ON THE AVENUES: Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon (The Big Bang Remix).

Pedestrians being hit by cars is a car problem. Car congestion is a car problem. Noise and air pollution from car exhaust is a car problem. The solution is less space devoted to cars and fewer cars.
-- Momifornia on Twitter

Nawbany was awash in cascading waves of irony the past week, and seeing as we’re not the sort of city that appreciates the variety of honesty that irony elicits, my brief return from internal (infernal?) exile is merited.

According to reliable reports on social media, it appears that Mayor Jeff Gahan was involved in an automobile accident on Monday afternoon at the contested intersection of Klerner Lane and Mt. Tabor Road.

First and foremost, we believe no one was hurt. Had there been an injury, and if any of it had been relayed by the picked-over carcass of deceased local media, I would not discuss the accident in this space. 

So, disclaimers aside, it was reported that on Monday the armored mayoral SUV (Nawbany lacks Saudi-sized oil reserves, but galdurn it, we have a sewer utility cash cow) t-boned a smaller car, with a photo clearly showing the mayor talking on his cell phone, probably with Rudy Giuliani (or the city attorney, whichever one picked up first), and absent the pandemic face covering timorously beseeched by his safely captive city council.

The witness who broke the story added that the mayor then left the scene before police arrived.

Wait -- you may be asking, “forget bad driving, Roger, but why is the intersection contested”?

Thanks for asking.

Originally the mayor sought to place a roundabout at this precise location, as part of a barely plausible multi-million dollar “improvement” project for Mt. Tabor Road, which local residents spent something like five years contesting, at their own expense, accurately characterizing it as an expensive boondoggle, constructed in such a way as to attract even more speeding cut-through traffic in a residential area, thus contradicting the claims of proponents in City Hall (and nowhere else) that traffic would be slowed and calmed for all time.

These neighborhood advocates, those fated to live adjacent to the “improvements,” felt strongly that with increased traffic there’d be even more instances of vehicular mayhem, a prediction scornfully rejected by the mayor, who blamed partisan politics, and in essence asked residents whether they believed the mayoral clique or their own two eyes.

As documented during the past two years, and now proven in 2020 by the automobile-supremacist mayor himself, their own two eyes proved plenty accurate. 

 

Naturally the residents were never once asked whether they wanted road “improvements.” The project was imposed from above, by the elites.

Welcome to Nawbany, pilgrim -- and if you don’t have a car, you’re not really welcome at all. 

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In fact, as this baleful year of 2020 limps to the finish line, motor vehicles of all stripes are moving way too fast all over town.

In response, City Hall continues to insist with a straight face that we should believe the increasingly illusory, North Korean-style press releases, which breathlessly laud the unprecedented achievement of universal street grid calming and pervasive lawfulness, as achieved throughout the city by the shining wonder of perfect governance.

But I live on Spring Street, and can attest that these claims are utterly fictitious, or as my father might have put it, “bullshit.”

Apart from obvious examples like chronic speeding at all hours of the day, there’s the noisy and disruptive HyperCar auto polishing and sales lot located in my East Spring Street neighborhood, which in the beginning claimed it would be servicing cars only, and not selling cars, at least for a very long time, but forgot the promises almost immediately as city officials yawned, and currently has so many fancy souped-up race cars crammed into its lot that some of them must always be parked (illegally) on 13th Street, with HyperCars employees and customers getting their jollies by taking all these cars on cacophonous spins around the block, dozens of times each day, while shifting, revving, squealing tires, screeching and emitting bursts of metallic flatulence that I’m guessing combine to produce something akin to an orgasm.

As such, and in an instance of profound irony that comes close to matching the mayor’s Mt. Tabor mishap, on Thursday evening one of hyper-diaper’s cars parked illegally on 13th Street was creamed by a hit-and-run driver, who paused long enough for nearby residents to emerge from their homes and chase the fleeing driver to Market Street.

I considered risking bad karma by laughing my ass off, but didn't. A better response is crying in frustration at the perennial backwardness displayed by Nawbany.

Here we are in Midtown, supposedly a municipal showplace for genteel “blue” progressivism, and instead of urbanism we have hyperactive race cars on one side of Spring at 13th, and the failed candidate Oxendine’s clown-car discount funeral home on the other.

And our presumed neighborhood leaders? They’re AWOL, as always.

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What makes the irony of the mayor’s recent driver’s ed fender bender even more delicious is that it transpired in the yard of a neighborhood resident who helped leaded the opposition to the Mt. Tabor “improvement” project.

She heard the crash and snapped a photo of the two damaged vehicles, with unmasked mayor (literally and figuratively) standing in her yard. Upon publishing the photo of a public event that occurred in front of her house, the ruling elites circled the wagons and commenced slagging, leading to the usual drooling defenses of the mayor as a wonderful human being on a par with Gandhi, or perhaps even the departing humanitarian Donald Trump.

Pfui. It’s all irrelevant.

Again and again I’ve pointed out that quite a lot of New Albany’s foot dragging pertaining to complete streets, walkability and all-purpose urban modernity -- the city’s abject refusal to so much as try leveling the playing field via mobility solutions not reliant on internal combustion engines -- stems from the abysmal and persistent ignorance of elected and appointed public officials who, in effect, have neither been anywhere nor seen anything, and who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a book if the pages slapped them in the face like the palm fronds adorning their hard seltzers.

City Hall has willfully botched these equations ever since Gahan began consolidating power, because power in little-pond Nawbany is about campaign finance funding from pay-to-play skimming, the proceeds from which simply cannot be generated by walking or biking projects. Rather, automobile supremacy equals cash. It’s unfortunate, but true.

At least the mayor now has direct experience of what it’s like to run afoul of city streets he’s done so much to curate in his own image, and I can only hope that some sweet day he’ll take the debacle a step further and attempt to use one of his favored push-button (un)controlled urban crosswalks, with their tiny flashing yellow lights ignored as hot rods roar and tow trucks cruise at 60 mph on “calmed” stretches of Gahanesque speedways, learning in accordance with those of us who walk, and despairing of making it to the other side alive.

Maybe then, at last, he’d grasp the profound disconnect he has imposed on those without cars. Yes, it means he’d have to go out for a walk, and admittedly that’s about as unlikely as a Democratic Party grandee being spotted on a bicycle. But a boy can dream, especially when dreams are all we have in the complete and unmitigated absence of principle.

The errant politician probably won't have to answer for it; his handlers will shelter him, and the super-duper-hyper-racecar place will deny that it creates daily mayhem on residential streets, but I'm just happy with any dent, real or metaphorical, placed in our local default of automobile supremacy.

Maybe we’ll get a clue, some day. After all, even a stopped pre-digital clock is right twice each day.

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November 7: On (or off) the Avenues, there's got to be a morning after. 

October 8: ON THE AVENUES: I'm voting for Biden. Otherwise it's Trump's burgeoning fascist GOP death cult. 

October 1: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to the last will and testament of NA Confidential. 

September 24: ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss. 

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

Examples from the News and Tribune illustrate how "Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers."

Read the headline again.

How Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers

It has been my contention for quite some time that the News and Tribune is a prime and persistent practitioner of this bias. These lapses may or may not be intentional. They just are.

First, the article explaining why.

I urge you to suspend your own biases for just a moment and read what Richard Florida has to say. After the article's conclusion, I'll paste recent examples from Facebook of the News and Tribune's (at best) inconsistent scattershot approach -- at times proper, at others ridiculous.

Note that the research referred to by Florida describes "pedestrians and cyclists collectively as 'vulnerable road users,' or VRUs."

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How Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

Safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars. Research suggests they’re right.

Since 2013, deaths among pedestrians and cyclists on U.S. roads have risen by nearly 30 percent and 14 percent respectively. Yet the public reaction to this spike in deaths has been fairly muted. Why?

One possible reason: road safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars. A paper published earlier this year in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board offers proof that they’re right.

snip

News stories overwhelmingly (but often subtly) shift blame onto pedestrians and cyclists, the researchers found. “Coverage almost always obscures the public health nature of the problem by treating crashes as isolated incidents, by referring to crashes as accidents, and by failing to include input from planners, engineers, and other road safety experts,” they write.

Despite its suggestion of inevitability and faultlessness, ‘‘accident’’ was the most commonly used term for crashes, occurring in 47 percent of sentences in articles’ body text and 11 percent of titles across the sample. News reports were also much more likely to use phrases like “a pedestrian or cyclist was hit by a car” instead of “a driver hit a pedestrian.”

(Journalists, it should be noted, have legal obligations to avoid placing blame on either party without an official determination by police or other authorities.)

Sentence structure and word choice matter. “A pedestrian was hit by a car” centers the victim getting hit—and as the authors note, “[p]eople tend to place greater blame on the focus of the sentence,” i.e., the victim. This kind of language de-emphasizes the agency of the driver. Additionally, many news reports used what the authors call “object-based language.” They explain:

Reports may describe a vehicle doing something rather than a driver (‘‘a car jumped the curb’’ versus ‘‘a driver drove over the curb’’). Object-based language obscures the driver’s role in the incident, thereby reducing blame. Observers tend to refer to people in cars using ‘‘object-based’’ language (e.g., car, traffic) but typically describe people walking or using bicycles with ‘‘human-based’’ language (e.g., bicyclist, pedestrian, person). This practice assigns unequal agency among the two groups.

Across the 200 articles that the researchers analyzed, 65 percent of sentences did include an agent—but that agent was the VRU in a full 74 percent of cases. And when a driver or vehicle was mentioned, sentences used object-based language (“A car hit a cyclist”) 81 percent of the time. “In other words, sentences overwhelmingly referred to an inanimate object as the actor [in a crash] rather than a driver,” the authors write, adding: “The use of object-based language was particularly jarring in the case of hit-and-run collisions where ‘the vehicle drove away.’’’

More than a quarter of the articles did not mention the driver at all, and some seemed to blame the victim for “darting” in front of a car.

News reports rarely mention the broader context behind car crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists. Safety advocates are right to be alarmed. Last year, more than 6,000 pedestrians were killed on roadways, up 3.4 percent from the previous year and the highest number since 1990. The fatality rate for cyclists jumped even higher (by 6.3 percent). This was during a period when overall traffic deaths (that is, including drivers) actually fell by 2.4 percent.

Very few of the articles in the sample brought up the role of road design or framed crashes as a public health issue, and none quoted experts knowledgeable in urban planning or traffic engineering. “This pattern of coverage likely contributes to the limited public outcry about pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities,” the authors observe.

Journalists are falling into common linguistic traps rather than consciously victim-blaming. But the problem is exacerbated by the shrinking of local newsrooms, so there are fewer seasoned reporters out there covering our deadly roads.

There are several steps journalists can take to cover road crashes more accurately. First and foremost, they should avoid referring to them as “accidents” and use “crash” or “collision” instead. “Because of the undue neutrality that ‘accident’ conveys, the editors of the British Medical Journal banned the use of the word” in 2001, as the paper notes.

Journalists should also be mindful of the tendency to blame the victim and to attribute agency to inanimate objects (cars). They should not let drivers off the hook, especially in cases of hit-and-run deaths. And they should look for patterns in pedestrian and cyclist deaths and contextualize their stories accordingly. Articles should probe issues such as road design, local failure to act on traffic safety initiatives (for example, Vision Zero policies), and broader public health. Experts can be helpful by acting as a resource for local news outlets covering this topic.

Ultimately, the study finds evidence for what many urbanists and safety advocates have been saying: The media is complicit in the growing American crisis of death by vehicle drivers. Better reporting practices are an indirect but important way to get to Vision Zero.

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Before listing examples of muddled News and Tribune usage, allow me to offer all requisite condolences to the families of the child and woman from Pekin, both killed by drivers the past month. Anyway you cut it, they're awful losses.

Permit me also to add that one way to help avoid future occurrences is to be precise in the way we refer to the situation, something the newspaper currently is struggling to achieve. Without knowing what exactly we're talking about, how can we move forward to make it better?

As an aside, what does the woman being a transient have to do with anything?

So: Crashes or accidents?

The newspaper gets it right ... often, though not always.

Hit by a car, or hit by a driver? Interesting that in the case of two walkers being struck, both were hit by a car, not a driver. But twice when two vehicles were involved in a mishap, drivers/humans are mentioned as having been involved.

When I brought this up on Facebook, something on the order of 15 comments were hurled at me to the effect that walkers are always to blame because they shouldn't be located where drivers are operating.

However the way I can recall being taught in driver's ed, the driver bears a responsibility to be proactive above and beyond all minimum standards. Now it's almost never the driver's fault; that's not the newspaper's doing, of course, but there's a great deal of complicity on the part of the nation's prosecutors, perhaps owing to an inadequate statutory structure.

Back to Florida's case. When's the last time you heard anyone locally -- newspaper, prosecutor, police, elected officials -- do any of this?

"They should look for patterns in pedestrian and cyclist deaths and contextualize their stories accordingly. Articles should probe issues such as road design, local failure to act on traffic safety initiatives (for example, Vision Zero policies), and broader public health. Experts can be helpful by acting as a resource for local news outlets covering this topic."

Our milieu at present is a sort of societal imperialism afforded by automobile centrism. As I've noted previously, driving is the last acceptable vestige of such imperialism in American life. Society properly frowns on the "N" word, sexual harassment and ableism, to name a few.

But we still willfully and almost proudly choose our words to absolve drivers who kill walkers, bikers and other non-automotive users of our planet.

Where does it say that drivers have MORE rights than non-drivers? Was that in the Declaration of Independence somewhere, and I missed it?

This narcissistic imperialism is the way most of us treat the undisputed hegemony of cars, isn't it?

My point, then: If media generally (and I believe lazily) phrases driver and walker/cyclist interaction as the former's interests invariably outweighing the latter's, then at the very least media is doing nothing to help resolve the problem.

The preceding placards clearly indicate that the News and Tribune could do better in every way cited by Florida's report.

Whether it cares to do so is something I wouldn't be willing to bet actually happens.

Blaming the victim in car crashes: "Journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists."

Hello ... THUMP THUMP ... is this thing on?

Bill, Susan, Jason, Chris, et al ... this is the Columbia Journalism Review speaking, not some foaming-at-the-mouth Baylorite radical anarchist trying to take your cars away from you.

When covering car crashes, be careful not to blame the victim, by Meg Dalton

Please feel free to click through and peruse the entire piece ... and then can you explain what you're doing to cure this bias at the News and Tribune?

PEDESTRIAN (AND CYCLIST) BLAME is the predominant framework in a lot of news coverage, according to Angie Schmitt, an editor of Streetsblog, a news site about transportation reform. Journalists will report that the victim “darted” into traffic, a verb you see almost exclusively in stories about traffic deaths. Or they’ll emphasize that the victim was jaywalking, texting while crossing the street, or not wearing a helmet.

“The helmet fixation redirects attention away from the overarching problem of vehicular violence, assisting in its denial,” according to a report released last month by the University of Heidelberg. Even in cases when a helmet would not have prevented death, the absence of one is usually noted, as in The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s 2009 coverage of the death of a young cyclist, Sylvia Bingham. Wearing a helmet would not have made a difference in the outcome of the crash, according to Bingham’s doctor. But the reporter, in the paragraph immediately following that statement, noted Bingham wasn’t wearing a helmet and included two additional incidents in which cyclists lacked them.

Journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists.

Whether it’s speeding, running a red light, texting, or just a general lack of attentiveness, journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists in these situations. These oversights can be startling. For instance, local television station KTSM solely focused on the victim following a fatal 2016 crash in El Paso, Texas. Eduardo Dill attempted to cross a street in his neighborhood in his electric wheelchair when a driver struck him. The police cited Dill’s “failure to yield the right of way” as the contributing factor in the crash, and so did the station’s story.

In reporters’ defense, Schmitt says, crash information usually comes from flawed police reports, which inform the news coverage. Those reports tend to reflect a survivor’s bias since, in crashes with fatal outcomes, the pedestrian or cyclist is not around to share their side of the story. Instead, the reports are usually based on a single eyewitness—the driver.

They're not car "accidents. They're car "crashes."

The gist is changing the way we use language, so as to change the way we view reality.

Families for Safe Streets has launched a campaign to get people to say “crash” instead of “accident.” They want to emphasize that many, if not most, traffic fatalities are preventable—not inevitable occurrences.

It would help. It also would be beneficial for our process of issuing drivers licenses to require prospective drivers to walk a few blocks in this or any other city, just so it can be seen how badly we drive. I don't exclude myself from this assessment; I've had my share of lapses. Perhaps it's of less significance in the countryside, where the odds of causing harm to another are less.

But here in the city, speed and recklessness kill. Can we be honest about it with the language we use? And, shouldn't we harness better design to discourage the likelihood of crashes, accidents, and general auto-borne mayhem?

Why We Say 'Car Accident,' and Why We Need to Stop: The term suggests fatal crashes are inevitable and beyond our control—they're not, by Sarah Goodyear (City Lab)

... Most people in the United States are compelled by the design of the places where they live to drive nearly everywhere. They are locked into a system where the car is a required tool for fully enfranchised citizenship—the only sensible and convenient way to get to work, to the store, to the doctor’s office, to school.

Anyone who has driven more than a few thousand miles in his or her lifetime has had the unnerving experience of a near miss. Get going fast enough, which is precisely what cars enable you to do, and even a momentary lapse of attention can have you drifting onto the shoulder, or making an unsafe turn. Drive hour after hour, day after day, year after year, and the potential for error mounts.

On some level, we all know that driving is a dangerous activity, probably the most dangerous thing that the average person does in a lifetime. We know that every time we turn the key in the ignition, we are powering up a machine that gives us a stupendous and potentially deadly power. But most of us are in no position to choose another mode of transportation. Most of us must accept the responsibility of piloting that machine as the baseline price of admission to America.