Non-Drivers Are People, Too
On the psychology of motordom and its consequences
I saw these two social media posts, on the same case, recently:
Here’s the article about it. It looks like a driving error, but a pretty extreme one: she was reportedly speeding at around 70 miles an hour in the wrong direction and rammed into a bus stop, where the entire family she killed was waiting.
It isn’t clear to me exactly why, and it suggests she is not or was not capable of driving anymore. Her error seems more in the “reckless driving” than in the mere “confusion/mistake” category—like the cases where someone accidentally accelerates into a building—but it doesn’t seem that she was trying to kill or injure anybody.
So the case sits somewhere within that moral haze of people who aren’t fit to drive still driving because it’s effectively impossible to give up driving given the way we have designed our country. You can view this as obviating any guilt except in extreme cases. Or you can view it as living in a system which may, and often does, compel all of us to eventually visit potentially deadly violence on someone else.
I do know that my first instinct was to bristle at the idea of jailing an old lady. To think of it as slightly sadistic of urbanists to wink at urban crime but then demand the book be thrown at an elderly person (the same way housing folks are happy to eject people from homes they’ve lived in for decades because they can’t afford rising property taxes on fixed incomes). The worse part of me—the part of me that would have been all of me if I had not discovered urbanism—sees why this codes as “entitlement” to some.
I don’t really think all of that. Though I do think the question of jail is less important than the question of licensing and testing of aging motorists, and the question of what exactly people in a largely car-dependent country are supposed to do with themselves as they age out of driving responsibly.1
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. I’m aware that part of what I may be telling myself is my concern for the elderly is really my own self-interest. On some level, I want to reserve my to not go to jail for (again, accidentally) killing someone while driving. And I’m uncomfortable with calling for that to be done to someone else. It’s a kind of inverse Golden Rule: let others get away with things you’d like to get away with.
Is that feeling of mine any worse—or, ultimately, any different—than traffic engineers designing for auto traffic first, automakers selling cars with cupholders and entertainment consoles, or municipalities permitting drive-thru restaurants? 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. Our society, broadly, has made this trade-off for us, and told us it is worth it.
Cars are widely—if not near-universally—treated as everything other than serious, risk-laden machines for getting from one place to another. Violence and death—which will be caused by someone or another—is already baked into the idea of the car as a comfortable mobile living room to navigate a landscape which is impossible to navigate without it.
If I try to figure out what’s going on in my head—to get past the “final filter” and to the absolute base-level idea—I think it is basically that on some level, driving and drivers are real, while walking and riding transit or biking are just…not quite real. It’s weird to me how much I still feel this bias operating in my brain, even though I obviously don’t think that, or even act like it. (I never drive into the city, and I take the Metro when I can, though it isn’t always convenient out in the suburbs. I certainly don’t think that’s less real or worthy than driving! And I’ve written many times against the idea that driving is a necessary element of growing up or maturing.)
On some level, I suppose, I can block out the danger of driving, and I’m reacting to urbanists reminding me about it. It’s almost a kind of superstition: if you don’t talk about it, it won’t happen. You’re going to get me killed by reminding me that it could happen.
This is one reason I like the Strong Towns framing of these issues so much. In Charles Marohn’s book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, he sort of blames everyone and no one for traffic deaths. Our roads and our built environments are built and engineered in a manner, he argues, that guarantees destruction, injury, and death. Statistically, it is going to happen. “We should all take driving more seriously” doesn’t solve anything because we aren’t all going to do that. The system—and the human beings who administer it—are chiefly to blame.
But again, do I agree with Marohn’s analysis, or do I like the idea of blaming the system instead of myself? Do I simply empathize with a driver being punished for killing someone more than I empathize with the person being killed?
I don’t think so. In some ways this is analogous to the discourse around crime. Suburbanites tend to be much more aware of the risk of crime, and much more viscerally afraid of it, than they are of the objectively higher risk of injury or death in a car crash. If we’re operating on base self-interest, we should drive less, and we should want to live in environments with fewer cars. So I don’t think it’s exactly a failure of empathy. It’s more that something about living in a car-dependent world pushes the reality of traffic violence2 out of consciousness.
The point is that to imagine the victims of traffic violence as in every respect real people (a thing which, of course, the victims and their families do not need to do), to banish any hint of the idea that by waiting for the bus this family of four was somehow “asking for it”—is wickedly hard in a country where such an awareness is apt to eat into the motoring majority’s own sense of security and comfort behind the wheel.
That famous saying about how it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it could be amended more broadly: it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his way of life depends on his not understanding it.
Related Reading:
Solidarity Or Generational Theft?
Always Treat A Car Like It’s Loaded
Owning a Car Is a Financial Decision
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The New York Post even reported the story, but not surprisingly ignored the car-dependence angle.
Some people don’t like this term and think it’s too ideological, or that it implies agency when most car crashes are at least partly random. I recall my very conservative father telling me “There’s no such thing as accident. ‘Accident’ is an excuse.” I’ll stick with 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