Straight from the APD to you:
“Media Advisory: The final traffic fatality count for 2006 is 64.”
64 people seems to be a high price to pay for doing business on the city’s arterials. Someone had the foresight to bring this up last week in the comments, saying “Think about it. If 60 people had been shot, stabbed, died of bird flu, natural disaster, fires… we would be in shambles as a community doing everything we could at all costs to change the outcome in the coming year. But since it’s just traffic deaths… AH… we just chalk up another death as a ‘big city’ issue that’s no different than any other big city.”
But failing some sort of massive paradigm shift, as long as our transportation culture is an auto fetishist’s car worship cult, it seems like there’s little to be done.
This article appears in December 29 • 2006.