If you wouldn’t let your kids ride a bike or walk across town in your city, or if you, as an adult are fearful of riding your bike around your town or for a bike ride to another town, there’s something seriously wrong. And the tragedy is that we know what it is. It’s cars. We know cars kill. We know that streets and roads are engineered to move cars quickly, and not to enable people to move about safely. So what are we going to do about it? Check out the podcasts.
We Need a Sea Change in How We Think About Roads and Streets
“You are grossly negligent if you show a conscious indifference to the safety of others. In other words, you’re aware that the safety of others is endangered, but you don’t do anything to act on that knowledge.”
— Charles Marohn
#8 in our Greatest Hits collection of the best Strong Towns Podcast episodes you may have missed the first time around, here’s “Gross Negligence” from June 2015. In it, Chuck Marohn describes:
- An exercise from army basic training in which he had to crawl through a trench while an expert marksman sent bullets whizzing nearby. No parent would let their child do this. So why do we accept that this is basically the condition of being on the sidewalk of an American stroad?
- Why we tend to associate speed with mobility and economic opportunity—and why we’re wrong.
- The incoherence of common responses to tragedy on our streets, such as a proposal to remedy an unsafe highway through a park in Buffalo by simultaneously making it more like a city street… and more like a high-speed road.
- What we would do if we actually wanted to make safety the number one priority on our streets. The podcast: http://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/greatest-hits-7-gross-negligence/