Trick or Truck (or SUV): The Deadliest Monsters in Our Community
Today will likely be the day with the highest level of pedestrian deaths for children this year, provided the pattern from past years continues.
You can count on KUSI and other outlets to promote imagery and cautionary tales about the candies collected by trick or treaters, even though the razors in apples and rainbow fentanyl stories have been repeatedly debunked.
The real danger on Halloween is cars.
Pedestrians under the age of 18 are three times more likely to be struck and killed by a car on Halloween than any other day of the year. That risk grows to 10 times more likely for children aged 4 to 8 years old, according to a study from 2019 in JAMA Pediatrics. When you add in adult victims, the risk of death to all pedestrians is 43% higher on Halloween as compared to a regular evening.
Local nonprofit CirculateSD has issued a press release (headline: This Halloween, Don’t Kill Any Kids With Your Car!) with tips for drivers to be added to the usual bundle of Oct 31 safety measures for pedestrians presented to the community:
Remember that cars don’t need costumes because they’re already the deadliest monsters in our community.
Don’t drive at all if you don’t have to - take the trolley or bus, or bike, or catch a cab!
Slow down and watch out for more foot traffic in residential neighborhoods.
Take extra time looking for trick-or-treaters at intersections and entering/exiting driveways.
Never drive distracted or impaired.
If you are heading to a local bar, restaurant or house party and plan to drink, bring the designated sober driver with you, use public transit or a ride-hailing service, or stay the night.
Circulate is partnering with the City of Chula Vista this year to promote pedestrian safety, thanks to a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety.
“Careless driving can turn a spooktacular night into a real-life nightmare,” Circulate San Diego Planning Director Carlisle Dockery said. “Whether your night involves boos at a Halloween party, or just a perfectly sober trip to the store, the best way to keep kids safe is to walk, bike or bus.” There’s a lot of focus on drunk driving during the holidays, but sober drivers can kill people too – especially on a night like Halloween, so be extra careful.
As is true with many other societal calamities that overlap with cultural and/or political norms, pedestrian deaths on Halloween are often framed so (potential) victims are held to blame.
Most annual public service announcements emphasize defense measures for trick or treaters, and drivers are warned to “be on the lookout” for kids on the streets. The norm in play with these cautionary messages is the unchallenged supremacy of cars and trucks in our communities.
Via Vox:
After gun injuries, motor vehicle injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the US overall. And with pedestrian fatalities (both adult and child) at a 40-year high in the US, it’s worth asking why children roaming the streets is so inherently deadly, and what can be done about it.
“Sometimes when you talk about this issue, you get pushback from people and people say, ‘Well, of course, you have more children on the streets, of course, more children are going to die,’” Doug Gordon, a writer and podcast host who advocates for safer streets and cities, told me. “But that accepts a baseline level of danger that I think we as a society have in fact accepted on the other 364 days of the year.”
We could have safer streets by building infrastructure accessible to all modes of transportation. Sometimes this means simply lowering speed limits. Sometimes this involves looking at the bigger picture, as KPBS reporter Andrew Bowen discovered in studying the city’s Mobility Master Plan:
One prime example of the city's mixed priorities when it comes to sustainable transportation lies in Grantville. The neighborhood east of Mission Valley is rapidly densifying, and residents are feeling the strain as it takes longer and longer to drive through its congested streets.
But, rather than working to make Grantville less car-centric by widening sidewalks, planting more trees and installing protected bike lanes, city traffic engineers are responding with a plan to widen a section of roads to accommodate more cars.
The most recent cost estimate for the widening, which requires the city to seize private property, is $39.8 million. The project was allocated $4 million in previous budget years at the request of Councilmember Raul Campillo, whose district includes Grantville. Campillo recently requested that the city spend another $1 million to complete the project's design.
I inverted Bowden’s story structure to make a point, so it’s only fair to present his initial reporting, regarding the city’s biggest source of pollution:
San Diego has made enormous strides toward getting more of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar in recent years. But, according to the city's latest inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, that progress is being canceled out by the city's biggest source of pollution: cars and trucks.
The findings were buried in the appendix of a climate-monitoring report uploaded to the city's website in March. They underscore the need to decarbonize San Diego's transportation system and build dense, walkable neighborhoods where more residents can get around without a car.
Ultimately, a single person in a single vehicle is an inefficient mode of transport. San Diego in particular has been built out in such a way as to accommodate this means of getting around. It will take time, money, and a huge amount of political capital to undo what has already been done.
Here’s Ryan Cooper’s thoughts as published in The Week:
Unfortunately, this will take a revolution in attitudes and city planning. Car supremacy saturates every part of American urban politics — bus and bike infrastructure are an afterthought in planning discussions if they are considered at all, and drivers typically regard being banned from any road space with screaming outrage, like it's some insult to their personal identity.
Even tiny steps like a single dedicated busway in New York City saw some protests. But if city residents can come to realize that some car-free streets will actually cut traffic by getting people out of their cars and letting the roads breathe, Americans would save a great deal of time, and our cities would be much more pleasant.
Preach, brother. Neighborhood noisemakers are still steaming about putting in a bike lane on 30th Street.
Consumers –including yours truly– are buying increasingly large trucks and SUVs. Automakers’ marketing is partly to blame as weightier vehicles can get away with lower government mandated gas mileage.
For myself, leasing a Honda SUV was a defensive move. Sedans and smaller profile vehicles are routinely ignored/bullied by aggressive drivers behind the wheel of larger vehicles. Lower-to-the-road profiles of sedans, designed to increase efficiency/gas mileage, also make them more vulnerable to road hazards and poorly designed speed bumps.
Bigger vehicles mean more mass and more serious injuries to pedestrians and cyclists. The height of today’s trucks makes it difficult for drivers to see nearby travelers. And the increased weight of electric powered individual transportation also is a factor.
From an editorial in the Los Angeles Times calling for more federal involvement in safety measures:
The head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, warned earlier this year that heavier, more powerful electric vehicles could increase the risk of serious injury and death from vehicle collisions.
Because of the large battery packs needed to power zero-emission SUVs and trucks, electric vehicle models weigh significantly more than their combustion engine versions. Ford’s F-150 Lightning EV pickup is 2,000 to 3,000 pounds heavier than the gas-powered model, she said. The electric GMC Hummer — which President Biden posted a picture of himself driving — weighs roughly 9,000 pounds. Its battery pack alone weighs 2,900 pounds, which is about the same weight as a typical Honda Civic.
Here in San Diego, we have a political problem when it comes to transportation, namely small-minded small city elected officials who view non-car centric planning as victimizing their constituents. We’re still adding lanes to highways in all the wrong ways that ultimately do not solve commuting issues.
There’s also a cultural barrier beyond politics, namely that vehicle ownership is a status symbol. We’re constantly sold on that idea with promises of off road fun, the guaranteed admiration of our neighbors, and imagined sex appeal.
A huge part of our economy is connected to the status quo when it comes to transportation; if teleportation became a realistic option tomorrow, millions of people would suffer financially.
Of course, the clock is ticking ever louder as extreme weather events connected to climate change continue to occur with increasing regularity. How many summers will the people of Texas and Arizona get their brains baked out before they’ll start wondering if there’s another way to do business?
Enjoy Halloween while you can. Be safe. And start thinking more about what the future holds.
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More Headlines Driving the Narrative
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Chains are using theft to mask other issues, report says Via CNN
A top Walgreens executive seemed to indicate as much earlier this year: “Maybe we cried too much last year” about theft and other losses, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe acknowledged in January. Kehoe is no longer with Walgreens.
Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who studies policing, said business leaders had turned retail theft into a “moral panic” to mobilize a stronger police and criminal justice response.
“It shows us the way certain crimes in certain moments get mobilized far beyond their impact to play into a set of political and social debates,” he said.
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The untold story of New Mexico's Indigenous people after the nuclear tests and Oppenheimer Via Daily Kos
The film portrays the Trinity Test, the world’s first nuclear test, as occurring in a remote and uninhabited landscape, which echoed what the government claimed at the time. In fact, there is a line in the film where Oppenheimer says the only thing near the site was a boy’s school and a burial site. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many people called that area their home, including many Hispano and Indigenous communities with deep historical roots in the region. The U.S. Military, along with Oppenheimer himself, knew that Nuevo Mexicano and Mescalero Apache families had farms near that area.
Eminent domain was used to seize their land for the nuclear test, sometimes at gunpoint, with promises of fair compensation that often went unfulfilled. Those few who did receive money for their property received substantially less than nearby white landowners. The land owned by an Anglo entrepreneur was acquired at a rate of $43 per acre, whereas Hispanic homesteaders received as little as $7 per acre for their own land.
Farms were bulldozed, livestock was shot, and there were even violent confrontations with military police. After forcibly being uprooted from their homes, being given less than 24 hours to leave with what they could carry and having nowhere to turn, the men displaced by the nuclear test were compelled to work at the very laboratory responsible for their displacement.
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Harry Belafonte - Zombie Jamboree (Thanks to Denise Oliver Velez @ Daily Kos)
Belafonte’s blurred performance of the scary Caribbean song is worth a watch, particularly if you pay attention to the clever way he injected then-contemporary politics into the performance.
What is truly amazing about this song is the real identity of the lead singer on the first existing recorded performance of “Jumbie Jamboree” released as “Back to Back, Belly to Belly” by The Charmer with the Johnny McCleverty Calypso Boys.
Via Richard Lei for The Washington Post in 1995:
It was lower Roxbury, Boston, the mid-1950s. Belafonte's Caribbean sound was breaking big-time, but in the neighborhood, Voigt said, The Charmer held sway. Everybody also knew him as Gene Walcott, the musical pride of the West Indian immigrant community served by the Boston Graphic weekly newspaper. In coming years, he would make news under another name: Louis Farrakhan.
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Psst! Don’t forget to check your children’s trick or treat candy for Critical Race Theory