Tom Condon penned a good article on pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in The Connecticut Mirror on April 21, but, in my opinion, missed the other half of the causes of increased fatalities of pedestrians and cyclists: civil engineers and politicians.
Condon opined that “the real problem [is]: roads are built for cars, not people.” Excuse me, roads and the facility they lend to our lives and commerce are a social good. Roads get people to where they want to go, when they want to. For trucks, roads get goods and equipment to where they are needed so that our economy functions more efficiently to meet the wants and needs of our citizenry and to support economic growth.
I appreciate that for some progressive politicians in Connecticut, economic growth is not the goal, political power is. Connecticut is one of the few states to have created no new jobs since the Great Recession of 2008-2009. We are led by political opportunists who have orchestrated no new jobs since the Great Recession. Connecticut is one of only a handful of states to achieve that nadir.
Assuming that economic growth is good for our citizens and the budgets of our state and local governments: roads are positive for our economy. The question of urban sprawl is a subject for a different article. Roads also allow buses to travel, another social good. Condon was helpful in pointing out that arterial roads, “fast-moving roads through built-up areas,” are where the majority of pedestrian deaths occur. In addition, the fast flow of traffic of 40-50 mph can occur inches from the sidewalk. That is a problem. Thank you for writing this.
Condon shared a statistic that pedestrian deaths had hit their highest number in 40 years in 2022, which could be statistically dubious, however. In 1982 the U.S. had about 231 million citizens. In 2022 the U.S. had about 333 million people. That is an increase of about 100 million people. A similar number of deaths after 40 years with almost 45 percent more people seems like the civil engineers and better cars have done a good job of making our roads safer, notwithstanding the higher rate of fatalities when an SUV plows through a pedestrian versus a lower profile sedan.
The reason civil engineers and politicians have a hand in killing pedestrians and cyclists is their encouragement of pedestrians and cyclists to think that they have a right to be in the streets. This may lead to less careful conduct by pedestrians and cyclists.
I was an avid cyclist in New York City in the late 1980s to get to work and get around town. I wore out tires; had a bike pass for the Metro North train system; and, repeatedly broke the crank arms on my English three-speed bike. After having traveled in Europe from time to time, it seems to me that our civil engineers have simply taken road, pedestrian and cycling designs from Germany, Holland and France; copied the diagrams; translated the language; and then presented the work as their own original work. This copying of another’s work is also done for drainage designs and water retention technologies in Europe, but that is a story for another day. Europe is smaller, more compact and has far more people per square mile/kilometer than we do. It can be customary to park a car with two wheels on the sidewalk and two wheels on the street in some towns as the streets are so narrow. We should temper our appetite for their designs in view of our greater open spaces.
Progressives want more walking and biking. Realtors rate “walk scores” for condominiums and homes as to their convenience to shopping, transportation, restaurants and work. Some progressives don’t want citizens to own cars and push urban designers to have less parking or penalize Americans who want to own a car in our beautiful, wide-open country.
Condon observed that “residents of low-income neighborhoods were over-represented among the victims [of road fatalities],” a statistic that could be explained by the fact that low-income residents have less money so they may be less likely to own a car, which may mean that they are on foot more to go to work, get groceries or otherwise conduct their lives. The opposite corollary of this is that rich people die more in private jets than poor people. At all events, references to low-income experiences is a de rigueur requirement of most anything white progressives write today, despite the fact that the policies of white progressives are ruinous for the economic interests of the residents of low-income neighborhoods, whether it be by annually erecting ever more state requirements and mandates on the citizen to make getting and holding jobs more difficult; running their own business difficult; getting a quality education more difficult; and, increasing inflation, as they did with the Inflation Increase Act of 2022 (IIA).
The lIA did just as it was designed to do by pouring gasoline on the inflation conflagration. The Orwellians among the white progressives called it the “Inflation Decrease Act,” but it was in fact the “Inflation Increase Act.” Orwellians like to give names to things to suit their political needs even if it has no correlation to reality or prior experience. There is no more effective way to undermine the standard of living of the poor than inflation! Objective achieved. Well done, white progressives.
While bicycles are supposed to recognize the same traffic laws as cars, with reference to stop lights and sidewalks, they don’t, wink, wink. In Old Greenwich, a civil engineering project to eliminate a support of the Metro-North train bridge over Sound Beach Avenue, allowed the addition of a left turn lane for train parking and as a back way to shops. It came after a small downhill portion. Coupled with this bridge modification, they re-did the parking in the Old Greenwich commercial district. The civil engineers showed how much they knew by eliminating scores of parking spots.
You see, just changing something indicates how smart you are. In fact, they were not smart. By eliminating six to eight parking spots, they make it harder for the local businesses to make business and pay their employee salaries and taxes to the entities that pay the civil engineers. Tragically, a 62-year-old woman was struck at this location on November 29, 2019 at 9:50 am and died from her injuries a week later. The driver struck her as he breezed under the bridge and used the newly created left-turn lane to head toward train parking or other parking.
Under the old design, a driver was necessarily restricted from breezing through due to the support wall under the bridge. About the same time, the engineers littered Old Greenwich with crosswalks between the Perrot Memorial Library and Shore Road. Flashing warning lights, some powered by solar power as they were too far from the electrical grid, were added to some of these crosswalks. This is a big problem. For decades, people have crossed the street in front of the First Congregational Church and St. Saviours Episcopal Church without flashing lights.
Environmentally speaking, making a car stop for a pedestrian in a non-commercial area is environmentally wasteful as the car must come to a complete stop and then start from a stop. This is carbon dioxide wasteful for those who claim to be concerned with climate change.
In addition, you should not encourage pedestrians or cyclists to think that they have a right to be in the street. The pedestrian and cyclist should still use the old-school technique of eye contact with the driver to confirm that the driver knows the pedestrian or cyclist is going to cross. The injuries that can occur are terrible. We should all want more people to be free of injuries or death by automobile and truck. These crosswalks with flashing lights powered by solar panels are poster-children for pedestrian kill-zones designed by our civil engineers and installed by our politicians. And now there is a suggestion in Hartford to change the law to allow pedestrians to adopt a more aggressive and legalistic approach to on-coming vehicles at crosswalks. This kind of an attitude will kill more people.
Then there are the people who die from electric bicycle fires. As of January 19, 2024, 267 fires in New York City were sparked by E-bike batteries which caused 18 deaths and 150 injuries according to the NYC fire department. For some progressive politicians these pedestrian deaths, cyclist deaths and deaths from E-bike batteries are a necessary cost of remaking society. There is a sorry history of progressives such as Mao Zedong of Communist China who viewed the millions who died from his famines and persecution as a necessary part of remaking society. Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union observed that one death was a tragedy, but one million deaths was a statistic! This is how some progressives think.
True, a reference to Mao and Stalin, while discussing pedestrian and cyclist deaths in Connecticut, is overdrawn, but the fact that some progressives are willing to accept people being injured and/or killed in the process of re-engineering society is acceptable to these same progressive politicians is troubling.
This begs the question, whether the compliant press of Connecticut, which shills progressive politics and proposals of progressive politicians, is willing to ask questions from a different perspective that perhaps we should remind and demand that citizens be more careful; that engineers and politicians not set up kill-zones outside of commercial districts; and, not to waste energy so liberally?
Roads were meant primarily for cars, trucks and buses. We should not lose sight of that fact. Sometimes the roads are not to blame. The title to Condon’s piece suggested that roads and sidewalks have an animus against walkers and bikers. If that were possible, couldn’t the same be said of engineers and politicians?
Peter Thalheim lives in Stamford.