Driving Mad

February 24, 2011

Driving Mad

notemily:

Driving her kids to school, a South Carolina woman, Amy Lynn Stewart, encountered a group of teens walking in the middle of the road. She honked but they would not get out of the way, so she plowed into them, hitting four. They were 12, 13, 13, and 14-years-old. “I wanted to knock some sense into them,” she would tell the police. Four victims were treated at the scene. One was taken to a hospital.

At that intersection, there are no sidewalks. All over America, there are many roads without sidewalks. Many communities are built just for the car. Lawns, often vast, encroach right to the curbs. 307 million Americans own about 150 million cars. Entire blocks are reserved for parking garages. Walking on a road shoulders, one can feel like a vagrant or a prowling criminal.

My parents grew up in Beaumont, Texas, a town of no sidewalks and plenty of strip malls. As a kid, visiting, I found the lack of sidewalks extremely strange. Where are people supposed to walk? On the street?

The rest of the linked post has some ableism going on and other things that gave me pause, so warning for that if you click through. But I’m always really grateful for the sidewalks in Milwaukee. We might be just a mid-size city without an Ikea, but dammit, we have sidewalks and a city bus system.

It’s really too bad that the post has that random “people want to be disabled so they can get better parking!!!” in the middle (I stopped reading then). When I was making the Record of the Dead, it was disturbing how often in the US I’d read cases of people who were using a wheelchair struck by a car while trying to get around because there were just no sidewalks. In one case two women were killed in the same intersection over the course of a month.

I cannot cope in areas without sidewalks. :(

Yes to all of this.

A related problem: there’s a school near my house. Sometimes, people speed through like bats out of Hell (it is a SCHOOL ZONE, you bastards), get caught by surprise by the stop sign, and are going so fast that they STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF MY EFFING CROSSWALK. Then I have to use my amazing spatial skills (which are not amazing) to figure out how to get around their stupid car. (Which wouldn’t be so bad, except I don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to flip them off).

(Source: azspot, via )

10:06am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z8WIPy3Ff5QX

(Notes: 23)