Off-duty police officer, mother of 2, killed helping elderly woman cross the street. Just another pedestrian killed.

I’ve always resisted the temptation to make this site a constant stream of stories about human tragedies. I did a series a few years ago on children being killed by drivers after a particular rash of jarring cases, but otherwise I’ve deferred. We could run a tragedy a day—after all, Americans kill tens of thousands of people each year with their automobiles—but I doubt it would move the cultural needle. As a society, we’ve long accepted a base level of carnage on our streets, the deaths broadly experienced as a random “accident” of circumstance instead of the statistically inevitable outcome of our chosen approach.

For example, the Kansas City Star recently reported on an incident—essentially routine—where a driver hit two people crossing at an intersection. The focus of the story was on the police report, which was written to cast blame on the two walkers because they had been drinking and were not crossing at a designated crosswalk. In reality, they had enjoyed a couple of drinks downtown, were going to catch an Uber, and were crossing at an intersection where one car was lawfully yielding to them. This is a story of reckless driving (and, in my opinion, reckless design), but it’s much easier to make it one of intoxication and poor judgement.

Looking at the well-worn path on the side of the street (stroad) where this incident occurred, it’s clear that the two victims here are not the first ones to attempt to cross at this intersection. When we say that engineers shouldn’t design streets, that our capital investment approach should begin with a humble observation of where people struggle, this is what we’re talking about. This isn’t difficult but, in most cases, we’re not even trying.

While the police were the villain in the Kansas City story, they are the hero in many others. Too often, we ask police officers to compensate for dangerous design with traffic enforcement. And this is dangerous itself. Along with domestic disturbances, routine traffic stops are the most dangerous type of incident police officers undertake. Many are killed on stroads each year, randomly struck by passing cars while doing things no more complicated than writing a speeding citation. It’s a tragic irony.

Then, this week, another tragedy, as reported by ABC News:

An off-duty sheriff’s detective was struck and killed by a car while she was in the middle of helping an elderly woman cross the street who had fallen in the middle of the road.

Amber Joy Leist, a 41-year-old mother of two sons aged 17 and 20 and a 12-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, had stopped her car in Valley Village, California, on Sunday morning at around 11 a.m. when she saw an elderly woman fall while she was crossing the street.

Leist parked her car near the intersection of Riverside Drive and Whitsett Avenue to help the fallen woman but was struck by an oncoming vehicle when she attempted to return to her car.

Leist was immediately taken to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.

An act of kindness as tender as it is human—helping a struggling elderly woman cross the street—ends with yet another death, another person needlessly run down in service of a system whose values are as ruthless as they are opaque.

Another glance at Google Streetview shows a design we’re all familiar with. That we’ve spent untold sums of money—certainly many trillions we’d love to have back—building places like these, adds to the tragedy.

That those places are enormously expensive to construct and maintain while simultaneously stifling land values in a development pattern that lacks financial productivity, adds to the tragedy.

That our taxes and debt are climbing, that we’re willing to centralize and distort our entire national economy, just to keep this all going, adds to the tragedy.

That Americans waste many hours of time each week driving around in environments like this, doing an activity shown to be incredibly stressful while allowing their bodies to unnaturally atrophy, all to obtain life’s essentials that our ancestors—humans from around the world for thousands of years—could have obtained with far less effort, adds to the tragedy.

That we design streets like this because the underlying math embedded in our approach values a dozen seconds of saved time over human life, adds to the tragedy.

That we rarely experience that theoretical time savings is less part of the tragedy and more like cosmic justice.

Or the ultimate farce.

Top image via Ian Valerio.

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