How many bicycle riders must be killed by speeding, intoxicated, or inattentive car drivers before we start putting people in jail?
Why do we accept “I didn’t see him/her” as an acceptable excuse?
What will it take before the police can shift their thinking and stop calling them “Accidents”?
Seattle Police Department, Washington State Police Department, Kitsap County Sheriff, can you strike “accident” from your vocabulary? If the driver was sipping a latte, distracted by a child, sleepy, blind, or otherwise not in control of their vehicle, perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to endanger the lives of any more people. It was cause and effect. Perhaps it wasn’t premeditated, but it was avoidable and someone died due to the negligence of someone else.
It is a bigger state-wide issue too. Seattle has tried to push for harsher penalties but has been trumped at the state level.
Is it fair that a life is lost and the only public charge is a traffic ticket? While an eye for an eye makes everyone blind, shouldn’t driving priviledges be revoked once someone proves that they can’t operate an automobile without killing somone else? Cyclists currently suffer a death penalty from motorists who fail to respect the power that they have, and the motorists only have to say “but I didn’t see him/her” and they get off scott free. Is that justice?
Last year, Oregon passed a law that increases the penalties when a car driver breaks the law and injures a more vulnerable user. Washington neglected to follow suit in the same week that Kevin Black was killed when a van driver made an illegal u-turn in front of him. When will Washington wake up and realize that drivers need to see the serious concequences of their actions?
Thank you for this. I’ll just add my own rant since I too have been bubbling with frustration.
We, as a society are so ingrained with car culture that we have somehow made driving a 2,000 lb metal machine into no big deal. But the truth is of course these vehicles are the most deadly and destructive pieces of equipment used by the average citizen. Operating them should be taken with the utmost seriousness and anyone behind the wheel should be entirely focused on maneuvering with care and caution.
But instead of fostering a culture of responsibility we have changed everything else to accommodate the lazy driver. Lanes are disgusting wide, pedestrians are corralled to the edges and filtered across designated crossings, and even vehicles themselves are designed like tanks in anticipation of a head-on collision.
So we throw cyclists onto the roads of these inattentive tank drivers and the best we can do for them is say, “wear a helmet” as if a small piece of foam covering their craniums will save them from one of these speeding boxes of death.
Its time we took a stand and shifted our transportation culture back to the needs of people instead of vehicles.
A start will be the aLIVe (a low impact vehicle exhibition) event happening in Seward Park on August 22nd. This exhibition, thought up by local artist Cheryl Dos Remedios aims to imagine a new set of transportation vehicles that are compatible with the fragile human being.
More info here:
http://www.greatcity.org/campaigns/streets-for-people/alive-a-low-impact-vehicle-exhibit/
Stranger coverage here:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/in-art-news/Content?oid=969342
Pingback: Carnage on the Roadways: Be safe out there! « Bike Intelligencer