To be a living sentient human at the present time on this earth, who also cares about what goes on beyond the confines of your yard or the screen on your device, is to be someone troubled by one thing or another. One can be troubled about Big Things such as prejudice or injustice or inequality or the lack of a level playing field in so many realms of endeavor that matter, or even Bigger Things like global warming and climate change and the end of life as we know it, especially as regards our own species. So many things to feel bad about, so little time! So many opportunities to practice Right Living and Making a Difference in whatever small or large ways you happen to see fit!
Ravinginbeantown being the soapbox that it is, any number of issues related to the above have been belabored here and there, with one in particular getting more attention than most, namely humanity’s love affair with the automobile in all its joyous and dangerously dysfunctional glory.
The dysfunction is particularly glaring and acute in urban spaces, where cars in excessive number are not a very good fit, and at so-called “rush hour” (which nowadays is almost always) it becomes readily apparent that they don’t fit at all.
What’s different in the city, especially a cramped eastern one like Boston, is that the vast numbers of motorists are matched to some degree by similar numbers of people on foot or awheel on scooters and skateboards and of course bicycles, a phenomenon unmatched by American rural and suburban places. America has long held the reputation as the most dangerous traffic environment in the developed world, with numbers to back this up, and steady improvements of traffic safety in Europe and Canada has made the American contradiction even more glaring – our numbers for crashes and injury and death have gone in the other direction, and is it any surprise that in recent years those not in vehicles have taken the biggest hit of all? They’ve even acquired their own acronym – VRU, for Vulnerable Road User – in the traffic engineering lexicon.
In the city it is a particularly in-your-face phenomenon, with visible disregard not only for the law but for the safety of others apparent almost anytime one steps out the front door nowadays. As children we were taught that traffic controls such as red lights and stop signs had an almost sacred aspect. As we got older and started to drive, some of us might’ve stretched the rules a bit, occasionally rolling through a stop sign or red light if there was no traffic (or cop!) visible, and as for speed limits, ten mph over the specified “maximum” speed was clearly the accepted norm. For many, much of this is now mostly out the window, as drivers have become ever more frustrated with congestion, and traffic law enforcement has become a rare thing, indeed, and everybody knows it. Or so it seems in this city. Red lights now seem to offer a three or four second “grace” period, running a stop sign, especially on a right turn, seems to be okay if the driver believes others see them coming, and on local expressways speed limits are a joke. You don’t find smoky takin’ pictures anywhere anymore, and the bear in the air has long since flown away, though Convoy remains one of the best and greatest of silly songs (check it out).
Of course there are statistics for things like crashes and injuries and the occasional death, but these numbers have been somberly announced by horrified public officials for so long that public response runs somewhere between numbness and complete boredom. With annual deaths numbered in the tens of thousands and injuries in the millions, one would think everyone by now would have had a personal experience with this phenomenon, which might have a sobering effect, but this clearly just ain’t so. The Great Sobering Up is yet to happen, so what gives? This lament in various forms has turned up elsewhere on this website, and inflammatory suggestions that denial and psychosis might be part of the seriously flawed mental processes involved have been shamelessly made, with no apologies. It all seems a bit crazy, and one might suggest that this writer’s obsession with these things fits that description, as well. You got a problem with that, punk? An insane person on a soapbox might be annoying, but insanity behind the wheel might kill you at some point, so look out.
So gloomy! So scary! So hopeless! Might one add “spooky”? (another obsession to be found in these posts) Cheer up, if only for a moment! The negative trend of bad and sometimes blithely murderous driver behavior has defied most attempts at a solution, at least until now. The endless call for “better enforcement and nastier punishment!” has long been exposed as an ineffective non-starter, though of course fear of it will always keep a lid on some driver behavior. Automated enforcement – red light cameras and speed monitoring and such – are obvious great solutions that work well, especially in places like Singapore and other totalitarian communist/socialist enclaves like Canada and Europe, but resistance in freedom-loving places like America has been strong, where we will drive free and die until you pry the steering wheel away from our cold stiff fingers.
The most interesting glimmer of hope in this black hole of perpetual gloom has involved giving up on any dream of voluntary co-operation from motorists, and and instead seeking to change the irresistible force that is bad driver behavior through the employment of passive measures like street design. Make the roads and streets narrower or curvier for instance, or put four-lane city and suburban streets on a “road diet” by changing a car lane to a bike-lane-with-parking, or crowding things up with immovable objects like trees or substantial metal posts close to the roadway. One crazy Dutchman has even championed the power of confusion, as in eliminating all traffic “controls” altogether, so motorists must slow down and work things out amongst themselves to negotiate encounters. As nutty and anarchic as this might sound, a few Dutch towns have tried it with some degree of success, though the concept has not exactly caught on like wildfire. We should remember it was also the Dutch who revolutionized their transportation system in the 1960s in a remarkable response to rising bicycle and pedestrian deaths among children, by supporting a shift to increased bicycle use with nationwide infrastructure and public encouragement to drive less, that is now a legend in transportation history – and still seen as nutty and anarchic by most powers-that-be in North America, where resistance runs high to any changes to the congested and dangerous status quo.
So in many ways it is totally remarkable or even borderline revolutionary that Boston’s latest mayor recently announced a plan to address local traffic safety with some of this radical cleverness in mind. Boston’s past few mayors have already steadily been adding bike lanes to local streets, some of them prominently “protected”, to various streets in the city, while also constantly expanding the bike-share program; one sees Bluebikes (with totally novice riders, almost none using a helmet) everywhere on nice days. But what Mayor MIchelle Wu announced last week ups the ante to an “interesting” (to say the least) new level.
We’re talking redesigning intersections and traffic signal timing to intentionally slow down the usual rush of vehicles, measures that will still face the resistance if not downright rebelliousness of many drivers, as described above. It all comes down to how cleverly these changes are made, and success may be limited. But the other strategy, let us figuratively call it the “nuclear option”, is far more daring and dare we say almost “Dutch” in nature? Speed humps! Many many speed humps! Boston already has a few streets blessed with these crude and somewhat effective speed-interruptors, and it is a known fact that some if not most drivers will yield to any laws of physics that add an element of violence to their attempts at high velocity, and slow the heck down. Others, of course, will just move a street or two over and turn that one into a busy dangerous thoroughfare. Everybody knows this is what happens, and so does Mayor Wu and her traffic people, and part of the new plan involves whole networks of speed humps covering whole neighborhoods. Whoa!
Will this all truly come to pass? More importantly, will it work? Is anything not possible in this best of all possible worlds? The Mayor has even touted some numbers: of the 800 miles of city streets, 394 have the potential for spouting speed humps at some point in the future, which is a whole lotta streets. Speaking of numbers, part of the supposed impetus for this program was the 35% increase in pedestrian deaths in the city in 2022. Of course, there are many many more accidents than those that lead to death. Another possible factor might’ve been Mayor Wu’s recent crash with another car while being transported in a Boston Police cruiser while she was at work, where her vehicle was hit broadside in an intersection. The outcome could’ve been tragic, but in the end it was just another daily ho-hum event on a Boston street, which is the whole problem.
You want to know how ho-hum? Nothing beats a good graphic, and may we humbly present here, for your possible horror and astonishment, what might be a truly great graphic, in the form of the Vision Zero crash map. Vision Zero is a movement that began in Sweden with the goal of achieving zero traffic deaths on the streets and roadways of the world, kind of idealistic but also a Great Idea, and VZ actually has gained a certain amount of traction, at least in Europe and North America. VZ people take part in the local political process, stage rallies and events, and produce a website with information, which includes the maps. Many major cities have programs, and most of these can show you a map or two. These maps are usually interactive, so one can get the current picture, or go back ten years, or zero in on one’s neighborhood, or any number of things to get the complete awful picture. More could be said here, but for now just take a look at some maps for the year-thus-far in our local neighborhood and the whole city:
Pretty interesting, no? Colorful! Informative! Makes you wonder whether everybody on the streets of Boston travels in a state of total terror! The problem is, they don’t at all. For one thing, almost nobody seems to know about these maps, and of course even if they did, are there not limits to the power of graphic information when it comes to changing people’s behavior? In the end, it’s just dots on a map. What would it take to generate a more powerful message about these things, and is that even possible?
How about I tell you a little story? It is a true story from last week. It was the Fourth of July, day of cookouts and fireworks and a Very Big Deal in Boston, with its nationally televised Boston Pops concert and epic fireworks extravaganza high above the Charles River downtown, an event enjoyed by millions. This particular Fourth had started out a bit soggy, just like the previous day, and this particular bicycle-junkie had waited a whole day for the rain to pass and it hadn’t, so he’d gone out for his road-fix in a light drizzle hoping it wouldn’t rain any harder. The roads were especially empty and peaceful, just as he’d hoped, as he rode his usual route from Iffley Road over to the Arnold Arboretum, where he always has to cross Route 203, the usually busy road that runs by the entrance. It was there that he used the designated pedestrian light-and-crosswalk, as 203 aka the Arborway is a divided multi-lane thoroughfare between two traffic chokepoints along this stretch, where drivers often “make up time” by rushing at breakneck speed and hoping for a green light ahead, which is almost never. It can be somewhat scary or at least unnerving sometimes, waiting at that crosswalk while folks rush by just a few feet away at maybe 50mph and sometimes faster, even though this is not a limited-access freeway or interstate expressway but just another street in a cramped city.
So the man made it safely across, as he always has thus far, and proceeded for another mile through the friendly and peaceful and car-free confines of the AA, only to decide to turn around as the rain unfortunately had picked up a bit. In his younger days he would’ve proceeded on, but that was a long time ago and being the old guy that he is, he gave it up and returned along his previous route, where he once again safely crossed the rather quiet Arborway/Route 203 (why several names? welcome to Boston!) at which point he noticed about a quarter mile away the brilliant flashing lights atop the cruiser of one of Boston’s finest. And not just a cop, but an ambulance as well, and one of those rescue firetrucks and maybe another cop and was that not a car in the middle of it all, upside down with its roof crushed in?
Call it shocking. Call it horrifying. Call it memorable. In the end what you get is powerful, in a way that a graphic or a statistic or a police report cannot begin to match. Was somebody still in the car? Were they dead? None of the emergency responders seemed very busy, like the moment of urgency was over, which suggests that this whole event had taken place in the 20 minutes since the man had passed by the first time. Is it possible this car had already crashed spectacularly, right before the man came through the first time? We shall never know, but it’s sobering to consider.
The man did not wait around or approach the scene, both of which seemed inappropriate, and besides he was getting soaked by this point. He did take pictures from a distance, as such a visually rich and powerful scene is a rare thing, especially one that tells a pretty clear and dramatic story, worth a thousand words and all that.
The next day the man searched the newspaper and the internet for the story, which turned up nothing. He went back to the scene of the crash, as the rain had passed and he was off on another ride anyway, and the roads were still quiet. All the vehicles were long gone, of course, but what was still there tells its own powerful story, though one with a great deal more mystery. All there is left to see is a long ripped-out piece of iron fencing, and a bit of litter: some broken glass, a gaming card, one of those pine-tree air fresheners, and most visibly a windshield-liner, the kind people use in summer to keep the car cooler when parked. Folks on 203 zooming by in their cars will notice the fence and maybe the shiny windshield-liner, if they notice anything at all, and some will wonder what the heck happened here? Some of them might figure a crash of some kind, but whatever they conjure up in their minds will have none of the power of what the biker and the emergency personnel witnessed, as well as anybody who might’ve come upon the scene while that car sat upside down, perhaps with the wheels still spinning and somebody inside pinned by an airbag. The fact that none of this showed up as a major news story suggests death was not an element, but nowadays who knows?
What probably will happen is that this event will at least turn up as a blue dot on the Vision Zero crash map, which demonstrates the limited emotional power of a simple graphic presentation. Given all this, the man has had the thought that it might have been a good idea for the emergency responders to clean up the crash scene, but then to maybe leave the wreck sitting there, untouched, for a week or so. That way everybody could pass by and ponder, and perhaps have a sobering moment or two, and just maybe some of them in the future might behave a bit more carefully and safely as they make their way about the city in the future, especially if they’re piloting a motor vehicle and they’re in their usual great big hurry. The city might consider making a regular thing out of this, given that there are numerous crashes each and every day and incredibly almost nobody seems to know it. Ignorance might be bliss but it can also be dangerous. Speed humps are a great idea but a little in-your-face consciousness-raising wouldn’t hurt either, don’t you think?
