The piece I was originally going to write for today—now scheduled for Thursday—took place in a strip mall. This piece, as it happens, also took place in a strip mall.

I was dropping off a package at the UPS store in a strip plaza not far from my home. As is usually the case, there were lots of people walking from the stores back to the parking lot, which, of course, requires walking across the main “road” into and out of the shopping center.

I suppose you could put a center entrance, and center aisle through the middle of the parking lot, so that cars and people don’t have to interact as much. Some stores and shopping centers are set up more like that, but this one isn’t.

This has never been an issue for me or that I have seen. But this time, a motorist in front of me rolled through a stop sign (I think) and in any case failed to see a woman crossing. He braked, she yelled at him, he rolled down his window and yelled back, and then when he slowly drove away, she gave his trunk a whack with her palm.

Then, losing her balance, she fell on the ground and apparently injured her knee.

The motorist got out of the car, obviously making sure she hadn’t been badly hurt, but also angry that she’d hit his car. “You blew through that stop sign,” she said, shaken and quietly angry. “No I didn’t. And you don’t hit someone’s car,” he snapped back. “Live whatever life you want to live,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what your problem is,” he said, exasperated and seemingly baffled.

I’d be willing to bet at least one of them was a New Yorker, but that’s neither here nor there.

One person saw part of the incident unfold, and another person called the police. Within a few minutes, a police car, a fire truck, and an ambulance arrived. It took several minutes for the woman to get up.

The idea of hitting a wayward motorist’s car to register displeasure or make yourself seen is bandied about a lot on urbanist and bike Twitter. You’ll see stuff like, “If your car is parked in the bike lane, I should be able to break your window.”

I don’t know how literally people mean this. Before I got into these issues, I would have found it utterly insane to suggest that anything gives you the right to damage what is almost certainly someone’s most or second-most expensive possession. But I have always pretty much driven everywhere, and grew up that way, so I never really had any personal experience being menaced by cars when I was not in one.

Now I kind of get it. “I don’t know what your problem is,” the man said. Maybe her problem was he almost just killed her. Maybe he blew the stop sign; maybe she didn’t look both ways; maybe both of those things happened. I don’t know.

But the punishment for jaywalking should not be the death penalty, and no “bad behavior” by a pedestrian, or any other road user, gives a motorist license to treat operating a car as anything other than a grave responsibility. Hitting the man’s car—not actually damaging it; I would see it differently if she’d pulled out a hammer—was a little way of making him feel just a fraction of what she did.

Why does “You don’t hit someone’s car” feel so natural and self-evident, but “You don’t run someone over” is kind of like, “Well, you know, we all make mistakes.” That to me is evidence of how deeply misanthropic cars can make us.

I know myself how sitting inside a car subtly alters your psychology and perception. Something about it, and the social attitudes we’ve developed to go with it, makes it seem perfectly sensible to equate running someone over with that person touching your vehicle. The potential speed and convenience of the car makes the inevitable real-world delays maddening, and turns other people into inconveniences. You feel so safe in the car, your perception less detailed and less granular, that you really might not have seen the lady crossing right in front of you.

You really might have perceived, as motorists involved in pedestrian crashes often say, that she “came out of nowhere.” You’ve almost just killed a person, but you’re irritated that they seemingly materialized right in front of you, not shaken at what almost happened. This happens every day, but that does not make it normal.

I’ve come to wonder whether it’s really possible for our brains to handle the mental and moral load of driving everywhere all the time.

This all made me think of Charles Marohn’s last book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, on the traffic engineering profession. (I reviewed it here.) He argues that this sort of thing is effectively built into the way we design roads. Our roads are dangerous experiments, and we run those experiments thousands of times every day. When we focus too much on blaming the individuals involved in these incidents, we can miss how the design of our roads increases their probability. Or worse, we can come to see fixing that design problem as absolving individuals of their responsibility. The fact is road users need to be responsible, but the design of our built environment should work with and not against them.

It’s often noted that other types of transportation incidents, involving airplanes, for example, are investigated to determine causes, not to assign blame. These investigations might involve assigning blame, depending, obviously, on the incident. But the primary purpose is to determine ways to prevent the same incident from happening again. If Charles Marohn is right about traffic engineers, then they’re doing everything they can to ensure that the same incidents happen over and over and over again.

I’m not certain who was to blame at the strip mall yesterday afternoon. Everyone does make mistakes, and as Marohn gravely observes in his book, we have, through bad design, made the cost of our inevitable mistakes far too high.

Related Reading:

If You Build a Speedway, They Will Speed

With Great Power

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share