Part II
The deaths of the disregarded
Below are the strangest phenomena surrounding the steady increase in the unnecessary deaths of vulnerable road users in the United States today:
- The lack of outrage that motorists who kill with carelessness seldom suffer any penalty more significant than a ticket, if that.
- The failure of the country’s legacy media to recognize and report on the fact that the pavements on which American children used to learn to ride their bikes and play have increasingly become kill zones.
- The inability of the nation’s body politic to grasp that the special treatment afforded the American motor vehicle helped fuel the pandemic of the unfit that, as of this writing, is blamed for the deaths of nearly 1.2 million Americans since 2020.
Let’s start the discussion with the first.
In Alaska today, if a motorist is found to be driving for the first time with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.8 (down from the old standard of 1.0) or refuses to blow for a BAC test, he or she faces a minimum mandatory sentence of three days in jail and a minimum mandatory fine of $1,500.
A sober motorist, on the other hand, can drive over a pedestrian in a crosswalk, maim her or kill him and face no more of a penalty than a $100 ticket for failure to yield.
In these circumstances, one is forced to ask a simple question: What the hell kind of message are Alaskan politicians and legal leaders trying to send; that the state doesn’t care how badly you drive or who you kill as long as you’re sober?
Now, before going further, it must be noted that 2024’s deadly problem of bad drivers extends beyond just pedestrians and cyclists, those people lumped together as vulnerable road users. The deaths of people thinking they are safe in their metal cages are also on the rise because of a growing number of collisions.
The death count pushed near 47,000 in 2021, equaling the number in 1990 when only 29 of the 50 states required the use of seatbelts in motor vehicles and eight years before the government ordered all new cars be equipped with airbags.
Seat belts and airbags have since been credited with saving tens of thousands of lives, but that hasn’t stopped the death toll on America’s roads from starting to climb again.
Vulnerable road users, unfortunately, became targets long before this shift. Their deaths, which made up nearly 30 percent of road fatalities in 1980, fell to a low of 20 percent in 1996 and then began a steady increase.
Overall, though, the roads were becoming more dangerous for everyone not in a motor vehicle.
“In 2011 and 2012 pedestrian fatality rates started to increase in the 20-to-29,
30-to-39, 40-to-49, 50-to-59, and 60-to-69 age groups for males and females,” the NHTSA reported, adding that “male and female pedalcyclist fatality rates are (also) increasing in the 50-to-59 and 60-to-69 age groups.”
Pedestrian deaths
Up, up, up
Those death rates would only keep on rising as the country entered the 2020s. By the time the Governors Highway Safety Association released a report on road safety in June of last year, pedestrian deaths were at a record high.
The report blamed many of the deaths on “speeding and other risky driving behaviors (that) increased during the pandemic and persisted” and on sport utility vehicles (SUVs).
“It is telling to look at the growth over the past 10 years in the number of pedestrians struck and killed by drivers of SUVs compared with the number of pedestrians struck and killed by drivers of passenger cars,” the report said. “The number of deaths involving SUVs increased 120 percent while deaths involving passenger cars grew 26 percent.”
SUVs, starting with the venerable Chevrolet Suburban which is considered the first of the breed, were popular in Alaska long before SUVs took off in the rest of the country because of the protection their mass offers the driver and occupants in a potential collision with a moose, which is four to five times heavier than most vulnerable road users.
The danger to humans of these bigger, heavier vehicles is now also considered such a risk that the NTHSA has proposed a requirement for “automatic emergency braking (AEB), including pedestrian AEB (PAEB), systems for light vehicles” that would automatically “detect and react to an imminent crash with a lead vehicle or pedestrian.”
The NHTSA is now investigating the phantom-braking phenomenon in Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles as manufacturers race to find a technological solution to the problem of drivers who don’t pay attention to their driving or choose to engage in dangerously aggressive driving in a country that seems uninterested in holding drivers accountable for their actions.
This is not the case everywhere.
There are no penalties for careless driving in Alaska or much of the rest of the U.S., and drivers who kill someone because their driving has become dangerous are regularly given a free pass. Some don’t even get ticketed for failure to yield as did the driver who killed Carlton Higgins in Anchorage last summer.
Months after Greg Knapp, a 58-year-old coach for the New York Jets of the National Football League, was run over and killed while cycling in a bike lane in California in 2021, The Pleasanton Weekly revealed that the driver who killed him was “glancing at his hands-free cellphone at the time he drifted into the Dougherty Road bicycle lane where Knapp was riding.”
As has become a national norm in these cases, the driver has never been named given the decision of California officials to protect him from any public shaming, which would seem a small price to pay for killing someone but from which law enforcement agencies regularly protect deadly drivers.
The Anchorage Police Department (APD) handled the death of Higins in the same way. His killer remains unnamed, shielded by APD in clear violation of the Alaska public records law but who has the money to sue APD to make it follow that law?
California, like Alaska, also happens to have a law that is supposed to penalize drivers who allow themselves to risk collisions by paying attention to their phone rather than to the road, but The Weekly reported that in Knapp’s case the phone being used by the driver who killed him “wasn’t in (the driver’s) hands as prohibited by law but rather sitting in a hands-free position” so it didn’t matter that it distracted him.
Either that or the Contra Costa District Attorney decided a jury would likely find the phone in a holder excuse enough to find the driver not guilty.
An Alaska precedent
Alaska has a precedent for the willingness of juries to buy defenses built on distractions.
Thao eventually went to trial in 2016, and a jury found her not guilty.
The jury concluded those things, rather than Thao dealing with an emotional cell phone conversation with her daughter in California, were responsible for the collision that killed Xiong.
Part of the problem with these cases in Alaska is the state’s negligent homicide statute, which requires a driver be guilty of “criminal negligence.” Criminal negligence, as written into the law, requires taking a risk “of such a nature and degree that the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.”
That charges were even brought against Thao was surprising in that Alaska prosecutors have long read the requirement of a “standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation” an almost impossible bar to get over given the normally bad and/or irresponsible driving common in the state.
Many drivers in the state don’t bother to slow down because the sun is in their eyes making it hard to see or drop their speed below the posted speed limit anywhere just because children are at play or visibility is restricted. And in criminal trials, it only takes one juror to conclude that a defendant should go free.
That juror can hang a jury or sometimes lead other jurors to conclude that it’s going to be easier to settle on a not guilty decision than spend days in debate. Given that juries are usually made up of motorists, some of whom are likely to be thinking “shit, this could be me,” this is not a hard sell, which is why prosecutors all over the country regularly refuse to bring charges against bad drivers.
Goodyear, Arizona police had originally charged Quintana-Lujan with “two counts of manslaughter, three counts of aggravated assault, 18 counts of endangerment, and two counts of causing serious injury or death by a moving violation,” but he said the collision wasn’t his fault because the steering on his truck locked.
Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell didn’t address whether the claim as to the steering was true or not, instead saying in a public statement that she didn’t think she could get a conviction because Quintana-Lujan wasn’t speeding, wasn’t drunk, could not be shown to have been distracted, and had only a small amount of THC, an indication of previous marijuana use, in his system in a state with no set standard for proving THC impairment.
There were no public protests in the wake of this announcement. There was no media investigation into Quintana-Lujan’s claim the “steering locked” on his Ford F250 pickup, something that has been reported to happen but is very rare.
“Mitchell tried to position her lack of action as a refusal to let the case go by referring it to the city prosecutor in Goodyear AZ, where the crash occurred. However, that means Quintana-Lujan could be charged with just a misdemeanor, at best, making the whole damn thing just another fatal ‘oopsie.'”
“Ooopsie” might be described as the standard treatment when a vulnerable road user is killed by a motorist, and few seem to care.
Not police. Not district attorneys or judges. Not the public at large. And certainly not the legacy media.
More deaths, so what?
The discussion mainly focused on bike lanes and urban design, which require costly modifications of the current transportation system, though NPR’s Joe Rose did identify a few of the key causes for fatalities – speeding in urban areas, bigger and heavier cars and trucks, and distracted driving, which is illegal almost everywhere and just as often ignored by authorities as was the case in the Knapp case and largely the case in a deadly crash that killed South Dakota’s Joe Boever.
Boever was walking along the shoulder of a South Dakota highway in 2020 when he was run down by a Ford sedan driven by then-South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg.
Ravnsborg never bothered to stop after the collision. He told investigators he kept going thinking he’d hit a deer despite the fact those same investigators found Boever’s glasses inside Ravnsborg’s car, indicating Boever’s face had to have impacted Ravnsborg’s windshield.
Ravnsborg insisted that if that had happened, the man must have been walking in the roadway.
Boever’s death resulted in Ravnsborg being charged with three misdemeanors and fined $1,000 after a plea deal that let him plead guilty to two of the charges – making an illegal lane change and driving while using his phone – in exchange for the state dropping the third charge.
The penalty imposed on Ravnsborg was 10 times that of the penalty imposed on the unnamed driver who killed Higgins in Anchorage, but still small enough to cause an uproar in South Dakota given Ravnsborg’s status as the state’s chief legal official.
Some were outraged at the sentence and confident Ravnsborg had received preferential treatment because of his position.
But when SD Public Media did a deep dive into the outcome of the case – something the country’s legacy media generally chooses to avoid when it comes to the deaths of vulnerable road users – it found that there was no sign that Ravnsborg was treated differently than other motorists who killed.
“The remaining 11 drivers were cited for traffic offenses or charged with low-level misdemeanors.”
Why did they all get off with a slap on the wrist or less?
Because, as South Dakota Public Media, unfortunately, phrased things, they “accidentally” ran over people, or as Ravnsborg’s lawyer put it, these “accidents happen, then there are those low misdemeanors to take care of it.”
And that is the essence of the problem. Ravnsborg didn’t hit a deer, but Boever was treated as if he was a deer.
He was walking on the side of the road where he shouldn’t have been because in the motocentric world of America today, roads and their shoulders are for motor vehicles not deer or people.
And if either of the latter are killed, it’s just an “accident.” Or at least this appears to be the view of a significant segment of the general public and of the legacy media which has made a big deal of how these deadly crashes should be called “collisions” not “accidents” while continuing to report on them as if they were accidents.
A different view
Their deaths were the result of badly designed transportation systems and human errors in driving, the consequences of which could be significantly reduced by lowering motor vehicle speeds in urban areas where 71 percent of cycling fatalities occur.
“…Bicyclist crashes at locations with speed limits set at or above 50 mph were more than five times more likely to result in fatal or serious injuries to the bicyclists compared to locations with posted motor vehicle speed limits of 25 mph or less,” the NTSB report read. “Even locations with posted speed limits of 30 to 35 mph yielded a 65 percent higher chance of the bicyclist sustaining a fatal or serious injury in a crash with a motor vehicle. Therefore, the NTSB concludes that reducing traffic speeds can improve bicycle
safety by reducing the likelihood of fatal or serious injury in the event of a crash.
“The safe-system approach recommends a maximum speed limit of about 18 mph where motor vehicles and vulnerable road users share the same space, such as in residential areas.”
Where speeds exceed 25 mph, the report recommended traffic-separated cycle lanes or reducing lane widths – the so-called “road diet” – which automatically makes drivers more cautious about their driving for fear they might clip another car or truck.
“The Federal Highway Administration recognized the road diet as a proven safety countermeasure in 2008, stating that it can improve safety by reducing total crashes by 19 percent to 47 percent,” the report said. “Road diets also provide better mobility and access for all road users, including bicyclists.
“Therefore, the NTSB concludes that the road diet is a proven safety countermeasure that both reduces traffic speeds and provides space on the roadway for the implementation of bicycle facilities, such as separated bike lanes.”
But instead of roads getting slimmer since 2008, roads – like the Americans who drive on them – have only gotten fatter. And there has been no change in the wake of the 2019 NTSB report despite that agency’s well-documented history of improving transportation safety.
As it noted, “in 2017 alone, 806 bicyclists died in crashes with motor vehicles on
U.S. roadways, which was comparable to the deaths resulting from railroad or marine accidents and more than twice the number of deaths resulting from aviation accidents in the same year.”
The number of cyclist deaths along with that of pedestrians has only gone up since. By 2021, the last year for which complete numbers are available, the NHTSA was reporting the number of cycling dead at 966.
Still, as of 2021, those odds were 1 in 3,546, which is way out of line with the general public perception of how unsafe it is to be on a bike in this country. As a cause of death, cycling is positioned between choking to death on food or dying from sunstroke, the odds of which are also getting worse as the climate warms.
The odds of dying of Covid-19 – deaths from which are directly linked to the increasingly sedentary lifestyles of Americans – were pegged at 1 in 10 with cancer at 1 in 7 and heart disease, long the nation’s number one killer, at 1 in 6.
Like Covid-19, both heart disease and cancer deaths have been tied to Americans sitting and driving too much rather than walking or cycling to get around. And many are now afraid to walk or cycle because the two words the NTSB found most important for making walking and cycling safer – slow down – are the last words American motorists want to hear.
They don’t want to go slower on the roads. They want to go faster. And even when they kill by going faster, there are seldom any consequences.
31 percent faster
On a percentage basis, Justice was going significantly faster than on a busy urban street where cars and/or people could enter the roadway from various directions at any time, and he had THC in his system.
Police investigating the crash that killed Griffith did not, however, conduct a field sobriety test because Justice had handicaps that prevented him from getting out of his car.
Neither did prosecutors address the question of whether a driver who can’t get out of his car to undergo a field sobriety test should be driving at all, or how much Justice’s handicaps impaired his ability to brake the car and thus increased the risks of the collision with Griffith.
Justice didn’t even get a ticket for speeding. Prosecutors simply decided they were unlikely to be able to convict him of anything, and so they let him go. The only reason his name became public was that Griffith was a well-known and popular member of the community and pressure was put on authorities to investigate.
This is not often the case in Anchorage or elsewhere, which also helps to explain why on the national level about 50 percent of hit-and-run drivers who kill vulnerable road users never get caught, according to the Journal of Safety Research.
Collisions with vulnerable road users are inherently easier to get away with because running into soft bodies or easily smashed bikes does a lot less damage to your car or truck than colliding with another big hunk of metal.
The Alaska Department of Transportation later explained that the “bike route” signs scattered around Alaska’s largest municipality are largely meaningless. They are only put up to “redirect cyclists from freeways to alternate routes.”
According to agency spokeswoman Jill Reese, “bike routes are routes not facility type. Bike routes can point to any type of facility legal for bicycle use. The rules of the road are commonly the same as for motorists, but when directed to shared use pathways, the cyclist can choose either to be a vehicle on the road, shared use if need be, or can choose to be on the path, under pedestrian laws.”
There are no shared-use pathways along Brayton Drive where the boy was hit. There is plenty of room to paint a bike lane down one side of the one-way road, but DOT has shown no interest in doing so.
“While some cyclists desire a dedicated, protected bike-only lane, the 2021 AMATS (Anchorage Metropolitan Area Transportation Solutions) Nonmotorized plan went through a lot of community review and is the newest plan for facilities types in Anchorage,” Reese told road safety activist Marc Grober in an email. “The next steps are to seek funding for capital projects as much of this plan is not in place, but instead is a guide for future projects. Much of this plan is in accordance with the FHWA (Federal Highway Administration) 2019 Guide for Selection of Bicycle Facilities, which does not prioritize dedicated, protected bicycle lanes in all cases of a bike route. A FHWA chart is exported on page 198 of the AMATS NMP (Non-Motorized Plan) and recommends separated paths at higher volumes and speeds as a first choice, not necessarily bike lanes.”
All of which is the overblown, bureaucratic way of saying “we don’t care about taking reasonable actions that might protect children now because we’d prefer to wait for the perfect solution sometime far in the future” if there ever is to be a solution.
Against such a backdrop, it is fair to say that it is not by accident that American roads have become increasingly dangerous for vulnerable road users. They have become more dangerous by design and action, or inaction, on a variety of levels, and few seem to care.
Categories: Commentary, Media
