I believe we’re at a turning point. We can cede our streets to dangerous people and vehicles, or we can stand and fight to reclaim them.
This isn’t a post I wanted to make.
For years now I’ve debated internally (both in my mind and in talks with colleagues) about what to do with all the messages we receive from people who have been involved in collisions. Things like hit-and-runs, collisions between people biking and walking, scary road rage behavior (a type of mental collision), and so on. Unfortunately there are more of these than you think. That’s because unless it’s a fatality/very serious injury or it has some novel or interesting aspect to it, the police don’t put out statements on them. And the local media won’t pay attention for similar reasons.
Even here at BikePortland, we don’t always have the time or the inclination to make a full, Front Page story out of each collision story we receive — no matter how sad they are for those involved.
As a result, all these collisions, all this carnage, all these people’s lives changed forever, go unnoticed by the public, the media, policymakers and elected officials. This has nagged at me in these past few weeks more than ever as I’ve been forced to come to acknowledge that our roads are indeed becoming more dangerous for unprotected users.
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