MOUNTAIN VIEW — At about 8:15 a.m. on a Thursday morning in March, Andre Retana, a 13-year-old driving his bike to center faculty, pulled as much as a crimson mild on the intersection of El Camino Actual and Grant Highway on this Silicon Valley suburb.
Close to two main state highways, the El Camino and Grant crossing is among the space’s busiest and most harmful sections of roadway. The intersection lacks devoted bike lanes and different options to guard bicyclists and pedestrians from fast-moving motorcar site visitors. As a substitute the intersection is an asphalt-and-concrete love letter to automobiles. Gasoline stations occupy two corners; an America’s Tire retailer sits on a 3rd, a BMW dealership on the fourth. Its site visitors design, too, prioritizes the environment friendly motion of automobiles and vans over different makes use of of the street. To maintain site visitors buzzing alongside, motorists on all of its corners are allowed to show proper on crimson lights.
As Andre approached the intersection’s southeast nook, he rode alongside a building truck ready on the mild to show proper. A police investigation would later decide that the truck had come to a whole cease on the crimson mild. Police say the truck driver, excessive up within the cab, had by no means seen Andre, who was within the truck’s blind spot.
Then, in a disaster of timing, Andre fell off his bike within the crosswalk close to the entrance of the truck — simply as the motive force, with the sunshine nonetheless crimson, determined it was protected to started turning proper. The truck hit Andre. The motive force, whose id has not been launched, realized he’d been in a crash solely after bystanders flagged him down. The boy on the bike suffered extreme accidents, and died in a hospital a short time later.
Police discovered no proof of wrongdoing and concluded that the demise was an “extraordinarily tragic incident.” They stated the motive force, whom they described as “devastated,” was not rushing or beneath the affect of medicine or alcohol, and had executed his proper flip legally. Andre, too, seems to have adopted all guidelines of the street.
It's tempting to name what occurred that morning in Mountain View a freak accident, the form of cosmic pileup of time and area that may by no means be averted in an advanced world. However as journalist Jessie Singer has argued, in a lot of American life, many “accidents” are removed from unintended — they're as an alternative the inevitable results of political and financial decisions that society has made, they usually might need been prevented had we made different, safer decisions.
States and cities will quickly be showered with $1.2 trillion in infrastructure funding that Congress allotted final yr. Some site visitors security advocates informed me they see this cash as an enormous alternative to avoid wasting our roads — however to make the very best use of that cash, they stated, we've got to be keen to consider street security in a transformative means.
America is within the midst of a site visitors fatality disaster. Practically 39,000 individuals died in motorcar crashes on U.S. roadways in 2020, probably the most since 2007. U.S. roads have grown particularly harmful to “nonoccupants” of autos — that's, bicyclists and pedestrians. In 2011, 16% of site visitors deaths had been of nonoccupants; in 2020 it was 20% .
The one means for America to reverse its site visitors demise spiral is to make a radically completely different selection. Visitors fatalities have been falling steadily in a lot of the United States’ peer nations, a lot of which have adopted stricter guidelines relating to velocity limits, seatbelts, drunken driving, helmets and car security requirements. Lots of our friends have additionally pulled again from car-focused street design. Now we've got an opportunity to copy their success.
In the meanwhile, in comparison with many elements of Europe, strolling and driving a motorbike in the US is a terrifically harmful proposition. However these dismal stats will be reversed. Even Amsterdam wasn’t at all times Amsterdam: Till the Seventies, the Dutch bike haven was as car-dependent as many different locations on this planet — and it was solely after a fierce activist marketing campaign triggered by tons of of site visitors deaths that Amsterdam determined to undertake bicycle security as a central a part of its city plan.
American states and cities now have a possibility to do similar. However they have to act quick, they usually should act decisively. That is no time for half-decade-long motion plans.
Per week after Andre Retana’s demise, his mother and father referred to as in to a Mountain View neighborhood assembly with a plea for metropolis officers to rethink street security.
“He ought to nonetheless be right here with us,” Andre’s father informed officers. “We wish one thing accomplished faster than 2030.”
Farhad Manjoo is a New York Instances columnist.