NYC startup founder Sophia D'Antoine dies after being struck crossing street
nypost.com
nypost.com
Traffic violence has become completely normalized, just the cost of doing business. You can constantly speed through school zones with no repercussions, especially if you cover your plate.
If you're looking to kill someone and get away with it, do it in your car.
This is perhaps more tragic since it’s the fault of bad infrastructure and broken justice system empowering narcissists and criminals
This case is a horrible tragedy and it's a farce that someone who kept breaking the law kept their license afterwards, but it's not evidence traffic violence is normalised. Just that people (rightly) treat accidental deaths as less of a big deal than deliberate ones.
If you mean that driving is too dangerous overall, then sorry, but I'd disagree with that. Not only do most people not get into accidents when driving or around cars, but there are plenty of things in life that are dangerous that kill a lot of people that we've accepted are tradeoffs for a more free society.
I’d probably wager that being a pedestrian is less safe than driving.
I remember hearing a statistic (I can't find the source yet so please treat it as unverified) that a non-trivial proportion of pedestrians that were run over were intoxicated (the pedestrians, not the drivers).
I'm not saying this to assign blame to one party or another, just to refute the simplistic statement that it's just the drivers' fault.
The problem is that if someone is killed, they aren’t around to argue their side of the story and most cases simply aren’t investigated.
But also, even if it is, this doesn't mean we should drive instead of walk to reduce our risk - it means everyone should drive less to reduce risk for everyone.
Everyone was very safe on foot, bikes and transit before there were so many cars. Cars made it dangerous to walk, so now everyone is in cars, which also makes driving more dangerous. Then people buy bigger cars that give them higher chances of survival in a crash at the great expense of everyone else involved, so everyone is buying bigger and bigger cars now.
The issue is that some places (like the US) are designed around cars rather than just treating them like another form of transport. Having shops and businesses miles from homes is bad design regardless of whether cars are a thing or not. Designing on the assumption every person will drive and having thousands of parking spaces is bad design for similar reasons.
The difference between driving and not driving is between going where the government deems it worth going/getting there in a far longer timespan and getting to wherever you want at roughly your own pace. The issues come from the assumption it's the only way to travel and societies designed around that idea.
This is leaving out a lot: your own pace is heavily impacted by traffic, the system is enormously expensive (around where I live, it’s tied with food as the second greatest household expense), and in many cities that freedom was constructed by removing other people’s freedom to have healthy neighborhoods.
Driving can seem like freedom but that’s because it’s heavily subsidized: not just for things like road infrastructure but also the less obvious things like not having to compensate the millions of people whose health is seriously impacted by car pollution or being allowed to carry grossly inadequate levels of insurance which mathematically ensures that the hundreds of thousands of people injured by cars every year will not be adequately compensated. That freedom is the illusion caused by shifting the costs to other people’s health and quality of life!
It's amazing that most people don't think this way: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
We have a lot of dumb laws on the books, but somehow we allow demonstrably reckless drivers to keep their license—sad times.
They invariably end up in places like this * , large multilane road with minimal pedestrian access and a park/school within whatever maximum statutory distance of the park/school. You never find them an actual neighborhood next to a school, because they wouldn't make money ...
* https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6680393,-73.9959523,3a,75y,3...
https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...
This person would likely be alive if the driver wasn't speeding. They were caught speeding in school zones many times.
We need to start enforcing speeding laws. You speed more than once, you don't drive for a few years minimum. You speed through a school zone multiple times, you never drive again.
We need self driving cars. They don't need to be better than the best possible human drivers; they just need to be a viable replacement for "normal" drivers, including and especially normal drivers at their own worst.
Once we have stuff like that, increased penalties for harms caused from manual driving make sense.
No matter how vigilant a pedestrian is, their life is still in the hands of drivers. Someone who repeatedly breaks laws that exist for pedestrian safety should be removed from the road before something like this happens.
if only he were younger so he could have his daughter or wife taken from him and suffer longer
there are no consequences for some of the most depraved clingers-on to the good will of everyone else
when will we make this world into one that isnt hostile to the living and favorable to mechanisms and predators
probably never because we allow ourselves to be tricked by them willingly over and over
i hate to say it but humanity needs to stop giving itself reasons for its own judgement of lack of merit. there is too much good in human history for the ignorant to destroy it like this in one swoop. don't be naive in handing the keys to the castle to an arbitrary person.