Today’s Headlines

  • Pelosi: Dems Could Work With Trump on Infrastructure Next If He Keeps Word on DACA (Fox News)
  • New Yorker Looks at the Damage Cars Cause, Including to Drivers Who Unintentionally Kill Others
  • Baltimore Latest City to Worry If It’s Bike-Friendly Enough for Amazon (Sun)
  • Related: Baltimore Sun Columnist Takes Larry Hogan to Task for Massive Highway Expansion
  • Meanwhile: Seattle Times Columnist Exposes Region’s All-Powerful Transit Lobby
  • In a Few Years, Boston Could Get Transit Pass That Includes Bike-Share, Ride-Hail, and More (Globe)
  • With WMATA in Death Spiral, National Zoo Asks to Build More Parking (Biz Journal via GGW)
  • Judge Derails Last-Ditch Effort of Purple Line Opponents to Save the Trees, Stop the Rail (WaPo)
  • Washington Post Reviews the Four Different Dockless Bike-Share Operators in DC
  • Kansas City Suburb Calls Bikes “Nuisance,” Requires Riders to Dismount (KCTV)
  • Southeasterner

    The New Yorker is still making the horrible generalization that traffic fatalities are related to “accidents” when the numbers they quote are primarily associated to fatalities caused by drunk, distracted, sleepy, and poor driving behavior. Hardly accidents.

    In terms of the “poor woman” who plowed over and killed a child on a road and has to live with the consequences, the article says nothing about the factors that led to the child’s death and the failure of traffic engineering, speed regulation/enforcement, and safety design. It’s all just an “accident.”

  • AMH

    She was allegedly obeying the 45mph speed limit, but that’s much too fast for a street where people live and children play.

    Notwithstanding all the contributing factors, the piece focuses on the effect of these incidents on those responsible, and includes an excellent quote from Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford: “The conscious choice to impose a risk—even permissible risk, as in the case of driving—opens a person up to moral liability.” This is something that my parents hammered into me when I was learning to drive. Practically no one takes the grave responsibility of driving as seriously as they should.