At the beginning of 2020, I committed to reporting on Connecticut’s fatal pedestrian and cyclist crashes for one year. Local news outlets were not publishing an ongoing body count for these preventable deaths, though it has been the norm for them to provide this service when it comes to murders. Aside from those deep in the world of Vision Zero work, it felt like nobody in state was giving sustained attention to this problem.
Checking the news, databases, and social media daily for crash information is distressing. Maybe there are others who are numb enough to not be bothered. I’m not among them. Every time I saw news of yet another driver killing a person (and in one case, killing two people during one collision in Hamden) it hurt. Didn’t matter if the person was young or old. The news never ceased to disturb me.
It’s also aggravating. There’s no public, centralized place to find this information. The UConn/Connecticut Crash Data Repository is mildly useful, but a number of the deaths reported in the news have not yet made it onto the page, and at times there are inconsistencies. If searching for fatal crashes, sometimes apparently non-fatal collisions turn up in the results. An example of this is a teen who was struck in a New London parking lot in August. The results list this both as fatal and non-fatal. There are crash diagrams with some of these cases, but we need to ask what are these based on? An officer’s assessment? Video footage? Witness reports? All or none of the above? There was at least one that seemed to contradict everything reported on the case publicly. What’s interesting is that sobriety tests are not consistently given to drivers, though in some cases we know this is not possible because of how many motorists opt to leave the crash scene rather than stay put and take responsibility.
Coverage of traffic injuries and fatalities is spotty, often with no follow-up story, and not every pedestrian death receives media attention. It feels outrageous for such lousy reporting to be allowed when we know that reporters can dig if incentivized; you need not look beyond the ink spilled over Fotis Dulos for evidence of this.
As an aside, I’ve asked various people to guess how many pedestrians were hit by cars in Hartford last year — as in, any collision causing injury or death to the person outside the vehicle. Nobody, including those who have themselves been struck, even came close. How do we convince people to fix a problem that is generally underestimated?
After intentionally and carefully observing how journalists and police, along with those commenting on news articles, spoke about deadly collisions, in combination with ongoing evaluation of crash patterns, there are a number of steps regular folks can take that would significantly reduce traffic fatalities and injuries. Here is an abbreviated list:
1. Take Personal Responsibility
If you drive, do so with intention. Be fully alert to your surroundings whether in a driveway, parking lot, side street, stroad, or highway. Assume that there are pedestrians and cyclists using the road and look for us. Drive at a speed that is appropriate to the road and weather conditions, even if the posted speed limit is much higher. Doing this makes it more likely that you can stop in time to avoid a collision. Use your headlights. Have working headlights. Clean your windshield. If there is poor visibility, slow down or pull over until conditions improve. Take the word “accident” out of your vocabulary and understand that if you hit someone or something, it was not an accident. You may not have intended to do that, but what caused this? Were you daydreaming behind the wheel? Going way too fast? Following too closely? Texting? Driving with bald tires? Get real with yourself. If it’s painful and anxiety-inducing to think you could potentially kill another person, good. That’s a sign that you have a soul. Use that to determine how you behave.
2. Embrace Educating Peers
In Connecticut, we live in a car-centric culture. It is exhausting to be constantly educating motorists about what should be basic concepts, but it needs to happen anyway. Do it not because you are “passionate” or an “avid” anything, but because you are tired of people dying.
When you hear conversations maligning pedestrians, step in. Let motorists know it’s not funny to joke about running down pedestrians, ever. Confront people when they make remarks about pedestrians “coming out of nowhere.” Challenge them about why they are allegedly not seeing people.
Reject safety theater without apology. What is safety theater? It’s a ploy to blame victims by insisting pedestrians and cyclists wear hi-vis/reflective gear head-to-toe. If a motorist is staring at his phone, that hi-vis ain’t gonna help. Hear someone gripe about how they “couldn’t see” a person wearing dark clothes? Go ahead and remind them that they just admitted to seeing them. The problem is not a person’s fashion choices — it’s poor street lighting, and very often, people driving without functioning or clean headlights combined with a dirty windshield.
When people complain about getting stuck in traffic, there’s a chance to remind them that they contributed to that traffic. When people gripe about struggling to find parking, there’s another teaching opportunity. Could they have taken the bus, carpooled, or adjusted their expectations and walked a few blocks? Know someone who just whined about spending 20 seconds walking in the rain from their car to the building? Enlighten them about walking a mile in the same conditions and having to keep a change of clothing at work because an inconsiderate driver always manages to speed in the right-hand lane, splashing you with untreated storm water that contains God knows what, but definitely oil, gas, and has likely washed over at least one dead squirrel or rat. Share the positive aspects too, like how many calories you burn simply by commuting or how many dogs you were able to pet on your morning commute. When car culture dominates, many have absolutely no concept of what it means to commute by foot or bike. They need to be informed by those who use these modes of transportation.
While having these conversations, remove “accident” from your vocabulary. There are more precise words: crash, collision, sideswipe, rollover, etc.
3. Embrace Educating Professionals
Tell Journalists to do better. When they use “accident,” we correct them. When they share bad intel, call them out. Are they publishing an officer’s inane excuse for a crash (ex: blaming the gradual change in daylight) without countering this with facts? Email or letter to editor or open letter. Are they using passive voice, or active voice? Are they phrasing their reports so that it seems like self-driving cars are in abundance? Do they use language that makes it seem like a car crashed while nobody was seated behind the wheel? Do they say things like “snow caused a rollover” when it would be more accurate to report that “a person driving too fast for snowy conditions rolled their car”?
4. Do Your Civic Duty
If you have the time and fortitude, attend those Complete Streets committee meetings or attend public hearings; if not, send emails to those in positions of power letting them know that doing nothing to dangerous streets is what poor leaders do. Let the politicians know when they’ve made the right move too. Good grassroots organizations provide templates to help people who want to speak up but might lack confidence in their writing. Use one of those templates or make one if you can. Use apps like 311 or Bike Lane Uprising to report broken street lights, unshoveled sidewalks and bike lanes, bushes blocking sidewalks, and cars parked in bicycle lanes.
5. Create Visual Aids
Make shrines. Install ghost bikes. Pile sneakers on the steps of City Hall. Find ways to help folks “get it.” I created this map (below) last year partly to track where people were getting hit, but to also share the victims’ photos when available and provide a more complete reminder of the severity of the problem. For casual news consumers, the stories may seem disconnected. Help others to see where the patterns are and that these deaths are not isolated, unfortunate “accidents,” but absolutely connected and absolutely preventable.
Is that it? No. Those are just a few things that the average person who is not an engineer, elected official, law enforcement officer, automaker, or journalist can do.
If there is any big takeaway here, it’s that these crashes, whether they cause injury or death, are not accidents. They are preventable.
What I Learned From Paying Attention to One Year of Pedestrian and Cyclist Deaths
At the beginning of 2020, I committed to reporting on Connecticut’s fatal pedestrian and cyclist crashes for one year. Local news outlets were not publishing an ongoing body count for these preventable deaths, though it has been the norm for them to provide this service when it comes to murders. Aside from those deep in the world of Vision Zero work, it felt like nobody in state was giving sustained attention to this problem.
Checking the news, databases, and social media daily for crash information is distressing. Maybe there are others who are numb enough to not be bothered. I’m not among them. Every time I saw news of yet another driver killing a person (and in one case, killing two people during one collision in Hamden) it hurt. Didn’t matter if the person was young or old. The news never ceased to disturb me.
It’s also aggravating. There’s no public, centralized place to find this information. The UConn/Connecticut Crash Data Repository is mildly useful, but a number of the deaths reported in the news have not yet made it onto the page, and at times there are inconsistencies. If searching for fatal crashes, sometimes apparently non-fatal collisions turn up in the results. An example of this is a teen who was struck in a New London parking lot in August. The results list this both as fatal and non-fatal. There are crash diagrams with some of these cases, but we need to ask what are these based on? An officer’s assessment? Video footage? Witness reports? All or none of the above? There was at least one that seemed to contradict everything reported on the case publicly. What’s interesting is that sobriety tests are not consistently given to drivers, though in some cases we know this is not possible because of how many motorists opt to leave the crash scene rather than stay put and take responsibility.
Coverage of traffic injuries and fatalities is spotty, often with no follow-up story, and not every pedestrian death receives media attention. It feels outrageous for such lousy reporting to be allowed when we know that reporters can dig if incentivized; you need not look beyond the ink spilled over Fotis Dulos for evidence of this.
As an aside, I’ve asked various people to guess how many pedestrians were hit by cars in Hartford last year — as in, any collision causing injury or death to the person outside the vehicle. Nobody, including those who have themselves been struck, even came close. How do we convince people to fix a problem that is generally underestimated?
After intentionally and carefully observing how journalists and police, along with those commenting on news articles, spoke about deadly collisions, in combination with ongoing evaluation of crash patterns, there are a number of steps regular folks can take that would significantly reduce traffic fatalities and injuries. Here is an abbreviated list:
1. Take Personal Responsibility
If you drive, do so with intention. Be fully alert to your surroundings whether in a driveway, parking lot, side street, stroad, or highway. Assume that there are pedestrians and cyclists using the road and look for us. Drive at a speed that is appropriate to the road and weather conditions, even if the posted speed limit is much higher. Doing this makes it more likely that you can stop in time to avoid a collision. Use your headlights. Have working headlights. Clean your windshield. If there is poor visibility, slow down or pull over until conditions improve. Take the word “accident” out of your vocabulary and understand that if you hit someone or something, it was not an accident. You may not have intended to do that, but what caused this? Were you daydreaming behind the wheel? Going way too fast? Following too closely? Texting? Driving with bald tires? Get real with yourself. If it’s painful and anxiety-inducing to think you could potentially kill another person, good. That’s a sign that you have a soul. Use that to determine how you behave.
2. Embrace Educating Peers
In Connecticut, we live in a car-centric culture. It is exhausting to be constantly educating motorists about what should be basic concepts, but it needs to happen anyway. Do it not because you are “passionate” or an “avid” anything, but because you are tired of people dying.
When you hear conversations maligning pedestrians, step in. Let motorists know it’s not funny to joke about running down pedestrians, ever. Confront people when they make remarks about pedestrians “coming out of nowhere.” Challenge them about why they are allegedly not seeing people.
Reject safety theater without apology. What is safety theater? It’s a ploy to blame victims by insisting pedestrians and cyclists wear hi-vis/reflective gear head-to-toe. If a motorist is staring at his phone, that hi-vis ain’t gonna help. Hear someone gripe about how they “couldn’t see” a person wearing dark clothes? Go ahead and remind them that they just admitted to seeing them. The problem is not a person’s fashion choices — it’s poor street lighting, and very often, people driving without functioning or clean headlights combined with a dirty windshield.
When people complain about getting stuck in traffic, there’s a chance to remind them that they contributed to that traffic. When people gripe about struggling to find parking, there’s another teaching opportunity. Could they have taken the bus, carpooled, or adjusted their expectations and walked a few blocks? Know someone who just whined about spending 20 seconds walking in the rain from their car to the building? Enlighten them about walking a mile in the same conditions and having to keep a change of clothing at work because an inconsiderate driver always manages to speed in the right-hand lane, splashing you with untreated storm water that contains God knows what, but definitely oil, gas, and has likely washed over at least one dead squirrel or rat. Share the positive aspects too, like how many calories you burn simply by commuting or how many dogs you were able to pet on your morning commute. When car culture dominates, many have absolutely no concept of what it means to commute by foot or bike. They need to be informed by those who use these modes of transportation.
While having these conversations, remove “accident” from your vocabulary. There are more precise words: crash, collision, sideswipe, rollover, etc.
3. Embrace Educating Professionals
Tell Journalists to do better. When they use “accident,” we correct them. When they share bad intel, call them out. Are they publishing an officer’s inane excuse for a crash (ex: blaming the gradual change in daylight) without countering this with facts? Email or letter to editor or open letter. Are they using passive voice, or active voice? Are they phrasing their reports so that it seems like self-driving cars are in abundance? Do they use language that makes it seem like a car crashed while nobody was seated behind the wheel? Do they say things like “snow caused a rollover” when it would be more accurate to report that “a person driving too fast for snowy conditions rolled their car”?
4. Do Your Civic Duty
If you have the time and fortitude, attend those Complete Streets committee meetings or attend public hearings; if not, send emails to those in positions of power letting them know that doing nothing to dangerous streets is what poor leaders do. Let the politicians know when they’ve made the right move too. Good grassroots organizations provide templates to help people who want to speak up but might lack confidence in their writing. Use one of those templates or make one if you can. Use apps like 311 or Bike Lane Uprising to report broken street lights, unshoveled sidewalks and bike lanes, bushes blocking sidewalks, and cars parked in bicycle lanes.
5. Create Visual Aids
Make shrines. Install ghost bikes. Pile sneakers on the steps of City Hall. Find ways to help folks “get it.” I created this map (below) last year partly to track where people were getting hit, but to also share the victims’ photos when available and provide a more complete reminder of the severity of the problem. For casual news consumers, the stories may seem disconnected. Help others to see where the patterns are and that these deaths are not isolated, unfortunate “accidents,” but absolutely connected and absolutely preventable.
Is that it? No. Those are just a few things that the average person who is not an engineer, elected official, law enforcement officer, automaker, or journalist can do.
If there is any big takeaway here, it’s that these crashes, whether they cause injury or death, are not accidents. They are preventable.
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