of practical reasons why more money would be spent on road clearing vs. sidewalk clearing, beginning with the fact that plow trucks are more expensive than shovels. Also, as you point out, clearing sidewalks is an obligation of property owners while clearing roads is a government function, so of *course* the government is going to spend less on the former than the latter.
Her point is that the legal architecture of snow clearing responsibility is downstream of an assumption that clearing the roads for cars is obviously a matter of pressing public interest, while doing likewise for pedestrians is not.
I'd also say that identity grouping, which I agree very much occurs here, easily leads to "othering" people. I don't think it's that far off from seeing members of "those" groups as not quite equal to yours. I think many of us do this in many ways all the time.
No, that's silly. For one thing, just because something is considered a "pressing public interest" doesn't mean that the pressing nature is predicated on any judgment that any group of people is more "real" than any other group - a point I still don't understand or recognize anywhere.
Second, if clearing sidewalks was not considered a pressing public interest, then we wouldn't have laws requiring property owners to shovel their sidewalks. And yet we do. So obviously government policy recognizes the public interest in both cleared sidewalks and cleared roads, and has simply made the sensible judgment that the former interest is efficiently addressed by making homeowners grab their shovels and the latter interest needs to be addressed differently.
That would make sense if it meant the sidewalks actually got cleared, but often they just don't, and it's tolerated in a way that clearing the roads would not be. At least that's what I've observed with regard to sidewalks vs. roads and clearing speeds. I'm not sure what about my phrasing you're having trouble with. I think it's quite obvious that people who get most places by driving have some kind of "lesser" view of non-drivers, however you would phrase it.
Clearing the roadways is a critical issue in a way clearing sidewalks is not.
I haven't noticed *any* of the things you're talking about here. I've never seen problems with uncleared sidewalks in any of the cities I've lived in, nor have I ever seen that supposed contrast between sidewalks and roads. If anything it's been the opposite. Just this month the DC government left massive snowcrete piles in the roads blocking traffic - including on major thoroughfares like Massachusetts Avenue - that were still there like 2 weeks after everyone had cleared their sidewalks, and this failure was perfectly "tolerated" by everybody as consistent with the baseline expectations about how governments tend to do their jobs (i.e., poorly). And I do not think you will see any improvements in sidewalk management if you shift this responsibility from homeowners to the government, either.
Oh, let me continue to be silly and suggest a thought experiment.
What would it mean if the city decided that property owners were responsible for clearing the streets while the city took on the responsibility of promptly and properly clearing the sidewalks?
That does indeed double down on silly.
Property owners have taken responsibility for clearing the streets by (correctly) deciding that the most efficient way to clear the streets is to make it a public service. That relieves them of the burden of having to spontaneously organize their neighborhood towards the retention of a private street-cleaner, collectively negotiate the terms of service, and figure out how to deal with free-riders who will enjoy the plowed streets but never get around to sending the check. Just like how we take responsibility for our garbage by having our taxes pay for garbage pickup instead of telling everybody to figure out on their own how to get their trash to the dump.
I don't think there would be many strong objections towards extending that service to sidewalks, but property owners don't tend to mind taking a few minutes to shovel the sidewalk, so there's been no movement towards replacing that ritual with a tax hike to pay for unionized government employees to do it instead.