Hello. They're crashes. Don’t call them accidents anymore. Thank you.

Janette Sadik-Khan, author of Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, tweeted a link to this article.

It's no "accident" that we've excused crashes for decades. Our word choices matter – let's adopt the language of life.

"Roadway fatalities are soaring at a rate not seen in 50 years, resulting from crashes, collisions and other incidents caused by drivers."

Words indeed matter, as when my council representative imagines he belongs to a "progressive" political party.

It’s No Accident: Advocates Want to Speak of Car ‘Crashes’ Instead, by Matt Richtel (New York Times)

Roadway fatalities are soaring at a rate not seen in 50 years, resulting from crashes, collisions and other incidents caused by drivers.

Just don’t call them accidents anymore.

That is the position of a growing number of safety advocates, including grass-roots groups, federal officials and state and local leaders across the country. They are campaigning to change a 100-year-old mentality that they say trivializes the single most common cause of traffic incidents: human error.

“When you use the word ‘accident,’ it’s like, ‘God made it happen,’ ” Mark Rosekind, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said at a driver safety conference this month at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“In our society,” he added, “language can be everything.”

Almost all crashes stem from driver behavior like drinking, distracted driving and other risky activity. About 6 percent are caused by vehicle malfunctions, weather and other factors.

Team Gahan's walkability gap (3 of 3): "A Playbook on the Politics of Better Streets." WE NEED IT.

Previously at NAC:

Get your copy now: "Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution."

Sadik-Khan makes two points that Team Gahan probably won't ever grasp: Transportation is multi-modal by definition, and restoring streets as a means of transit by all users need not be expensive.

But this is precisely why any future effort aimed at walkability in New Albany is dead to the mayor if it can be done inexpensively.

How can Jeff Gahan fund his election campaigns via efficiency of expenditure?

You need grease. Lots and lots of grease.

A Playbook on the Politics of Better Streets, by Richard Florida (City Lab)

In conversation with former New York City transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

 ... In her new book Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution—written with her longtime colleague and chief media strategist Seth Solomonow—Sadik-Khan tells the story of how she made it happen, offering a roadmap for making cities and neighborhoods safer, more sustainable, and more connected. And she argues this can be done without spending huge sums of money. By emphasizing fast, easy-to-implement, “do-it-yourself” solutions, Sadik-Khan makes the case that being smart and creative—not having access to a hefty budget—matters most.

The crux of it:

Biking is transportation. Walking is transportation. Buses are transportation. Where bikes are perceived as a nuisance it’s often just a symptom of outdated street designs, which ultimately serve no one well. All these modes can play well together if they’re not forced to fight over the scraps of road left over after room is carved out for cars. Reclaiming road space for bikes, pedestrians, and buses isn’t a mere amenity, it’s an infrastructure and economic investment whose effects are felt far beyond the lane. So if you want better streets for everyone, you can start by building a bike lane.

Get your copy now: "Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution."

"If you can change the street, you can change the world."

Someone tell the mayor, but yell really loudly; he's a few stories underground in the down-low bunker. The book is Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow.

Janette Sadik-Khan's homepage includes views of before/after street transformations.

Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved the bottom line of businesses.

I reiterate my previous call: If Gahan has no intention of doing it, I'm ready to start painting streets.

Streetfight Offers Vision to Reshape Cities (Destinations Booksellers)

Janette Sadik-Khan is one of the world’s foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation. She served as New York’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, overseeing historic changes to New York City’s streets – closing Broadway to cars in Times Square, building nearly four hundred miles of bike landes, and creating more than sixty plazas citywide. She, along with colleague Seth Solomonow, provide case studies of how cities and/or activists can make city streets safer and more accommodating to multiple uses.

If you’re a fan of protected bike lanes and road diets, here’s a manual of successful procedures taken from real life.

Say the word "innovation" in New Albany ...

... and they generally think you said "syncopation," so they start dancing the Charleston -- say, wasn't flapper dancing a Bicentennial showcase event?

"If it works, keep it" and "it's all I've ever known and so I'm terrified" are two very different things. As I reminded Bob Caesar last week, it isn't like his long reign as arbiter of all that's good and decent downtown let to streets paved with gold (those turned out to be the ones leading to his domicile in Silver Hills.

No, it took different people, different money and different ways of thinking about development to so much as take the hesitant baby steps of recent years. When you read the first two comments in the discussion below, you see ideas -- streets comprise a real estate portfolio, and that parks needn't be big and expensive to be desirable -- that fully qualify as the AntiCaesar.

Just get out of the way, Bob. Your time has passed, and we must adapt and experiment now if we're too have any hope of surviving the effects of the bridges and tolling regime that you, yourself, tragically joined in imposing.

Dynamic Duos: Michael Bloomberg And Janette Sadik-Khan On The Future Of Walking, Biking, And Driving

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor
Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, Department of Transportation

Sadik-Khan: The streets in a city like New York--6,300 miles of streets--it's the largest real estate portfolio the city has. So we have to make it more efficient. That's why designing in bike lanes, bus lanes, new capacity on the seven-line [subway] extension--it's all about using that existing resource, but looking at it differently.

Bloomberg: And it's not just roads. It's parks. With our PlaNYC, a park for everyone within 10 minutes was our [goal]; to get that, you have to take schoolyards and convert them into parks in the off-hours, simply because there's no room to go build new parks in the dense parts of our city. There are a lot of those kinds of things, and they impact the economy, they impact the psyche of the people who live here, they make the city more attractive.