Friday, Febuary 13, 2015, was a normal day on America’s roads, all 4,071,000 miles of them,1 a web of asphalt, concrete, and unpaved dirt that binds our nation and neighborhoods, linking Wall Street to Main Street, port to warehouse, shopper to store—and driver to doom.
A young entertainer walked home rather than drive drunk, only to be run down by a drunken driver. A graphic artist drove oh-so-carefully in the snowy darkness, only to collide head-on with a car barreling down the wrong side of the interstate. And there was the crazy mundanity of a mattress dropped on a freeway, a soft object, a thing that cushions—except when a car strikes it at high speed. Then it sets off a fatal chain reaction, a deadly game of pinball in which the balls weigh two tons and the bumpers are concrete medians.
America’s roads that day, like every day, bore casualties around the clock:2
A death every 15 minutes.
A trip to the emergency room every 12.6 seconds.
An injury serious enough for a medical consult every 7.3 seconds.
And there was a crash of some kind, somewhere—involving death, injury, or property damage, or a mix of all three—every 2.8 seconds. It’s happening right now: in the time it takes to read this sentence, two more car crashes occurred on America’s roads and streets.3
The day began with a wreck in New Hampshire so bad, it closed a frigid highway in both directions: a wooded stretch of Route 16 in the town of Milton, just short of the Maine state line. The road had to be scrubbed of cars and trucks so the first responders could descend on the twisted wreckage, trying to stanch the blood, then extract the occupants and attempt to resuscitate those who showed no signs of life but who might yet be saved. Next came the investigators, followed by the coroners, then the tow trucks and, finally, the cleanup crews to carry off the post-crash debris and the detour signs, letting the inexorable flow of traffic resume. Four hours later, a bit past midnight, no sign remained of the three women and the family dog who perished in a head-on collision. The crash occurred while it was still Thursday, but its aftermath spilled over into Friday the thirteenth.
Most days in America begin with a lane or street or highway closed somewhere because of a fatal crash the night before.
Victoria Rose had been driving south on the two-lane highway toward her home in Revere, Massachusetts, when her 2005 Jeep Liberty SUV drifted across the centerline and into northbound traffic. This would be the first of many such “over-the-line” wrecks this day, a common sort of accident. The fifty-seven-year-old died instantly when she collided head-on with a Subaru Outback station wagon that had been cruising quite legally and properly in the northbound lane. That driver, Allison Smith, an environmental expert with the nonprofit New England States Committee on Electricity, survived only long enough to be cut free from her mangled car and rushed to a local hospital, where the thirty-one-year-old died within minutes. One of her passengers, Vanessa Cox of Boston, athletic department administrator at Brandeis University, also died in the hospital emergency room. A third person in the Subaru, Lucy Pollard, a prep school teacher and Allison Smith’s wife, survived with serious injuries, as did a passenger in Rose’s Jeep. A small dog riding in that car had to be euthanized at the scene.
Wandering over lane lines, either off the road to the right or into oncoming traffic to the left—“road departure” and “lane departure” are the official terms—can be a hallmark of distracted driving or dozing at the wheel. But, as is often the case, establishing with certainty the cause for Rose’s fatal swerve has been difficult for investigators. Those most able to explain were killed.
Friday the thirteenth was full of such unexplained drifts into destruction. Jillian L. “Jilly” Rebel was a victim of one. A forty-year-old worker at a local gas station and convenience store, Jilly was well-known in her community for her cheery greetings to customers and her love of all sorts of animals. On Friday the thirteenth she drifted across the centerline on I–80 in Lackawannock Township, Pennsylvania, at 2:30 in the afternoon. Her PT Cruiser hit the grassy median, skidded, and rolled four times before crunching to a halt. With her seat belt left unbuckled as she drove—another common theme this day—she hurtled out of the car to her death during the roll.
Ten minutes later, eighty-seven-year-old Dick Morgan died at the wheel of his Ford F–150 pickup on Minnesota State Highway 19 after he, too, drifted across the centerline and collided head-on with a semitruck. Chad Hilborn, a thirty-three-year-old corrections officer coming home from a graveyard shift in Washtenaw County, Michigan, died the same way, crossing the centerline and running head-on into an approaching pickup truck, critically injuring the other driver. There were more than two dozen fatal crashes of this sort during the day: drifting out of lanes, drifting into clearly marked barriers, drifting into fields and forests. None of these involved mechanical failures or adverse weather, nor was there evidence of drunken driving, which means avoidable errors—distraction, dozing, or speeding—were involved.
Extensive research in the U.S. and United Kingdom dating back to 1979 pins the blame for 90 to 99 percent of traffic crashes on human error.4 Speeding (a factor in 30 percent of traffic deaths) and distraction (26 percent) together account for more than half of all crashes.5 The single most frequent cause of fatal collisions, driving drunk (30.8 percent of road deaths) is certainly an example of human error, as are all the other acts of reckless, negligent, incompetent, and criminal driving behavior: tailgating, running red lights, refusing to yield to pedestrians, ignoring the right of way of bike riders, driving at unsafe speeds, driving drowsy (instead of pulling over when drowsy). All of these are intentional behaviors, as opposed to the commonly used but almost always incorrect descriptor “accidental.” The fatal results might have been unintended, but the behavior is no accident.
Driving is by far the most difficult, complex, and high-risk task most people other than bomb defusers and brain surgeons will ever do. Yet driver training and licensing tests set the bar so low that almost everyone passes (eventually). So it’s not really surprising that error, by commission or omission, is the primary culprit in almost all car wrecks. The surprise would be if it were otherwise.
The real surprise is that, for all its prevalence, few mechanisms exist to deal effectively with the often reckless or negligent decisions that precede fatally bad driving—either preventing it, minimizing it, or imposing consequences to deter it.
On the afternoon of Friday the thirteenth, Tiffanie Strasser waited patiently for the “Walk” signal and a green light before stepping out to cross a busy street in Denver’s lively Bonnie Brae neighborhood, pushing her two children before her in a double stroller. There was five-year-old Audrey, blind and developmentally delayed, and, next to her, three-year-old Austin, Audrey’s precocious, self-appointed “big” brother, protector, and guide, who was counting down the days to his fourth birthday one week away. The family was headed for ice cream, then the library.
At the same intersection, also with a green light, was driver Joan Hinkemeyer, a seventy-eight-year-old retired professor and current gardening columnist for the Washington Park Profile, a monthly community newspaper. Hinkemeyer, after departing from her volunteer work at the same neighborhood library the Strassers had planned to visit, turned her car left—into the crosswalk, and into the Strassers. Tiffanie and Audrey suffered only minor injuries, but Austin was dragged several feet and suffered fatal head trauma. Hinkemeyer said she couldn’t see the family in the crosswalk because of glare from the late-afternoon sun.
After a long investigation, the Denver district attorney charged her with one count of careless driving resulting in death, and two counts of careless driving resulting in injury—misdemeanors under Colorado law, punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 and a year in jail. The maximums were only theoretical, however; lesser penalties are the norm. Prosecutors offered a plea bargain with a sentence of no jail time, two hundred hours of community service, and a driving class in exchange for an admission of one count of careless driving.
In an emotional court hearing in which Hinkemeyer apologized to the Strasser family, Austin’s parents pleaded with the judge to reject the deal in favor of a maximum jail sentence and a ban on Hinkemeyer ever driving again. After setting up framed photos of her son throughout the courtroom, Tiffanie Strasser stared at the judge and asked, “How can the consequences of killing a child in a crosswalk be some hours of community service?”
The judge did indeed reject the plea bargain but accepted a slightly modified deal, hastily worked out on the spot: one day in jail plus thirty days of home confinement and a requirement that Hinkemeyer pass a driving course in order to keep her license.
These would be the toughest sanctions imposed this day anywhere in the nation for fatal driving, other than cases involving intoxication. A crash earlier that day in Auburn Hills, Michigan, was far more typical. A thirty-three-year-old machinist, apparently in reaction to erratic driving by another car southbound on Interstate 75, lost control of his Ford Escort, struck the concrete median wall, and came to a stop in the left lane. The disabled car was then struck by a Chevy Malibu. The driver of the Ford, John Steele, who had recently purchased a house he was immersed in renovating, suffered critical injuries and died three weeks later from complications from cerebral trauma. Eyewitnesses thought a black Ford SUV had clipped Steele’s car and fled after causing the deadly sequence of events. After police issued a plea through the media for additional witnesses, the driver of the mysterious SUV came forward. Investigators determined that vehicle had no physical contact with Steele’s car after all—it was just a close call. The SUV driver’s consequence: a ticket for erratic driving.
Even more typical: a driver in Conroe, Texas, at 6:30 that morning turned left in front of a young motorcyclist going 55 miles an hour in the opposite direction on busy State Highway 105. There was no way for the biker to avoid slamming into the car that suddenly veered into his path. Seventeen-year-old Trenton Fortune, on his way to meet his girlfriend for breakfast before they went to their high school together, died from the impact. The driver of the car was blamed for the crash in police reports for failing to yield the right of way, but no criminal charges were filed.
There’s an old joke told around the California Highway Patrol: If you want to get away with killing someone, use a car.
It’s not a very funny joke—just a literally true one. As long as a driver is sober, causing a crash that leads to injury or death is rarely treated as a crime, and rarely leads to meaningful sanctions, such as taking away someone’s driving privileges (although such a policy might have limited impact, as a 2008 study found: one in five fatal collisions involve a driver with no valid license).6 Erratic driving may cause a chain reaction leading to hospitals and graves, but such arguably negligent or reckless conduct is almost always regarded as an ordinary traffic violation or a simple “accident.” On the rare occasions when prosecutors file formal criminal charges such as vehicular homicide, they often end up reduced to misdemeanors or traffic violations. Case in point: a twenty-year-old North Dakota woman, accused in 2014 of using her phone while driving, was allegedly so inattentive to the road that she rear-ended another car at 80 miles per hour without ever braking. An eighty-nine-year-old great-grandmother in the other car died. The case against the driver started as a stiff felony prosecution but ended up plea bargained down to a misdemeanor, with the young woman receiving a year of unsupervised probation and a guarantee that her record would be expunged if she finished the year without incident.7
In other cases, the lenient treatment is a function of a system deliberately constructed to excuse auto violence, as in the 2013 death in New York City of three-year-old Allison Liao, run down as she walked hand in hand with her grandmother in a crosswalk with the right of way on Main Street in Flushing. The Queens district attorney refused to prosecute the driver of the SUV that killed the toddler because he wasn’t drunk or on drugs at the time; the driver was given a pair of traffic tickets instead. And even those were tossed out by a callous and disinterested judge—abetted by an inept department of motor vehicles—who conducted a forty-seven-second hearing without even reviewing the facts of the case. The system, designed to process as many tickets in a day as possible, had neither time nor concern for the death of a three-year-old.8
Such outcomes are the rule, not the exception, although in most cases stiff initial changes are rarely filed in the first place. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal combed through traffic and criminal justice data to show that 95 percent of traffic fatalities in New York City led to no criminal prosecutions.9 A similar analysis in Oregon showed that sober drivers in fatal car crashes in the Beaver State had little to worry about, either.10 Drivers, it seems, enjoy an exalted position in a U.S. criminal justice system that is otherwise viewed as one of the toughest in the developed world.11
No other single product has shaped the law, the landscape, and public opinion as radically as the car. As revolutionary as the horseless carriage was at redefining travel in America, other changes instigated by cars went deeper, none more than the revealing evolution of how we describe car violence. A common term of the 1920s, “motor killings,” has morphed into today’s “fatal accidents.” The gulf between the two ways of describing road death—the early term, angry and accusatory, and the current phrase, blameless and bureaucratic—perhaps explains what might otherwise seem inexplicable: the American public’s willing acceptance for decades of cars designed and used in such a way that they have become the number one killer of our children and teenagers and everyone else under forty.
Sheriff’s investigators combing the wreckage on the night of February thirteenth in Forsyth County, Georgia, concluded high school senior Taylor Oliver was using his cell phone to send text messages in the moments before his Ford pickup truck drifted off a county road. When he realized his blunder, Oliver appeared to try to steer back onto the asphalt, but he overcorrected and lost control. His pickup slid sideways across the centerline and into opposing traffic. A “Super Duty” Ford F–350 pickup truck—towing a twenty-four-foot trailer with a Bobcat front-end loader onboard—broadsided the passenger side of Oliver’s pickup. Both trucks careened off the roadway and down an embankment. The driver and passenger in the bigger truck were not injured, but Oliver, alone in his Ford, suffered fatal head injuries.
Investigators in Greensboro, North Carolina, theorized that some sort of distraction also sent UPS Store worker Roger McHenry to his death when his car careened into the “gore point” where Interstate 40 splits, and in Flagstaff, Arizona, where the driver of a semitruck hauling a load of beer died when he drove off the road and into a culvert on Interstate 40, closing the westbound side of the freeway for half a day because of spilled beer and debris. And Mandy J. Theurer died on the familiar rural road where she lived, another likely distracted driver, careening into a ditch she had driven by safely countless times before. The twenty-six-year-old cosmetologist who worked at the Cute as a Button salon in Portland, Indiana, did not have her seat belt buckled, and when her car overturned she was ejected, suffering fatal trauma. Fifty percent of all car crashes occur within five miles of home.
Because of the prevalence of such accidents, distracted driving—particularly when it involves using cell phones—has in recent years become the focus of public debate, legislation, police crackdowns . . . and considerable misunderstanding.
The problem is not cell phones per se—it’s the human brain and what the National Safety Council calls “the myth of multitasking.”12 This is the common but incorrect belief that humans are good at doing several things at once, whether driving or cooking or dancing. In most endeavors, this is a harmless belief; but when traveling 65 miles per hour, the stakes are too high to be governed by myth. We’re not talking about walking and chewing gum here, but about tasks that require thought and attention. The truth is, no matter how it feels or appears subjectively, the human brain cannot pay attention to two cognitive tasks at the same time. Computers can do this but not humans. We are not built for it.
What the brain is really good at is toggling between mind-absorbing tasks—shifting focus rather than dividing it, then picking up where it left off when it toggles back. So when drivers are messing with cell phones or car stereos or dropped baby bottles, they are not driving. They have toggled, shifting focus and attention from one task to another, sometimes quite rapidly, but never simultaneously.
This is the essence of distraction and it’s not limited to staring down at a phone instead of out through the windshield. Brain scans of drivers talking on the phone while staring straight ahead show that activity in the area of the brain that processes moving images decreases by one third or more—hard evidence of a distracted brain. There have been many fatal crashes attributed to this “inattention blindness,” commonly called “tunnel vision.” Drivers talking on cell phones or performing other non-driving tasks can become so focused on the non-driving activity that their brains fail to perceive half the information their eyeballs are receiving from the driving environment. They can appear to be paying attention—the drivers may even think they are paying attention—but they are distracted drivers. This is not a matter of skill or practice or experience. It’s biology.
The U.S. Department of Transportation made a public service video a few years ago featuring a fatal crash in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that illustrates this problem.13 A twenty-year-old woman, while driving on a city street, spoke by cell phone with someone at the church where she did volunteer work with elementary school–aged children. Witnesses later told police that she was looking straight ahead out the windshield while talking on her phone—not looking down, not texting, not dialing. Yet she drove right through a red light at an intersection into cross traffic. The light had been changed long enough for several cars to move through the intersection right in her field of view, yet she kept going, never braking but speeding into the intersection against the light, where she broadsided another car at 48 miles an hour. A twelve-year-old boy in the car she broadsided was killed in the collision.
The problem isn’t that humans can’t be good drivers. When focused and fully engaged, humans can be fantastic drivers, capable of displaying the same sort of innate mental calculation of trajectories and safe passage as a star football quarterback and his receiver use to complete a pass forty yards downfield. At the same time, the brain is very good at ignoring false signs of danger—thereby avoiding the constant traffic slowdowns that would result from stopping for every possible hazard—and able to distinguish a person running into traffic from a wayward balloon blowing into the road without a moment’s hesitation. That might sound like a no-brainer, but that balloon would give fits to the literal computer brain of a driverless car, which would likely grind to a halt for the balloon as quickly as for a person.
The problem is that staying focused and fully engaged for sustained periods of time is not what humans do best, with or without a cell phone in hand. Driving can be boring, the conditions monotonous, or the street or intersection so familiar that we hardly notice or think about it. That’s when the brain’s ability to stay focused on safe driving decays, because humans are terrible at doing repetitive, routine tasks while also remaining alert for sudden, unexpected dangers that may or not materialize. Robots and computers excel in that scenario—which is why autopilots on airliners have become essential tools during long flights.
Using cell phones, employing GPS devices, and engaging in other tasks unrelated to driving (eating, putting on makeup, using an electric razor—almost anything can become a distraction) heighten this risk. And so distracted driving happens every day in America. The results are fatal: about once an hour that we know of.
When danger looms—a car jamming on the brakes in front, a stop signal unnoticed, a curve in the road when attention is diverted—a lot of bad things can happen before a distracted driver can refocus attention and react.
“You put your life in the hands of everybody passing you on a two-lane road every day,” Jim McNamara says, and the CHP officer’s tone makes clear that he does not enjoy this particular aspect of driving. McNamara knows that trust is violated daily. He’s seen it. He’s cleaned up after it. It happens so fast and so easily: the physics of four-thousand-pound objects racing toward one another, pitted against the temptation so many drivers indulge, to read that text or find that playlist, because it’ll only take a few seconds looking away from the road. The problem: two cars traveling 65 miles per hour in opposite directions have a closing speed of 190 feet per second. All you have to do is look down at your phone and inadvertently drift across the centerline: in just three seconds, two cars that had two football fields’ worth of distance between them are in a head-on collision.
“I wish we could impress that on people, the ramifications of looking down at your phone,” McNamara says. “We see it all the time.”
Even when there is time to react, the sudden refocus from a distracted state can lead to overcorrection—a too-vigorous swerve of the steering wheel or skid-causing jam of the brakes that can make things worse. This, too, happened several times on Friday the thirteenth.
For the police, proving a case of distracted driving is difficult. Unlike drunken driving, which can be verified with blood alcohol testing, or speeding, which can be calculated from traffic cameras, impact force, skid marks, and physical damage, distraction rarely leaves hard evidence and, in the absence of witnesses, can be inferred though seldom proved.14 But now an unusual and sobering analysis of 1,700 videos of teen drivers taken from in-car recordings of crashes suggests distracted driving may be a much larger problem than previously believed. Two particular types of crashes stood out: 89 percent of road-departure crashes—in which cars drifted onto shoulders or off roadbeds entriely—and 76 percent of rear-end collisions were caused by distraction.
The videos are horrifying, one crash after another in which death or major injury was avoided by luck rather than skill: teens staring down at cell phones for four seconds, applying makeup, staring out the side windows—all while their cars veered off the road, slammed into the back of other cars, or spun out as the drivers looked up and overreacted. The seven most common distractions observed in this video study played out this way:
• Interacting with one or more passengers: 15 percent of crashes
• Cell phone use: 12 percent of crashes
• Looking at something in the vehicle: 10 percent of crashes
• Looking at something outside the vehicle: 9 percent of crashes
• Singing/moving to music: 8 percent of crashes
• Grooming: 6 percent of crashes
• Reaching for an object: 6 percent of crashes
The study, released in March 2015 by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety, found that distraction was a factor in nearly six out of ten moderate to severe crashes involving teen drivers.15
Kids who drive to Lincoln-Way Central High School in the Chicago suburb of New Lenox every day would do almost anything to avoid the $125 annual parking fee for a spot in the school lot. The preferred method to beat this bill is to park on the far side of US Highway 30, which the school campus sits astride. The drawback of that free parking is the need to brave a busy four-lane thoroughfare at rush hour in order to get to class. Students can start to cross, then find themselves stranded on the concrete median separating the eastbound and westbound lanes, forced to wait for traffic to ease. So it was with seventeen-year-old Dylan Wischover of Manhattan, Illinois. Whether he tripped, slipped, or simply misjudged when to cross, the junior stepped off the median and into the path of a westbound semitruck. The trucker had no chance to brake before striking and killing Dylan. Grief counselors were summoned to the school to help distraught students, while at home his parents had to face their son’s room, filled with boxes of pickup truck parts he and his father had planned to use that weekend in Dylan’s favorite pastime: fixing up old vehicles.
Among his final Twitter posts the day before he died, one was wryly humorous, the other darkly poignant: “The only 4.0 I’m getting this semester is when girls rate me out of 10,” he wrote, followed by the post, “Ride or die.”
The uneasy mix of pedestrians and vehicles played out with terrible consequences many times on this particular Friday the thirteenth. A seventy-year-old finance professor at the University of Arizona, out for a stroll at 5:00 p.m. along the shoulder of Tucson’s aptly named Speedway Boulevard, was struck from behind by a car coming around a bend in the road. Sharon Garrison, whose online tributes included praise from students, colleagues, and business leaders she previously taught during a long career, died the next day of her injuries. The driver stopped immediately and cooperated with police, and no citations were issued. Under Arizona laws that generally favor drivers over walkers, pedestrians on shoulders of roads where no sidewalks are present are supposed to walk facing traffic, presumably so they can avoid approaching vehicles rather than vice versa.
An hour later, in Desert Hot Springs, California, Edward Manning, a forty-four-year-old father of four, was struck and killed by a passing car on the same route he walked every day to and from home—a residential avenue in this resort town notorious for poor lighting, lack of crosswalks, and drivers who routinely exceed the forty-mile-per-hour limit. A city official conceded in a press interview that lighting and speeding were regional problems that needed to be addressed, but opined that, with scant public money available for improvements, pedestrians needed to be more wary. A few hours after that fatal encounter, a fifty-four-year-old Alabama woman was struck and killed by a GMC Yukon sport-utility vehicle as she took an early-evening walk down a road in the border town of Donna, Texas.
The exact time Tony Ulloa was mowed down in New Braunfels, Texas, by a hit-and-run driver is unknown. The person who rammed into the sixty-five-year-old retired factory worker didn’t stop and didn’t leave behind much in the way of evidence except for a broken man lying in the road, groaning and bleeding. Ulloa had just taken up jogging to stay fit in his retirement. He had nearly completed his usual course, which had taken him down the frontage road next to Interstate 35, just five minutes from his home. How much time passed after the hit-and-run driver fled, and what chance of survival he might have had with immediate care, are questions that plague the members of his large family—who say they are most haunted by the knowledge that he died alone when his whole family was so close by.
Overall, sixteen pedestrians are killed by motor vehicles every day in America. Another 466 are injured daily.16 Only a third of the deaths and injuries are even arguably the pedestrians’ fault: in 2013, 20 percent occurred from pedestrians running into the street, 7 percent involved improper crossing of the walkway, and 6 percent were from pedestrians standing, lying, playing, or working in the street. The majority are more like the collision that claimed Edward Manning’s and Tony Uloa’s lives, unintended but nonetheless the result of driver carelessness, indifference, or worse—as avoidable as they are commonplace.
A substantial minority of pedestrian traffic deaths are hit-and-run accidents—about one in five. Hit-and-run crashes of all types (car versus pedestrian, car versus bike, car versus car) have been on the rise for years and are ridiculously common in some cities where sprawl and readily accessible freeway systems make getaways easy. In recent years, a data search by the LA Weekly found, nearly half of all car collisions in the City of Los Angeles were hit-and-run cases, and the death and injury rate from hit-and-runs was four times the national average.17 In 2014, 27 deaths and 144 serious injuries resulted from hit-and-run collisions with pedestrians, bikes, and other cars in Los Angeles; all reported cases of hit-and-runs (including parking lot scrapes and fender benders) in the city topped 20,000 that year. Arrests were made in less than 20 percent of the cases; more than half of reports were not investigated at all.18
The last year in which a comprehensive look at the problem nationwide was made, 2011, there were 1,449 fatal hit-and-runs in the U.S.19
Attitudes about what to do when the mix of driver and walker goes wrong have changed markedly over time. In the 1920s, as cars first became commonplace on city streets previously dominated by men and women on foot, rapidly escalating numbers of pedestrian injuries and deaths led to public outrage. There were demands for reform and pedestrian protections, occasional riots and acts of vigilantism against cars, and massive parades to protest car violence. Secretary of Commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover launched a federal probe of the problem.
“Nation Roused Against Motor Killings,” screamed a headline in the New York Times about Hoover’s investigation on November 23, 1924. The story’s illustration spoke volumes: a picture of a skeletal, caped figure of the Grim Reaper driving a giant roadster, crushing hundreds of children beneath its wheels. In explaining “the alarming increase in automobile fatalities,” the opening of the news story warned Times readers that cars were a greater menace than World War I: “The horrors of war appear to be less appalling than the horrors of peace. The automobile looms up as a far more destructive piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death than the artilleryman. The man in the street seems less safe than the man in the trench.”
The prevailing view at the time seemed to be that drivers who ran over people were by definition reckless simply by driving too fast or incautiously in areas where there were pedestrians about, particularly children. Carmakers came under pressure to install “governors” on engines that would prevent speeding over 25 miles per hour in highly populated areas. This turns out to have been a pretty good speed to single out. Subsequent research has shown that the vast majority of pedestrians survive crashes in which the vehicle is traveling under 20 miles an hour, while most victims die when the speed exceeds 40 miles an hour.20
In a barrage of marketing and lobbying, car manufacturers, auto dealers, auto clubs, and related industries in that era not only fought off such requirements as “antiprogress” and an affront to personal freedom, they succeeded in reframing the debate to shift blame away from drivers and onto pedestrians. This is when the term “jaywalkers” came into prominence with public and press, often accompanied by cartoon images of fools and bumpkins wandering cluelessly into traffic. Crashes began to be referred to less as innately reckless and more as blamelessly accidental—or due to the recklessness of pedestrians for failing to look both ways before daring to walk near moving vehicles. Next the idea that pedestrians were impediments to progress, travel, and commerce—and therefore should be confined to crosswalks and punished for crossing “against traffic”—came into vogue. Cityscapes were reengineered and traffic signals installed to manage rising car traffic, but the moves also had the effect of corralling pedestrians.21
This reframing of the relative rights of drivers and pedestrians began before the Great Depression and continues to dominate current law, street behavior, and thinking. Drivers today have little patience for pedestrians who “impede” them, and rules that allow right turns on red lights have forced pedestrians at crosswalks to hesitate before stepping from the curb because of the risk of being run down by heedless or distracted drivers, despite the fact that pedestrians have the right of way. Speeding is a principal factor in car-pedestrian crashes, yet a majority of drivers routinely exceed posted speed limits,22 with many reporting that they find it impossible to keep up with traffic flow without speeding.23 Engineers routinely create streets and roads that encourage this with designs appropriate for speeds far in excess of posted limits. When a child runs into the street and is struck by a car, the prevailing sentiment today, unlike sixty years ago, often places blame on the child’s parents for negligent supervision. In Denver, there was widespread uncertainty over whether to view four-year-old Austin Strasser’s death while legally crossing a street with his mother a crime or an unfortunate accident that could have happened to anyone. This confusion lingered even after the driver admitted to driving so carelessly it killed a boy. The antipathy is understandable: the driver who plowed into a mother pushing a stroller in a Denver crosswalk did something terrible, but did she do anything unusual? What driver hasn’t turned the wheel and pushed the accelerator in a moment of inattention or impatience or bad decision-making? The explanation for little Austin’s death, that the driver was blinded by glaring sunshine, is no excuse. The proper response when visibility is poor at an intersection where pedestrians are present is for the driver to stop until certain the way is clear, not to plunge blindly into a crosswalk. But other drivers make bad choices all the time in all sorts of circumstances. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, nothing bad happens. The driver—and the Strassers—were just the unlucky exceptions. Harsh jail sentences for doing something everybody else does daily seem hypocritical to many. But trivializing the carelessness that killed a child is no solution, either. So far this conflict between rules, practice, and decency has yielded a moral paralysis—and decades of a deadly status quo.
Some high-profile programs in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles seek to shake society free of this torpor, to make the world safer for pedestrians with lower speed limits in select areas where walkers and cyclists abound. The slogan “Vision Zero”24 is often used to describe such efforts, which aspire to create a human environment in which there are zero traffic deaths. So far, the U.S. efforts on this score, and on traffic safety in general, seem to lag far behind the European programs they emulate—and have been plagued by pitched political battles and mixed messages as well. Drivers simply don’t want to slow down, and all too often, they are enabled rather than discouraged, even in Vision Zero cities. The police departments in Los Angeles and New York responded to a rash of pedestrian deaths in recent years not by cracking down on bad drivers but by stepping up the issuing of very expensive tickets for jaywalking.
Another deadly pattern emerged on February 13, beginning with Heidi J. Springer. The fifty-two-year-old nurse-anesthetist at the Cleveland Clinic was ejected from her BMW X5 SUV after she drifted from her lane, overcompensated by jerking the wheel when she realized what had happened, then struck the concrete center median. Pedro Padron Sanchez of Hamilton, Alabama, lost control of his Chevy Silverado pickup in similar fashion when he wandered off Highway 253 in a moment of inattention. He, too, was hurled from his truck as it overturned. At almost the same time, an eighteen-year-old driver was thrown from his car after taking a sharp curve too fast and crashing through a farm fence, rolling the car four times. Christopher Short, meanwhile, drifted off a rural road at high speed and hit a ditch along Louisiana Highway 568, not far from his hometown of Waterproof. Short’s Chevy pickup became airborne with such momentum, it crossed two lanes of traffic before landing, overturning several times on impact, and throwing him from the car. Short died on his nineteenth birthday.
Each of these crashes—and they were not the only ones to follow this pattern this day—had three things in common. They were fatal. The drivers were hurled from their vehicles with terrible force, inflicting catastrophic injury. And none of the dead were wearing seat belts.
The physics of car crashes are brutally simple: unrestrained people, pets, and objects turn into missiles inside cars during rapid deceleration. Isaac Newton first explained this phenomenon in 1687 with his First Law of Motion, and the merciless physics never change: if a car going a mere 30 miles per hour crashes to a sudden stop, everything that’s not anchored in place continues to move forward at the same speed, striking anything around them with tremendous force. For the average adult male in the U.S., that force can have an effect roughly the same as dropping a twelve-ton weight on his head. That’s more than twenty times the force of a professional boxer’s best roundhouse punch. And so people fly through windshields. Their bodies bend or shatter steering wheels. Passengers in the backseat fly forward into the people in the front, injuring or killing them along with themselves. And if you’re holding a baby in your arms, the infant will seem to weigh hundreds of pounds and be torn from your grasp, impossible to hold on to during impact.
And that’s at 30 miles an hour. At 60 miles an hour, people fly through car windows and windshields like cannonballs. The official cause of death in such cases—and the single most common finding by coroners working fatal car crashes—is termed “blunt-force trauma.” This is the coldly clinical term for the internal and external injuries a human body sustains when it is turned into a high-speed projectile striking metal, road, rock, tree, or ground. The reality is much messier than the term.
Seat belts are the single best way to avoid turning into a human missile during a car crash. The statistics on this are undeniable: the surviving passengers in fatal crashes studied in 2013 were wearing seat belts 84 percent of the time.25 Only 16 percent of the survivors in those fatal crashes were not buckled up. There are always anecdotes of people who survived because their lack of a seat belt allowed them to be “thrown clear.” That happens from time to time, but far more often the unbelted are thrown to death.
Seat belt use has steadily improved during the last half century. Overall, 87 percent of Americans say they wear seat belts when driving or riding in a car. This rate varies depending on the region and whether a particular state imposes strict fines for not wearing a seat belt. The West led seat belt use in 2014 with 95 percent of car occupants buckling up. The South was next, matching the national average of 87 percent, while the Northeast and Midwest trailed with 83 percent of car occupants using their seat belts.26
Men are 10 percent less likely to wear their seat belts than women, and rural residents are 10 percent less likely to buckle up than their urban counterparts.
Shortly before midnight, a married couple and their three-year-old daughter were all killed in Lonoke, Arkansas, when their Mercury sedan skidded and screeched off the road and into a tree after being rear-ended by a much heavier SUV. Glenna Michelle Wright, thirty-eight, who had been driving; her husband, Aundrey “Bucky” Wright Sr.; and their daughter Aunaysia Wright, all died at the scene, about forty miles away from their home in Stuttgart, Arkansas. The driver of the Mercury Mountaineer SUV was uninjured.
This mismatched weights and sizes of the two vehicles—one of several such mismatch crashes this day—illustrates a deadly trend that emerged in the early nineties in the U.S. After two decades of steadily dropping traffic fatalities on America’s streets and roads, the numbers started climbing again. The shift coincided with another change: the rapid rise in popularity of a new type of passenger car—the sport-utility vehicle, a bigger, heavier car that was actually classified as a light truck (the same classification as a pickup truck).
The confusing part of this: heavier cars are supposed to be safer, not more dangerous, yet traffic deaths were going up.
Researchers soon figured out what was going on: vehicle owners were, according to University of California, San Diego, economist Michelle J. White, “running an ‘arms race’ on American roads by buying increasingly large vehicles.”27
The SUVs that had become so popular at the time were, in fact, safer for drivers and passengers inside them, White reported in a 2004 paper. She found SUV occupants were 29 percent less likely to be seriously injured in a collision with a smaller car, irrespective of who was at fault in a collision. However, the reverse showed the high cost of that increased safety: the small car occupants were 42 percent more likely to be seriously injured in the same crash. Again, it didn’t matter who was at fault. The occupants of the lighter vehicle were more likely to be toast.
And when all the various types of cars and traffic collisions were taken into consideration, White found that for every crash death avoided inside an SUV or light truck, there were 4.3 additional collisions that took the lives of car occupants, pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. The supposedly safer SUVs were, in fact, “extremely deadly,” White concluded.
She calculated that the safety benefit of replacing light trucks and SUVs with conventionally sized and weighted passenger cars would be “similar in magnitude to the benefit of seat belts.”
The simple bottom line of this: heavier cars make most people more likely to die. If we all drove lighter cars, we’d all be much safer.
But the popularity of SUVs and the newer, similar class of vehicles known as “crossovers” has continued to rise, although some newer models do not run quite as huge as the original versions. In 2014, for the first time, SUVs and crossovers took a larger share of the American car market than sedans. Cars of all kinds have grown heavier as well in the last forty years: the original Honda Civic, a compact car, debuted in 1973 at 1,500 pounds but now weighs in at more than 2,800 pounds.
Expanding on White’s work, a more detailed study out of Berkeley looking at the effect of vehicle weight on safety found that for every additional 1,000 pounds in a vehicle’s weight, it raises the probability of a death in any other vehicle in a collision by 47 percent.28 The added cost to society of overweight vehicles is $136 billion a year—costs that the owners of SUVs do not bear, the study’s authors concluded. In order to make up for the added death and injury their vehicles cost the rest of the country, their fair share of the gasoline tax would have to be raised from the current 18.4 cents to $2.17 per gallon, the authors calculated.
Imposing this charge as the cost of using an inherently more deadly vehicle would, advocates argue, amount to removing a subsidy and allowing market forces to take over—which would likely dry up demand for heavy vehicles. But for a country that professes to believe in the power of markets more than public subsidies, there is absolutely no will or interest in having drivers pay the true cost of their choices. The U.S. government has not raised the gasoline tax since 1993.
On a more positive note, vehicle obesity is trending down for other reasons. After weights rose 26 percent overall for all vehicles between 1980 and 2006, government mandates to increase fuel economy are slowly nudging car weights in the other direction. The average U.S. passenger vehicle weighs in at just under two tons. Automakers are, if very cautiously, looking at substituting lighter aluminum and carbon-fiber composites for some heavier steel parts, which theoretically could cut vehicle weight in half with no loss of safety protection. Other trends, such as the arrival of fully autonomous cars, could shift Americans toward even smaller vehicles because virtually every crash that took place on Friday the thirteenth could, theoretically, have been avoided by replacing human drivers with robotic ones. The arms race toward big, heavy cars as the “safer” choice would end.
Brian Bayers, newly elected as Elk Creek magistrate for Spencer County, Kentucky, ran through his morning routine on February 13 like any other workday. He got his eighteen-month-old son, Jackson, dressed, fed, and ready for preschool. With his wife already off to work this frigid day, Bayers decided to dash outside and back his pickup truck into the driveway, where it could sit idling while the heater warmed the interior. When he returned to his house, he saw the front door he thought he had left closed now stood wide-open. Worried for his son, he ran inside, looking and calling for Jackson, but he could not find the boy. In a panic, Bayers ran back outside, fearful that, if his son had somehow gotten past the latched door—something he had never been able to do before—Jackson would be at risk of falling into a pond on the family’s rural property. Then Bayers spotted the crumpled form of his only child beneath the pickup.
The toddler had somehow gotten outside right behind Bayers, trying to follow his dad out the door. He had trundled into the truck’s blind spot as Bayers backed up. Jackson had been knocked over and run over by the front tires as the pickup backed into place. He died instantly.
Bayers called 911 for help, knowing there could be no help, then called his wife, Amanda, who rushed home from work so they could hold and rock their only child, whose pictures decorated seemingly every available surface in their home.
When backing up, motor vehicles don’t have a “blind spot,” as many drivers believe. They have a blind zone. The Kansas-based advocacy group Kids and Cars has made this message a key part of its crusade to prevent backover collisions. One illuminating poster the group distributes shows a photograph of a black SUV next to a house, with sixty-two preschoolers sitting cross-legged behind it, covering most of the driveway. None of the children are visible to the driver behind the wheel.29
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that the inherently poor visibility behind most cars and trucks, coupled with driver complacency about the risks of backing up, leads to 210 deaths and 15,000 injuries a year. Nearly a third of the dead are under five, and another quarter are adults over seventy. Kids and Cars estimates that fifty children under the age of fifteen are backed into or over every month, with forty-eight of them requiring emergency care and two dying.
Backup video cameras for cars that eliminate the blind zones have been available for decades. (Prototypes were first demonstrated in the 1950s.) Safety advocates and parents of children who died in someone’s blind zone have campaigned to make them as ubiquitous as safety belts since the turn of this century, and federal legislation in 2007 mandated backup cameras in all new cars,30 though implementation has been repeatedly delayed as the deaths and injuries continue. They finally were scheduled to be installed on all new vehicles under 10,000 pounds sold in the U.S. by May 2018. The federal rule calling for this was only finalized in 2014.31 Some automakers are already voluntarily providing backup cameras in their cars ahead of the requirement.
Cameras alone can reduce but not cure the backover risk, because drivers are still required to pay attention to the video display. Only an automated system that overrides the driver and prevents collisions by braking the car when an object is behind could do that. That technology exists—several new models of big-rig trucks on the road now have similar forward-looking collision avoidance systems in place already—but there is no mandate to put it on passenger cars.
Meanwhile, Brian Bayers agonizes over what might have been done to save his son from death, and other families from the same devastating loss and guilt. “What if I had a back-up camera on my vehicle? What if I had my window rolled down?” he said during a wrenching television interview he granted in order to warn other parents of the danger he never thought about before.32 “I think: what if I just picked my child up and carried him with me to my car?”
Fridays are usually among the worst days for drunken driving. Friday the thirteenth was no exception, marked by a litany of people killed for doing nothing more than being on the same road with a drunk—for doing nothing more than trusting in the choices made by every other driver on the road.
At 2:00 p.m. outside Pittsburgh, one man was killed and two other people injured when a sport-utility vehicle made a left turn in front of an oncoming car on Pennsylvania Route 56. The crash turned into a police manhunt when the alleged driver of the SUV, thirty-four-year-old Jeremy Jonathan Blystone, ran from the scene. Blystone had a prior conviction for drunk driving and was wanted by police in three states.
The other driver, Thomas Pater, a sixty-one-year-old Vietnam veteran and local farmer, died in the crash. A passenger in each car was seriously injured. A three-hour police search using bloodhounds and a police helicopter ended in the nearby town of Apollo, where police caught up with Blystone after he stopped in a store, seemingly without a care in the world, to buy a pack of cigarettes.
A few hours later in Kenneth City, Florida, sixty-five-year-old Mark R. Ehrhardt died while crossing Fifty-Eighth Street a few blocks from home, run down by a Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV. The driver, forty-year-old Troy E. Donnelly, was arrested for driving while intoxicated and manslaughter after sheriff’s deputies reported observing signs of impairment and Donnelly refused to submit to a breath test for alcohol. Donnelly had three previous convictions for drunken driving, the most recent in 2004.
And at 10:30 p.m., local entertainer Shane “Shaggy” Authement was making the two-mile walk from Marty J’s Bayou Station, a truck stop and bar in Chauvin, Louisiana, to his family’s home in the neighboring town of Montegut. Shaggy enjoyed partying as much as anyone and more than most, but the affable twenty-eight-year-old had one inflexible rule: no drinking and driving. He wouldn’t do it himself. He wouldn’t get in a car with someone else doing it. And he took away friends’ car keys so they wouldn’t do it. In keeping with his policy, Shaggy was walking home along the shoulder of Louisiana Highway 58 when a Toyota Camry driven by an alleged drunk driver struck and killed him. The fifty-three-year-old driver, from the same town as the conscientious entertainer, was charged with vehicular homicide.
Drunken driving, despite decades of tougher laws, police crackdowns, random checkpoints, and public awareness campaigns, remains the number one cause of traffic deaths. This runs counter to the widespread perception that public attitudes have turned sharply in recent years against driving drunk (after a long history of lax enforcement), so much so that the term “designated driver” has become a part of the everyday lexicon. Yet the statistics that document DWI carnage have stubbornly refused to budge in recent years. Ken Kolosh at the National Safety Council calls it “this brick wall we’ve hit” and identifies it as one of the main obstacles to reducing the car crash death toll going forward.
Consider these gruesome statistics:
• The average drunk driver has driven drunk eighty times before his or her first arrest.
• Every two minutes a person is injured in a drunk-driving crash.
• Costs directly associated with drunk driving in the U.S. are $200 billion a year.
• One-third of drivers arrested for drunk driving are repeat offenders.
• The age group most likely to drive drunk is twenty-one to twenty-five (nearly a fourth of all cases).
• On weekends, 31 percent of all fatal crashes involve alcohol. On weekdays, drunk driving is a factor in less than half that amount (15 percent of all fatal crashes).
• Men are twice as likely to drive drunk as women.
• More than 29 million people admitted to driving under the influence of alcohol in 2012—more than the population of Texas.
• The lifetime odds of being involved in a drunk-driving crash are two out of three.33
It is true that the number of drunk-driving fatalities has fallen dramatically since their high point in the seventies, when more than 60 percent of all traffic deaths involved alcohol. Since those days, when traffic deaths from all causes peaked at 54,589, several major changes in car design and the legal drinking age combined to bring that number down.
A spike in alcohol-related crashes occurred in the seventies after many states lowered the legal drinking age to eighteen. The trend reversed after the ages were raised again in the eighties and nineties, driven in part by the lobbying and public awareness campaigns by the Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization.
Separately, a 1968 federal law34 mandating seat belts in all vehicles except buses and, later, state laws requiring people to actually wear them or face stiff fines, reduced traffic deaths (though not traffic crashes) dramatically. So did subsequent collision safeguards: air bags and more crashworthy car frames and bodies. Other technologies actually prevented crashes by compensating for human error, such as antilock braking systems that became commonplace in the late eighties, lowering the risk of fatal multivehicle collisions by 18 percent and run-off-the-road fatalities (particularly loss of control on curves) by 35 percent. All of which meant that crashes, drunken or otherwise, were being survived that in the past might have been fatal.
Combined with raising the legal drinking age, these changes had cut the number of drunk driving deaths in half by the early 2000s. The drunk-driving fatality rate has been hovering in the range of one-third of all deaths ever since—which means about 12,000 deaths caused by drunk driving in 2014.
There are devices that would add a few hundred dollars to the price of a new car that prevent them from being started by a legally drunk person based on breath analysis. This technology has been used successfully in some states where judges are empowered to make it a condition of a convicted drunk driver’s sentence, but this is done in a minority of cases, even those involving repeat offenders. The technology has become so simple that comparable pocket-size devices are on the market that can be clipped to a smartphone, so technology is not the barrier. Touch sensors that can measure alcohol in the blood by “sniffing” the skin are also being tested and show promise. But proposals to use drunk-driver lockout devices more widely—or to have them installed in all new cars—have garnered little support and gone nowhere, although the payoff is potentially huge. Putting them in all new cars would be something of an inconvenience, but over fifteen years, as they gradually became ubiquitous, the gadgets would prevent an estimated 59,000 deaths, 1.25 million crash injuries, and $349 billion in crash injury costs—much, much more than the cost of adding the devices.35
There is one encouraging change in progress. Some evidence suggests that ridesharing services have reduced drunken driving arrests, at least among men and women under the age of thirty, the most frequent ridesharing customers. Every rideshare driver knows the busiest time and place for picking up a customer: outside bars at closing time. Data collected by rideshare industry leader Uber for the seventeen markets it serves in California showed a 6.5 percent decline in drunk-driving crashes involving drivers thirty years old and younger after Uber entered the market.36
The final fatal crash of February 13, 2015, began with a dropped mattress in the fast lane of the 55 Freeway in Santa Ana, California. At 11:40 p.m., the wayward mattress triggered a four-car chain reaction of collisions that in turn led to a hit-and-run, a manhunt, a drunk-driving arrest, two people injured, the death of one driver, and a mystery as to where the mattress came from in the first place. The northbound side of the busy 55, also known as the Costa Mesa Freeway, stayed closed until sunrise the next morning as the California Highway Patrol photographed skid marks, measured the trajectories of the cars, and slowly tried to piece together what happened beneath the harsh glow of emergency floodlights.
Cynthia Brock, a fifty-three-year-old resident of Costa Mesa, was the first driver to encounter the mattress, dropped by an unknown driver in one of the freeway’s left lanes. The mattress caught beneath the front end of Brock’s 1982 Toyota Celica, which skidded out of control and slammed into the concrete center divider, then slid to a stop sideways in the fast lane. A Ford van immediately broadsided Brock’s helpless car, striking the driver’s side full on. The van driver, whom the CHP identified as nineteen-year-old Sherwin Ali Sabzerou of Irvine, California, managed to pull his van to the shoulder five hundred feet up the road, then allegedly fled the scene on foot. Meanwhile, the van’s impact pushed Brock’s Celica into the path of a 1999 Toyota sedan, which rear-ended her, spinning the car around so that it was facing the wrong way. Then it was struck head-on by a 1995 Honda.
All the vehicles were badly damaged, but Brock’s looked like it had been run through a junkyard compactor after four collisions with cars and one with concrete. The driver’s door hung by a thread. The Toyota’s roof had been crushed and the front end accordioned. The wheels hung askew, and broken glass had been sprayed everywhere. Brock died before the CHP arrived. Two occupants of the other cars were hospitalized as well, with both expected to recover.
Police found Sabzerou at his home and arrested him on suspicion of drunk driving. He was later charged by prosecutors with hit-and-run causing injury or death and vehicular homicide. However, the ultimate culprit who caused it all, the person who dropped the mattress, has not been identified.
Objects dumped on freeways are a daily occurrence throughout California and the nation. The California Department of Transportation maintains storage yards filled with retrieved roadway debris and maintains special crews to work with the CHP to pick up objects on the freeways, a chore that is among the most high-risk jobs in town, because there is never a time of day or night when traffic is not present. Toilets, televisions, flat tires, chairs, suitcases, refrigerators, and all sorts of bedding, including mattresses, turn up regularly on freeways, where speeding vehicles attempt to dodge them until they can be cleared. There’s also a chronic problem with debris left over from scavenging gangs, who steal miles of copper wire from freeway lighting, signals, signage, and even the metal embedded in the roads for traffic sensors and water pumps, leaving traffic hazards in their wake, costing the state tens of millions of dollars to replace.37 It’s a constant game of chicken, of taking away vital parts of the freeway system and dumping unwanted trash in its place, turning engineering marvels into minefields where even a mattress can have the effect of a bomb.
As with backup cameras, forward-looking collision avoidance systems already exist and could have prevented this entire fatal pinball machine effect. Airliners have had them for decades—the result of painstaking crash investigations that proved they were needed and would be worth the cost. But that’s air travel. The mattress would not be so painstakingly investigated. The careless, clueless killer who left it on the freeway would bear no consequences. The mandate, the public pressure, the will to provide cars with the same protection that airliners have, doesn’t exist. Even the oceangoing shipping containers filled with sneakers or lawn mowers or scrap metal enjoy more protection from damage than the containers that carry people—that carry us and those we love. Cars are different.
And so ended one day of traffic carnage. Every day begins and ends the same as February 13, with ruin and road closures, the consequences of one day’s wreck carrying over into the next morning. (A list of the day’s crashes can be found in the Appendix.)
The sheer volume of one day’s worth of car death and injury forms a kind of protection for even the most reckless drivers. There are just too many of them. Most drivers speed. Phone use behind the wheel is endemic. Only a tiny fraction of drunk drivers get caught. Imposing true and reliable accountability for putting others at risk on streets and highways would be like policing a tidal wave. There simply is no money, manpower, or public demand for fully investigating car deaths with the same vigor applied to aviation or food safety or epidemics.
Two deaths from Ebola in 2014 sparked a national panic. One German airliner crashed purposely by its copilot in 2015—a truly unique event—generated worldwide discussion of how to build fail-safe systems that would prevent that most rare of events from ever happening again. It is a curious truth of human behavior that the rare risks—the ones least likely to harm us—are the ones we most fear and try hardest to conquer. This reaction is instinctive rather than reflective. The far greater risks we face daily, such as driving fast and distracted on crowded freeways, are perceived as normal and routine, becoming functionally imperceptible to the brain unless we consciously dwell on them. Just as aberration pushes us to overestimate risk, habit pushes us to underestimate it wildly. One car death every fifteen minutes, and one crash every three seconds, become little more than white noise to us. We couldn’t get in our cars every day otherwise. And we certainly couldn’t cruise down 65-mile-per-hour freeways with our babies strapped into car seats that offer little protection above 35 miles per hour. Habit conquers all.
There are also practical barriers when it comes to holding bad drivers accountable for their risky and poor choices. Truly enforcing the rules of the road with our current infrastructure and cars poses far too great a burden to police, beyond attempts to round up and punish drunk drivers with occasional and controversial checkpoints that rarely lead to arrests (although they may have a deterrent effect).
When the authorities try to crack down on sober motor violence, the efforts are even more controversial and are often met with community uncertainty, even outrage. When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk on this very morning of February 13 (she was seriously but not fatally injured, one leg badly mangled when she was pinned by the bus), the New York Daily News decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city’s bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city’s new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.”38 The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce misdemeanor charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way. The offenders were not just run-of-the-mill drivers hurrying to work and succumbing to regrettable, though perhaps understandable, human failings. These were professional bus drivers with a $67,444 annual base salary plus generous overtime,39 whose job includes, above all other considerations, a duty for safe, alert, and lawful driving, in a city with more pedestrians crossing streets than any other municipality in America. Yet even these halting attempts to hold drivers accountable for the street injury and death they inflict on innocents are met with resistance and doubt.
In Springfield, Oregon, later in February 2015, a sixty-eight-year-old man was accused of running a red light on State Route 126 (which serves as Main Street in Springfield), killing three children and critically injuring their mother as they crossed. After months of soul searching, investigation, and dithering, the authorities found the driver was neither drunk, nor speeding, nor on his cell phone when he decimated a family, and so no charges of any kind would be filed.40 It was just an accident, the local newspaper editorialized, in support of the official findings, an accident on a street with homes and families and a forty-mile-per-hour speed limit, in a world where most vehicle-pedestrian collisions at that speed bring catastrophic results. The two cardinal rules of driving—stop for red lights and stop for kids—had been broken by a driver who could not or would not behave as if he was in charge of a machine as deadly as a gun, and that every decision or incident of thoughtlessness behind the wheel really was a matter of life and death. We have trivialized the dangers and risks of driving, just as we have trivialized the inevitable, fatal results. The state newspaper editorialized, after much hand-wringing, that “‘accident’ is the only way to accurately describe what unfolded at that intersection . . . Just a tragic accident.”41
In a way, such antipathy makes perfect sense, because a terrible truth lies at the heart of our star, the car: the American system of roads and wheels is performing exactly as it was designed to perform.
Charles Marohn, who identifies himself as a “recovering traffic engineer” and who founded the Minnesota-based non-profit group Strong Towns, publicly rails against his profession for knowingly designing traffic systems where deadly interactions between cars, pedestrians, and intersections are inevitable.42 Who, Marohn asks, is most responsible for that fatal crash in Oregon? Is it the driver who was momentarily inattentive and mistook a red light for green? Or should blame be laid before the engineers who make residential streets with design speeds 20 or 30 miles per hour faster than the posted speed limit? Or the policy makers who allow posted speed limits high enough in residential areas to be catastrophic every time a pedestrian collision occurs? The street where the three children died carries four lanes of traffic with a center turn lane—a design that invites risky speeds in a family neighborhood.
“Speed is seductive,” Marohn observes. “We engineer for high performance. Can we then blame drivers for taking advantage of that engineering? We know they will. . . . This is indicative of our incoherent approach to streets and roads.”
Marohn argues that the distinction between streets and roads has become blurred over time, a confusion at the heart of motor violence. Streets are supposed to be platforms for creating wealth, he argues, while roads exist to get people from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible.
Great streets thrive on complexity, which today can encompass the safe (and slow) mix of pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses, trolleys, delivery vans, schoolchildren, shoppers, business people—the classic Main Street mix. Think of any street where you love to walk or window-shop or sightsee, where you slow or stop your car to turn and park and no one angers, honks, or glares, and you get the idea. Great streets build business, society, prosperity, and strong towns.
Roads serve a completely different purpose. They do not tolerate complexity. Think of freeways. They have barriers that prevent turning. They have no traffic signals or crosswalks. Pedestrians and bicycles are banned. There are no roadside attractions to park and visit without getting off the freeway first. Roads serve the simple purpose of taking us and our stuff somewhere far and fast. They can take you to streets, but they can’t be streets.
“We need both,” Marohn says. “What we don’t need is something that tries to be both.”
Yet the modern landscape is filled with thoroughfares trying to be both. Marohn coined the useful term “stroad” to describe these often unsightly hybrids that arose during the age of postwar suburban sprawl and the car-centric traffic engineering philosophy that accompanied it. The fatal crash in Oregon took place on such a stroad—a conveyance that has the worst attributes of street and road while performing neither function well. Stroads offer commerce without walkability—fast-food drive-throughs, strip malls, big-box stores—but they usually lack the larger economic payoffs that great streets generate. At the same time, the turning, parking, and crosswalks bolted onto these fast, wide stroads slow down the Point-A-to-B traffic flow, imposing the cost of delay on drivers, encouraging them to speed even more when they are moving.
This uncomfortable mix makes stroads the scene of many crashes, particularly those involving cars hitting pedestrians. The official response—when there is any at all—is usually to armor up the roads with guardrails or barriers or, as in the Oregon case, to propose stepped-up police patrols. Rarely is the obvious and only effective solution imposed, Marohn says: making sure cars can’t go faster than a statistically safe 20 miles per hour where significant numbers of pedestrians are present. That means having pure streets and pure roads, with hybrids taken out of the mix.
The problem is that stroads have become an enormous part of the American landscape. Converting them one way or the other would be a long and arduous project—and a controversial one. Pushing this viewpoint has turned Marohn from insider to political pariah in his own Minnesota community. His current cause there is to generate support to turn a disused highway that cuts through the center of his town of Brainerd into a bike and pedestrian-friendly great street. But too many people associate getting somewhere fast with prosperity, he says, ignoring the evidence that true streets—slow and safe streets—play an important role in creating wealth, and do so better than stroads.
“Until we can change that attitude,” he says, “it is inevitable that we continue to have tragedy.”
Today’s combination of powerful cars, street and traffic engineering, and human behavior is designed to produce 36,000 deaths and 2.5 million injuries every year. That toll is not some unintended by-product of our personal transportation choices but the predictable and expected result of the design choices—and design defects—built into our transportation system and our human selves. Cars are convenient, fast, and mostly far bigger and more powerful than they really need to be, given that they drive around with only one person and mostly empty seats and cargo space 75 percent of the time. A death every fifteen minutes is part of the price tag for that convenience, size, and speed.
And here a strange dichotomy arises between man and machine that warrants attention.
Regulatory agencies, the legal system, advocacy groups, and the media leap into action when there is a design flaw in the machines we drive. On February 13, 2015, a day of normal human error causing normal traffic carnage, General Motors announced the recall of 81,000 passenger cars with a flaw in the power steering—a flaw that caused one crash and no death or injury. The previous year, General Motors recalled 2.2 million cars to repair faulty ignition systems that unexpectedly shut off the cars, leading to 124 deaths.43 And in May 2015 the largest recall in history would be announced, involving 34 million cars in the U.S. from multiple carmakers (57 million worldwide), all of them equipped with flawed air bags made by the Takata Corporation of Japan. Fixing them will cost the company at least $2 billion for repairs and potentially billions more in litigation costs. The defective bags spray metal fragments during an accident, much like shrapnel from a grenade. Six deaths and more than one hundred injuries have been linked to this problem.
Recalls often require months, even years, of investigative and regulatory pressure in order to hold carmakers accountable. This is a considerable effort that, however vital, involves numbers of deaths and injuries so small they barely register statistically. When it comes to the overall death and injury rate from driving, fault rests overwhelmingly with the choices of drivers, not the mechanical defects in cars and components.
But when the defect is in the human behind the wheel rather than the machine itself, the story takes a very different turn. There has never been a recall aimed at fixing cars so drunks cannot start them, or so drivers cannot exceed the speed limit, or to prevent cell phones from being used while cars are in motion. Cars currently are designed to allow, even enable, all three of these deadly behaviors, although affordable technology exists that could make all three impossible. Their omission can be viewed as design defects, too—defects in the human-machine-road interface, which kills far more than any bad air bags and faulty ignition switches. Undertaking a “recall” to correct any one of these human design defects could prevent 30 deaths and 2,200 serious injuries every day—more death and injury prevention than all the car recalls in history. Now that would be a true Vision Zero.
Instead, Americans have thrown up their hands and written off daily death and injury on a massive scale as the inevitable cost of mobility in the modern world. The predictable results of epidemic-scale fatal driving behavior and design are not viewed as defects but as “accidents,” a choice of language that suggests being stuck down by someone carelessly misdirecting two tons of speeding metal is somehow equivalent to being struck down by a bolt of lightning. But they are not the same. One is largely preventable, while the other, not so much.
There is another difference: the odds of lightning killing a U.S. citizen in the course of his or her lifetime is 1 out of 136,011. The odds of that same person dying in a car crash: 1 out of 112.