Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (14 page)

Cynthia Brock, a fifty-three-year-old resident of Costa Mesa, was the first driver to encounter the mattress, dropped by an unknown driver in one of the freeway's left lanes. The mattress caught
beneath the front end of Brock's 1982 Toyota Celica, which skidded out of control and slammed into the concrete center divider, then slid to a stop sideways in the fast lane. A Ford van immediately broadsided Brock's helpless car, striking the driver's side full on. The van driver, whom the CHP identified as nineteen-year-old Sherwin Ali Sabzerou of Irvine, California, managed to pull his van to the shoulder five hundred feet up the road, then allegedly fled the scene on foot. Meanwhile, the van's impact pushed Brock's Celica into the path of a 1999 Toyota sedan, which rear-ended her, spinning the car around so that it was facing the wrong way. Then it was struck head-on by a 1995 Honda.

All the vehicles were badly damaged, but Brock's looked like it had been run through a junkyard compactor after four collisions with cars and one with concrete. The driver's door hung by a thread. The Toyota's roof had been crushed and the front end accordioned. The wheels hung askew, and broken glass had been sprayed everywhere. Brock died before the CHP arrived. Two occupants of the other cars were hospitalized as well, with both expected to recover.

Police found Sabzerou at his home and arrested him on suspicion of drunk driving. He was later charged by prosecutors with hit-and-run causing injury or death and vehicular homicide. However, the ultimate culprit who caused it all, the person who dropped the mattress, has not been identified.

Objects dumped on freeways are a daily occurrence throughout California and the nation. The California Department of Transportation maintains storage yards filled with retrieved roadway debris and maintains special crews to work with the CHP to pick up objects on the freeways, a chore that is among the most high-risk jobs in town, because there is never a time of day or night when traffic is not present. Toilets, televisions, flat tires, chairs, suitcases, refrigerators, and all sorts of bedding, including mattresses,
turn up regularly on freeways, where speeding vehicles attempt to dodge them until they can be cleared. There's also a chronic problem with debris left over from scavenging gangs, who steal miles of copper wire from freeway lighting, signals, signage, and even the metal embedded in the roads for traffic sensors and water pumps, leaving traffic hazards in their wake, costing the state tens of millions of dollars to replace.
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It's a constant game of chicken, of taking away vital parts of the freeway system and dumping unwanted trash in its place, turning engineering marvels into minefields where even a mattress can have the effect of a bomb.

As with backup cameras, forward-looking collision avoidance systems already exist and could have prevented this entire fatal pinball machine effect. Airliners have had them for decades—the result of painstaking crash investigations that proved they were needed and would be worth the cost. But that's air travel. The mattress would not be so painstakingly investigated. The careless, clueless killer who left it on the freeway would bear no consequences. The mandate, the public pressure, the will to provide cars with the same protection that airliners have, doesn't exist. Even the oceangoing shipping containers filled with sneakers or lawn mowers or scrap metal enjoy more protection from damage than the containers that carry people—that carry us and those we love. Cars are different.

A
nd so ended one day of traffic carnage. Every day begins and ends the same as February 13, with ruin and road closures, the consequences of one day's wreck carrying over into the next morning. (A list of the day's crashes can be found in the Appendix.)

The sheer volume of one day's worth of car death and injury forms a kind of protection for even the most reckless drivers. There are just too many of them. Most drivers speed. Phone
use behind the wheel is endemic. Only a tiny fraction of drunk drivers get caught. Imposing true and reliable accountability for putting others at risk on streets and highways would be like policing a tidal wave. There simply is no money, manpower, or public demand for fully investigating car deaths with the same vigor applied to aviation or food safety or epidemics.

Two deaths from Ebola in 2014 sparked a national panic. One German airliner crashed purposely by its copilot in 2015—a truly unique event—generated worldwide discussion of how to build fail-safe systems that would prevent that most rare of events from ever happening again. It is a curious truth of human behavior that the rare risks—the ones least likely to harm us—are the ones we most fear and try hardest to conquer. This reaction is instinctive rather than reflective. The far greater risks we face daily, such as driving fast and distracted on crowded freeways, are perceived as normal and routine, becoming functionally imperceptible to the brain unless we consciously dwell on them. Just as aberration pushes us to overestimate risk, habit pushes us to underestimate it wildly. One car death every fifteen minutes, and one crash every three seconds, become little more than white noise to us. We couldn't get in our cars every day otherwise. And we certainly couldn't cruise down 65-mile-per-hour freeways with our babies strapped into car seats that offer little protection above 35 miles per hour. Habit conquers all.

There are also practical barriers when it comes to holding bad drivers accountable for their risky and poor choices. Truly enforcing the rules of the road with our current infrastructure and cars poses far too great a burden to police, beyond attempts to round up and punish drunk drivers with occasional and controversial checkpoints that rarely lead to arrests (although they may have a deterrent effect).

When the authorities try to crack down on sober motor violence, the efforts are even more controversial and are often met
with community uncertainty, even outrage. When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk on this very morning of February 13 (she was seriously but not fatally injured, one leg badly mangled when she was pinned by the bus), the
New York Daily News
decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city's bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city's new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.”
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The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce
misdemeanor
charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way. The offenders were not just run-of-the-mill drivers hurrying to work and succumbing to regrettable, though perhaps understandable, human failings. These were professional bus drivers with a $67,444 annual base salary plus generous overtime,
³⁹
whose job includes, above all other considerations, a duty for safe, alert, and lawful driving, in a city with more pedestrians crossing streets than any other municipality in America. Yet even these halting attempts to hold drivers accountable for the street injury and death they inflict on innocents are met with resistance and doubt.

In Springfield, Oregon, later in February 2015, a sixty-eight-year-old man was accused of running a red light on State Route 126 (which serves as Main Street in Springfield), killing three children and critically injuring their mother as they crossed. After months of soul searching, investigation, and dithering, the authorities found the driver was neither drunk, nor speeding, nor on his cell phone when he decimated a family, and so no charges of any kind would be filed.
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It was just an accident, the local newspaper
editorialized, in support of the official findings, an accident on a street with homes and families and a forty-mile-per-hour speed limit, in a world where most vehicle-pedestrian collisions at that speed bring catastrophic results. The two cardinal rules of driving—stop for red lights and stop for kids—had been broken by a driver who could not or would not behave as if he was in charge of a machine as deadly as a gun, and that every decision or incident of thoughtlessness behind the wheel really was a matter of life and death. We have trivialized the dangers and risks of driving, just as we have trivialized the inevitable, fatal results. The state newspaper editorialized, after much hand-wringing, that “‘accident' is the only way to accurately describe what unfolded at that intersection . . . Just a tragic accident.”
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In a way, such antipathy makes perfect sense, because a terrible truth lies at the heart of our star, the car: the American system of roads and wheels is performing exactly as it was designed to perform.

Charles Marohn, who identifies himself as a “recovering traffic engineer” and who founded the Minnesota-based non-profit group Strong Towns, publicly rails against his profession for knowingly designing traffic systems where deadly interactions between cars, pedestrians, and intersections are inevitable.
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Who, Marohn asks, is most responsible for that fatal crash in Oregon? Is it the driver who was momentarily inattentive and mistook a red light for green? Or should blame be laid before the engineers who make residential streets with design speeds 20 or 30 miles per hour faster than the posted speed limit? Or the policy makers who allow posted speed limits high enough in residential areas to be catastrophic every time a pedestrian collision occurs? The street where the three children died carries four lanes of traffic with a center turn lane—a design that invites risky speeds in a family neighborhood.

“Speed is seductive,” Marohn observes. “We engineer for high performance. Can we then blame drivers for taking advantage of that engineering? We know they will. . . . This is indicative of our incoherent approach to streets and roads.”

Marohn argues that the distinction between streets and roads has become blurred over time, a confusion at the heart of motor violence. Streets are supposed to be platforms for creating wealth, he argues, while roads exist to get people from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible.

Great streets thrive on complexity, which today can encompass the safe (and slow) mix of pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses, trolleys, delivery vans, schoolchildren, shoppers, business people—the classic Main Street mix. Think of any street where you love to walk or window-shop or sightsee, where you slow or stop your car to turn and park and no one angers, honks, or glares, and you get the idea. Great streets build business, society, prosperity, and strong towns.

Roads serve a completely different purpose. They do not tolerate complexity. Think of freeways. They have barriers that prevent turning. They have no traffic signals or crosswalks. Pedestrians and bicycles are banned. There are no roadside attractions to park and visit without getting off the freeway first. Roads serve the simple purpose of taking us and our stuff somewhere far and fast. They can take you to streets, but they can't
be
streets.

“We need both,” Marohn says. “What we don't need is something that tries to be both.”

Yet the modern landscape is filled with thoroughfares trying to be both. Marohn coined the useful term “stroad” to describe these often unsightly hybrids that arose during the age of postwar suburban sprawl and the car-centric traffic engineering philosophy that accompanied it. The fatal crash in Oregon took place on such a stroad—a conveyance that has the worst attributes of street and road while performing neither function well. Stroads offer commerce
without walkability—fast-food drive-throughs, strip malls, big-box stores—but they usually lack the larger economic payoffs that great streets generate. At the same time, the turning, parking, and crosswalks bolted onto these fast, wide stroads slow down the Point-A-to-B traffic flow, imposing the cost of delay on drivers, encouraging them to speed even more when they are moving.

This uncomfortable mix makes stroads the scene of many crashes, particularly those involving cars hitting pedestrians. The official response—when there is any at all—is usually to armor up the roads with guardrails or barriers or, as in the Oregon case, to propose stepped-up police patrols. Rarely is the obvious and only effective solution imposed, Marohn says: making sure cars can't go faster than a statistically safe 20 miles per hour where significant numbers of pedestrians are present. That means having pure streets and pure roads, with hybrids taken out of the mix.

The problem is that stroads have become an enormous part of the American landscape. Converting them one way or the other would be a long and arduous project—and a controversial one. Pushing this viewpoint has turned Marohn from insider to political pariah in his own Minnesota community. His current cause there is to generate support to turn a disused highway that cuts through the center of his town of Brainerd into a bike and pedestrian-friendly great street. But too many people associate getting somewhere fast with prosperity, he says, ignoring the evidence that true streets—slow and safe streets—play an important role in creating wealth, and do so better than stroads.

“Until we can change that attitude,” he says, “it is inevitable that we continue to have tragedy.”

T
oday's combination of powerful cars, street and traffic engineering, and human behavior is designed to produce 36,000
deaths and 2.5 million injuries every year. That toll is not some unintended by-product of our personal transportation choices but the predictable and expected result of the design choices—and design defects—built into our transportation system and our human selves. Cars are convenient, fast, and mostly far bigger and more powerful than they really need to be, given that they drive around with only one person and mostly empty seats and cargo space 75 percent of the time. A death every fifteen minutes is part of the price tag for that convenience, size, and speed.