You're undoubtedly correct that most news organizations don't take traffic violence seriously, but you've probably seen that Oaklandside decided two years ago to dedicate one of its reporters to the issue: https://oaklandside.org/category/public-safety/road-safety/
Think of how car deaths are used in fiction. It's treated like an unavoidable force of nature. I was watching Shrinking, a show where the main character's wife was killed in a traffic accident. He spends the entire show dealing with his grief. At no point does he ever consider taking action for traffic safety, it's just a thing that happens!
Thank you for reporting on this and similar issues. I bike almost exclusively, both in Mexico and the U.S., and I recently posted an article about how people from the U.S. are much more likely to die riding their bikes than they are to die in Mexico. Which isn’t to say that Mexico is overly dangerous to visitors from the U.S. - rather, it is meant to point out the ignorance that the U.S. population suffers when it comes to questions of safety.
You paint a pretty grim portrait here, and I probably have an even more cynical attitude, born of riding a bike in my hometown of Santa Cruz, CA (I visit there a few months a year). We live in a democracy (well, a partial one at best - and more democracy at the local level than the national), and the majority have spoken: bikes don’t belong on the road. Motorists don’t like the inconvenience of bikes slowing them down, being less visible, just generally taking up space. I think if you ask most motorists what we should do about the ridiculous volume of traffic violence in the U.S., they will respond with: get those damn bikes off the road - they don’t belong there. A reasonable response, given how demonstrably dangerous it is to ride a bike on U.S. streets.
It sucks that this is our reality, when it is not the reality in basically all other developed countries. And of course the same thing can be said about guns. In the U.S., we value our “freedom” to get where we’re going 5 minutes earlier over the “freedom” to live a reasonably safe life. I doubt this will change in my lifetime, which, of course, will end prematurely when I get killed by a motorist.
Unfortunately, the car-centric echo chamber those in the U.S. inhabit doesn’t seem to be abating. As you rightly point out, even the younger generations don’t understand why we should put any energy into fixing the problem of traffic violence. It is not a sexy issue, and there are apparently for more sexy issues across the globe to get activated about.
Is tolerating death and destruction inherent in the culture of the United States, especially as it related to guns and cars? It certainly seems to be. As you state, our car obsession knows no ideological boundaries; rather, it is who we are, are at least who we choose to be.
I could go into how and why in a country as “dangerous” as Mexico, riding a bike there is safer than riding a bike in the U.S. Laws, etc - it just doesn’t help those in the U.S. You cannot argue about religion using facts, and in the U.S., the right to cause mayhem from the comfort of your climate-controlled, leather-upholstered automobile is as much of a religion as Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, etc.
Darrell, you are so good at laying bare the important truths that much of our societal milieu either ignores or or habitually gaslights away. Your work inspires me (and I hope others as well) to more focused activism.
You're undoubtedly correct that most news organizations don't take traffic violence seriously, but you've probably seen that Oaklandside decided two years ago to dedicate one of its reporters to the issue: https://oaklandside.org/category/public-safety/road-safety/
YES! Oaklandsides done a fantastic job
Think of how car deaths are used in fiction. It's treated like an unavoidable force of nature. I was watching Shrinking, a show where the main character's wife was killed in a traffic accident. He spends the entire show dealing with his grief. At no point does he ever consider taking action for traffic safety, it's just a thing that happens!
Thank you for reporting on this and similar issues. I bike almost exclusively, both in Mexico and the U.S., and I recently posted an article about how people from the U.S. are much more likely to die riding their bikes than they are to die in Mexico. Which isn’t to say that Mexico is overly dangerous to visitors from the U.S. - rather, it is meant to point out the ignorance that the U.S. population suffers when it comes to questions of safety.
You paint a pretty grim portrait here, and I probably have an even more cynical attitude, born of riding a bike in my hometown of Santa Cruz, CA (I visit there a few months a year). We live in a democracy (well, a partial one at best - and more democracy at the local level than the national), and the majority have spoken: bikes don’t belong on the road. Motorists don’t like the inconvenience of bikes slowing them down, being less visible, just generally taking up space. I think if you ask most motorists what we should do about the ridiculous volume of traffic violence in the U.S., they will respond with: get those damn bikes off the road - they don’t belong there. A reasonable response, given how demonstrably dangerous it is to ride a bike on U.S. streets.
It sucks that this is our reality, when it is not the reality in basically all other developed countries. And of course the same thing can be said about guns. In the U.S., we value our “freedom” to get where we’re going 5 minutes earlier over the “freedom” to live a reasonably safe life. I doubt this will change in my lifetime, which, of course, will end prematurely when I get killed by a motorist.
Unfortunately, the car-centric echo chamber those in the U.S. inhabit doesn’t seem to be abating. As you rightly point out, even the younger generations don’t understand why we should put any energy into fixing the problem of traffic violence. It is not a sexy issue, and there are apparently for more sexy issues across the globe to get activated about.
Is tolerating death and destruction inherent in the culture of the United States, especially as it related to guns and cars? It certainly seems to be. As you state, our car obsession knows no ideological boundaries; rather, it is who we are, are at least who we choose to be.
I could go into how and why in a country as “dangerous” as Mexico, riding a bike there is safer than riding a bike in the U.S. Laws, etc - it just doesn’t help those in the U.S. You cannot argue about religion using facts, and in the U.S., the right to cause mayhem from the comfort of your climate-controlled, leather-upholstered automobile is as much of a religion as Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, etc.
Darrell, you are so good at laying bare the important truths that much of our societal milieu either ignores or or habitually gaslights away. Your work inspires me (and I hope others as well) to more focused activism.
Fantastic and important read.