In the blink of an eye

Last week on Tuesday afternoon I got an email at work informing Cleveland Clinic employees that there had been a serious automobile crash at the intersection of Carnegie and E. 105th and it was causing traffic delays in the area of the Clinic campus. At the end of the afternoon I left work and, as I do every work day, walked across that intersection on the way to my parking garage. There I saw two very damaged vehicles. I also saw that traffic on Carnegie was very backed up.

I walked the rest of the way to the garage, took the elevator to the roof (the 9th level of the garage), and was surprised and dismayed by the sight that greeted me as I completed the walk to my car. Cars waiting to exit the garage were backed up all the way to the roof! I'd never seen anything like it. After I got into my car it soon became apparent that the line of cars was basically not moving at all. I began to wonder how long it would take me to get out of the garage. A half hour? An hour? And I began to feel very irritated.

Looking at the faces of the other drivers I could see from my vantage point, it was clear I was not alone in feeling irritated.

But then a thought came to me. I was going to be delayed in leaving work. It was annoying, but it wasn't anything more than annoying. It was a very minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. There was no reason for me to let it ruin my day. The people who were in that crash? Their days had really been ruined. A delay in leaving work was really not that big a deal. I put some calming music on my car stereo and basically just chilled out for the rest of the wait, which ended up being a little more than half an hour in length.

Not surprisingly, I observed that a lot of the other drivers were not nearly as chill. There were some angry faces and gestures when people disagreed on whose turn in line it was. Of course, we all see this all the time on our journeys by automobile.

I later learned that a 49 year old woman had been killed in the crash. The crash was caused by a man speeding and running a red light.

Later last week, Karyn had a scary incident when she was driving and had to swerve to avoid someone who was... speeding and running a red light. She related to me how the driver had been going at least 50 mph in a 35 zone and had sped through the intersection seconds after the light had changed to green in Karyn's direction.

It really puts things in perspective, doesn't it? Maybe we shouldn't let being stuck in traffic bother us so much. It could be a lot worse.

And it occurred to me that there's a connection. We've created this society where the ability to speedily get from point A to point B in an automobile often takes precedence over almost everything else. And so we feel entitled to that ability to speedily get from point A to point B in our automobiles. And so when something interferes with that ability we tend to get frustrated and angry. And so also some among us feel so entitled to that ability to speedily get from point A to point B that we take risks and skirt or ignore rules - and horrific injuries and deaths are the result.

It's absolutely crazy if you really think about it. Automobiles are deadly weapons. And so many people are so neglectful of the responsibility that should come with operating such a deadly weapon. A human life is an incredibly precious thing. How could saving a few seconds on your commute possibly be worth risking ending a life?

I've seen many times, in gun control arguments, that when someone in favor of stricter gun control brings up the fact that guns kill over 30,000 people per year in the United States, someone will counter with that fact that cars also kill over 30,000 people per year, so should we have car control, they ask rhetorically?

The obvious response is that those deaths are an unfortunate side effect of the primary purpose of cars, transportation, whereas causing death is the primary purpose of a gun. But over the last few years I've become inclined to say that actually yes, we do need better car control.

It's absurd the extent to which our society has prioritized fast automobile travel over so many other things that are so much more important. We know for a fact that faster speeds lead to more deaths, and yet we keep raising speed limits on highways. We know that we could make our roads safer with speeding and red light cameras, and yet here in Cleveland we've done away with those cameras. We know that SUVs are much more likely to kill pedestrians than are normal cars, and yet bigger and deadlier SUVs continue to increase their share of the auto market. (I want to give a shout out to my friend Angie Schmitt who has done a lot to raise my, and hopefully a lot of other people's, awareness on these issues with her writing on the website StreetBlog - here's a good post about SUVs, for example.)

Not to mention texting while driving...

What can we do about all this? Raising awareness can only do so much. There's probably some element of human nature that causes that impatience in traffic that most of feel, but it's something that has undoubtedly been amplified by the structure of the society in which we live, a structure that was created by choices people made over the years. The way things are is not the way things have to be. A functional society does not require over 30,000 traffic-related deaths per year. If commercial airline travel was as dangerous as automobile travel, the airlines would go out of business because people would be too afraid to get on planes. And yet with cars we just take it for granted.

A woman died next to my workplace last week because someone flouted the responsibility of handling an automobile and it was barely a blip in the news because it happens all the time. Something to think about the next time you feel annoyed about being stuck in traffic.