I live right by 4th and king where the kid was killed.
There was a community event where we all gathered to express our discontent with the lack of safety at this intersection, and many others.
Someone had a sign that said "our neighbor died here" and one of the police officers there, the one who responded first the day the child died, walked up to the person with the sign and said "they weren't our neighbor". He said that because the family was visiting.
They were our neighbor, and we let them down.
I've been pretty dissapointed with many of my interactions with the folks that are supposed to be protecting us in this city. It's got to be a hard job, but we need to do better, somehow.
I just want to shout out WalkSF which is a small organization punching well above its weight fighting for increased safety for pedestrians (which by proxy will mean increased safety for everyone). Voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly chose to maintain the JFK promenade vehicle closure in spite of very noisy complaints from a small minority of car owners. There are many uphill battles, but calmer, safer streets are popular with a solid majority of residents and I think politicians will start realizing that this will be a winning issue for them. It won't happen overnight, but I do think there is cause for optimism.
This is a poor framing and Darrel knows better. While it is true retail shops fight to maintain parking spots, the real underlying issue is the local homeowners who fight the denser type of housing that is needed to promote foot traffic to keep businesses viable. Cities in general also don’t sufficiently support mass transit and biking which also helps increase non-auto customers.
What is needed is general reform of the layout of America cities. Specifically we need to allow five-over-one buildings (retail first floor, 5 stories of residential above) nearly everywhere. Every time I am in Cambridge MA I am shocked at the blocks of one story retail along Massachusetts Ave.
> Cities in general also don't sufficiently support mass transit and biking
Yes, and he's pointing to a very big reason why: electeds defer to small business owners, who tend to be irrationally hostile to those alternatives.
Zoning reform is all well and good (pretty sure Owens agrees with you there), but road use reform is much cheaper and faster path to greater safety. And it too will lead to greater density.
You miss my point. Bus lanes are economic and political non starters in cities without sufficient residential density. Not enough people to use them to justify the cost to the average city official. And all the bike lanes in the world aren’t going to help a business if enough people don’t live within biking distance. Denser housing is key, and it also drives down rents for retail.
A good biking distance is about 3-5 miles. Anyone living in a city should live within 3-5 miles of something. Heck even in a lot of suburbs or small towns, biking makes more sense that business owners realize. But the infrastructure discourages people biking.
I live in such a place. The primary reason why I bike to the grocery store, restaurants, and coffee shop while my spouse does not is safety. They're very concerned about the risks. I'm more tolerant of the risks, but their position is perfectly reasonable. If there were more biking infrastructure that made it safe to bike (separarte bikes and cars), more people would bike. But building such biking infrastructure is often seen as taking something away from car-driving customers.
But I also support denser housing. We should be doing both.
Good for you. But the average person is not going to bike 5 miles, or even a couple of miles for that matter, even with good infrastructure. It’s just too far for most folks. In biking heavy European cities, average trips are well less than a mile. That only works in dense cities. Density is key in all discussions about livable, walkable, bike-able, communities.
It's fine if biking is not for everyone, but it is a great option for some people. If we can encourage more people to sometimes bike instead bof drive a car, that is positive.
Even if we say that 1 mile is gold standard biking distance, surely there are people that live within 1 mile of a grocery or a restaurant. That is a very comfortable distance, as far as physical exertion goes, for many people. But, again, whenever cars and bikes are negotiating a shared space, it's dangerous, and a lot of people simply won't do it for safety concerns.
Next, I agree that increasing density is a very good goal. I want that. But surely you must acknowledge how painfully difficult that has been to achieve politically in most places in the United States? I think we should keep pushing for denser towns and cities, but even when progress is made, it is gradual. The vicious cycle is that cars encourage more sprawl, and sprawl demands cars. Maybe the city council isn't going to budge on bringing housing and businesses to be dense enough for most things to be 1 mile of each other. But maybe bringing some stuff within 4 or 5 miles is more possible sooner, and if it is, we should take it. Increasing density a little bit now makes it easier to increase density a little bit more tomorrow, and a little bit more the next day.
My last bit I want to share is ebikes really open up what is possible. Trips can be longer, the terrain can be hillier, and the exertion lower. The physical barriers to biking drop a lot. Costs are coming down, and are quite a bargain if one is able to replace a car with an ebike. The missing piece is infrastructure to support safe biking.
We are pretty much on the same page. My experience in Cambridge MA though (which has great bike infrastructure) is that bike lines have really done fuck-all to improve the walkability/livability of the city. We still have one story retail along major commercial avenues and the stores do suffer from a lack of parking. (Case in point: last week I tried to buy a present for my partner at a local store but ended up forced to drive to a box store because I couldn’t carry the present on a bike in the rain, and there was no place to park, and the MBTA sucks.) My point: density promotes walkability, bike-ability, and mass transit within urban cores.
> In biking heavy European cities, average trips are well less than a mile.
The average in the Netherlands in 2016 was ~3.5km (~2.2 miles) for ordinary bikes and ~5km (~3.1 miles) for ebikes. [1]
"For trips of up to 7.5 km (65% of all trips), 38% of the Dutch use the bicycle and 34% the car. For distances from 3.7 km and more, the car is more popular than the bicycle." [2]
"55% of workers who live within 5 km of their workplace go to work by bicycle. When the home-work distance is between 5 and 10 km 31% of the people go by bicycle and between 10 and 15 km that is 14%." [2]
It is time to start examining why these stores are vacant. Are the businesses that provide services necessary for living profitable enough to pay city rent and living wage with the number of people within a 15-minute walk?
Commercial property owners are in denial at the moment. I have a friend who wanted to open a small restaurant in our neighborhood. The building is mixed use so great foot traffic and great elevator traffic. They contact the realtor who sends back the terms and the terms were eye watering expensive. Since then multiple coffee shops have tried and failed within the same storefront. I'm guessing over 50% of revenue is going toward paying the lease. Now it's been empty for almost a year.
That and the whole notion that a majority of people want to go to a bunch of little shops every day for food and supplies. I go to Kroger or Target once or twice a week and I'm set.
Maybe I’m just feeling emotional today but I found the examples so distressing I couldn’t continue the article. How could a whole family just be killed off: mother, father, and their children, and the driver responsible faces NO consequences? Even if consequences don’t bring people back from the dead, they are still useful for signaling to society that we recognize the severity of what happened.
It’s depressing to think about their home where they spent their days together now just sitting silent and empty, one day they all left together and would never return again, everything exactly as they left it, soon to be emptied out and sold off to the next owners who will take over as if nothing happened. And apparently as far as society is concerned nothing did happen. Our lives really don’t mean shit to anyone but ourselves. Why are we like this?
Because the court just views as driving "accidents", mere oopsies.
There was also this driver, Raja Whitfield of SFSU, who hit and killed a man crossing the street at Geary and Gough. Raja was sentenced to pay only $58k in restitution. That's the price we value life here.
If someone hits a pedestrian or cyclist with their car, their license should be revoked for at least a decade, and they should be forced to ride a bike during that time.
I drive about 120 miles a day, and also like weekend road trips. I see so many accidents and fatal ones every now and then and it really weirds me out how people's lives are totally boring and average just driving down the freeway, and then just dead.
~100 a day in America on average.
Another depressing metric is that an Americans lifetime odds of dying in a car are about 1 in 100.
As the article mentions, the driver will have to deal with the knowledge that they killed an entire family by accident, which can’t be easy. Of course, it is nothing compared to what the killed family’s fiends and loved ones feel, but “NO consequences” isn’t exactly fair.
Which is also part of the point of the article: the problem is that it’s missing the forest for the trees to treat just the driver as responsible — one could argue the driver was also failed by the entire system described here, the system that privileges vehicles and their occupants over pedestrians, that treats death as an unavoidable, and therefore acceptable, consequence of vehicle use, which itself is treated as an unalienable right.
Where are the:
- fitness-to-drive tests every few years?
- geofenced enforced speed limits?
- protected sidewalks with higher boundaries?
- physical smartphone restrictions on use while driving? (Paired with your car, moving > 5 mph, single occupancy? Car mode.)
- traffic calming measures on major roadways shared with pedestrians?
- standards around signaling at crosswalks on major roadways?
- heavily subsidized transit that runs frequently enough that it’s preferable to driving?
Every regulation has a cost, of course, and many of these are horribly privacy-violating if naively implemented. But let’s be 100% clear what we are privileging when we make these decisions!
It would be less frustrating if our society was willing to take this systemic view of low level crime as well. But there are people in jail and even prison for shoplifting, or stealing a car, or such unforgivable violence as a punch that left someone bruised. Because yes, we demand a system that creates these kinds of crime, but no, people aren’t willing to think that way about anything except killing people with your car.
I don't disagree with you -- I'd only add that I think a major factor here is premeditation.
The law already treats harms from negligence or even from "heat of the moment" actions differently than harms from premeditated action.
Few of the vehicular deaths here are the result of a person making a particular decision to kill someone -- even if that is a statistically likelier outcome of distracted driving. That stands in contrast with shoplifting and vehicle theft, which are almost always planned actions, or at least actions undertaken with the knowledge that they are crimes.
Whether this is the right line to draw or not is, of course, a major question.
Relying on the driver to have some kind of moral anguish the rest of his life as punishment is shaky at best.
The driver might not even give a fuck. He might rationalize he wasn’t a fault.
What about the anguish it would cause a parent to know their child and their whole family were killed off and the driver gets to pretty much live his life as normal? Would you just accept that?
I am not suggesting anything of the sort. The family should absolutely sue the driver for everything he's got, an avenue available beyond the paltry criminal penalties applied here.
Of course, that will not make the family whole. Additional punishment for the driver will also not make the family whole.
The question is: what are our priorities as a society? This article is arguing that our priorities are terrible: as a society we create the conditions that allow and perpetuate this kind of tragedy on a daily basis, and then point fingers at the individuals when the tragedies inevitably happen.
We can't do anything to make this family whole. Advocating for greater punishment will do approximately nothing to make the next family whole.
This article is arguing: all we can do to make the next family whole is to stop treating traffic fatalities as unavoidable, and prevent the next tragedy by treating cars as the dangerous objects they really are, by supporting alternative modes of transportation.
He basically wants to keep repeating the virtue signalling idea that all people are good and punishment is bad.
He thinks you can cure bad actions by restricting freedom of actions in the first place. It's pretty sad and unfortunately terrible. But it is definitely "easier to feel good" with it.
Oof. You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity. It’s fine, it provides a mild disincentive, in some cases it works a bit, but it overwhelmingly doesn’t solve the problems discussed in this thread: mistakes people make, sometimes innocently, and sometimes because of lapses of judgment. You can’t punish your way into better judgment, people will continue to make mistakes. We’re not talking about crimes with intent here. We’re talking about screwups that killed people.
The approach that works is to fix systems so that mistakes are harder to make or their consequences are mitigated. This is sometimes called defense in depth: many overlapping protections mean that accidents are less likely. Extra defenses mean that when mistakes do happen their consequences are less severe. (None of this has anything to do with whether you punish people who act maliciously, and is actually independent of whether you also do that.)
The FAA is a good example: mandated redundancies, the NTSB does a root cause analysis on every accident to figure out how it made it through defenses. As a result flying is one of the safest modes of transport, even despite Boeing’s recent attempts to undo that legacy.
For the cases in question here, roads could be redesigned to reduce the likelihood and severity of vehicles impacting pedestrians. In another message in this thread I listed eight possible measures society could take to do this.
Honestly it’s starting to feel like it’s the “more punishment!” crowd that’s virtue signaling at this point. Of course it’s easier to feel like you’ve solved the problem when you punish any person you can point a finger at, it’s much harder actually getting to the root of anything.
>You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity.
It's not debated nor under debate, it's worked for that long. Not only has it worked that long but the effects are not even minor... otherwise it would have disappeared as it's pretty hard to maintain.
The punishment isn’t about corrective action, it’s about justice. If you kill off a whole family being a reckless idiot, you should not be able to just go on living your own life happily ever after. You should be rotting in prison without being able to live your own life. Both sides of the tragedy should be balanced out.
Yes, and neither this article nor I are advocating against justice being served. We are just making the point that this kind of justice alone doesn’t prevent future tragedies.
We can have justice, and we should, and then we should also feel a moral obligation to reduce harm from reckless or mistaken action in the future, no?
If we only have “justice” in the sense of punishment for harm, but do nothing to reduce the chances that we end up needing “justice” again later, then we’re just setting ourselves up for more future “justice” in the form of multiple destroyed lives: some through negligence, some through state action pursuing justice. Who does that serve?
I (and the original article) are advocating that we do more to reduce the likelihood that “being a reckless idiot” causes a whole family to be killed, because “justice” doesn’t prevent people from “being a reckless idiot” — and I for one would vastly prefer that my whole family not be killed, even if I knew that killer would be brought to justice.
I proposed 8 things we can do in the message you originally replied to.
It's statistically very unlikely that this driver will accidentally kill someone else. Keeping this driver locked up behind bars may be a reasonable punishment, but it doesn't change the stats one iota, and it doesn't prevent others from doing the same thing. That's why we also need systemic interventions like the 8 I listed earlier.
> the driver will have to deal with the knowledge that they killed an entire family by accident
Do you think the term "accident" accurately describes what happened? In that particular case, the driver of an SUV was speeding on the wrong side of the road, ran onto the sidewalk, and struck the family and the neighboring library.
In the sense that the outcome was not maliciously intentional, yes. Doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility, of course, or that their egregious actions didn’t cause it—just means they didn’t set out to do it.
> Even if consequences don’t bring people back from the dead, they are still useful for signaling to society that we recognize the severity of what happened.
Punishment shouldn't be used as a signal to the rest of society to show that an event was serious, there are ways to do that without ruining (more) lives.
I honestly can't think of a good reason to punish anyone in the US legal system as it has nothing to do with recovery or change for the individual. Laws and punishment should reflect the will and concerns of society though, not the other way around.
The driver, if not a complete sociopath, will be haunted by it for the rest of his/her life. Likely also bankrupt from a civil wrongful death lawsuit by the next of kin. I'm not sure what a jail sentence would do on top of that.
My US driving test didn’t even include a highway drive. It does feel like the ability to drive is treated as a right here. It’s only a privilege from the license cost point of view.
I was getting driver's license in Europe as well as US and both did not include freeway driving.
I think this is because actually driving on freeway is actually easier that on streets, the major difference is that if you get into an accident likely much more severe. And you're much more likely to get into accident during a test than after passing it.
What one needs on freeway is to have a greater confidence in their driving to not do sudden changes and drive around the same speed as the rest of the traffic. That confidence you get after you pass your exam and drive for a bit.
Well, driving is pretty easy and a virtual necessity. You can't drive without a license and you can't learn to drive without doing it. Most people take a class and/or get a learner's permit at a young age. They aren't crazy. If you are a new driver, going fast is scary and you'll avoid it until you have mastered basic driving on slow streets.
The only country I've heard of where getting a basic driver's license is remotely hard is Germany, and it's because of the Autobahn. I forgot the details but I think you have to take a long class and clock a certain number of hours, and pay a couple thousand dollars equivalent. That kind of crap simply is not necessary in 90% of the US which is slow suburban traffic, where people can live for years without even going onto a highway once.
> Business owners and the merchant class believe that any customers they get are drivers. They are unswayed by research consistently showing that increased foot traffic and alternative travel to commercial areas increase their profit.
It was exactly the same problem in German cities until a few pilot programs were ram-rodded through.
While the article fails to explain why deadly incidents seems to rise in the west, the graph show another interesting point: Russia. They have had, and still have, more deadly accidents than the west, but their rates still drop, while in the west the trend is inverted here and there.
Well, people in Russia move by car, much, and they tend to be not exactly modern cars with ADAS, they have smartphones as well, perhaps in some spread area they use them less, but most deadly accidents happen in not-so-spread areas simply because of number of people on the road. Roads mean condition and climate does not help. They have business as well...
Long story short, still unproved, but maybe the west inversion is due to people less and less able to drive, not to business or big SUV/light trucks. Indeed we can see young less and less good at driving, at least here in EU. So far we have not seen except in very rare cases ads in cars or other new-and-distracted infotainment, at least not hyper-recently, touchscreens distracts, but they are not that new. So...
~50% of murders go unsolved in the US. I don’t believe the idea is so far fetched, but importantly, the point is that pedestrian and bicycle deaths by motorists is rarely punished (unless egregiously willful).
How long do the police spend on a fatal car accident that fits the standard profile of a no-fault accident? A couple hours, maybe? What are the chances they notice anything suspicious in that time frame? Pretty low, in my opinion.
I heard you. I understand you think that’s the most important art of the message. Did you hear me that I believe the author is trying to use strong wording to evoke emotion but that they are not intending it to be taken literally/technically?
Basically: I validate your point of view (without agreeing). Can you validate that you understand that I feel the way that I do (can also be done without agreeing).
>I place most of the blame for these accidents on traffic engineers and city planners who let drivers speed through crowded pedestrian areas.
What a dumb take.
"I blame the people who eat seafood on why the ocean's coral reefs are dying."
"I blame the people who sell knives to chefs for murders in restaurants."
It turns out that if you basically don't punish people, they don't care what wrongs they do. That's it. That's all there is to it, there is no optimisation that can avoid telling people not to be naughty. Drivers aren't taking more precaution in their driving and it shows. There are less pedestrians on the streets next to fast cars than ever before...
A junior fat fingers a command line and accidentally deletes prod. Do you
a) Immediately fire the junior, yell a bunch and send company wide messages that anyone else making the same mistake will face the same consequences
b) Do a retro, figure out process changes that can avoid the same mistake happening again and thank the junior for discovering a flaw in our processes that leave room for improvement?
>A junior fat fingers a command line and accidentally deletes prod. Do you
A) Delete prod yourself because it was obviously your design flaw for creating a production server.
B) Teach juniors that deleting prod destroys the company and that to keep the company alive we need to limit anyone to deleting prod more than two times at the company. We don't want to punish people who know how not to delete prod from working on prod.
C) Teach juniors that deleting prod destroys the company and that deleting prod means their instant access to prod is now forfeit for a set amount of time and needs to be reviewed.
D) Ramble on about how everything that goes wrong with a persons actions is a good thing and all the negatives are actually positives.
Would you like a 50/50?
Neither of your solutions are good. You can't "change a process" and have prod be both worked on and undeletable. Prods have existed for a long time without constantly being deleted everywhere, they also need to be accessed. This isn't a situation where you're magically limited from deleting X or Y or Z but not XYZ.
>and thank the junior for discovering a flaw in our processes that leave room for improvement?
This is the most unhinged part of your comment and made me laugh. Reward the poop on the floor with a treat! It's clearly my fault for buying carpet!
I find this post super confusing, like I can’t tell if it’s satire or just super strawmanning.
The problem clearly isn’t that “you can delete prod” — the problem is that you can “fat finger a command line and accidentally delete prod”.
You can absolutely make it harder to delete prod—since this is something few people are doing regularly—by requiring some kind of confirmation. That’s the process change being discussed, and is the smart response.
There was a community event where we all gathered to express our discontent with the lack of safety at this intersection, and many others.
Someone had a sign that said "our neighbor died here" and one of the police officers there, the one who responded first the day the child died, walked up to the person with the sign and said "they weren't our neighbor". He said that because the family was visiting.
They were our neighbor, and we let them down.
I've been pretty dissapointed with many of my interactions with the folks that are supposed to be protecting us in this city. It's got to be a hard job, but we need to do better, somehow.