Monday, December 5, 2016

Salemite Dead from Hit and Run in Silverton on Friday

Friday morning in Silverton, one Salemite struck and killed another and then compounded his troubles by fleeing.

From the paper:
A North Salem man was arrested after a fatal hit-and-run crash near Silverton High School on Friday morning.

Dillon Van Diviner, 22, was driving on the 400 block of Grant Street when he hit a construction worker who was working on a driveway project of a new home, according to a statement released by Silverton Police Chief Jeff Fossholm. Van Diviner continued driving after hitting the construction worker, identified as Bradley Goad, 45, of West Salem. Goad was pronounced dead at the scene.
(It should be noted the paper's rhetoric is correct, that the human has agency here: None of this "the car left the road and hit the pedestrian" evasiveness. Humans are driving and required to maintain control. Even when it is not done with murderous intent, in the awful catastrophe a human remains the agent.)

Update, December 5th

Wow. Apparently "murderous intent" is in fact an issue here. From an update in the paper:
Moments before he struck and killed a West Salem man with his car, the suspect in Friday's fatal hit-and-run in Silverton allegedly smoked marijuana in his car and then intentionally sped toward the victim, officials said.

Dillon Van Diviner, 22, of Salem, was arrested on charges of murder, hit-and-run and DUI after he told police he purposely hit Bradley Goad in Silverton on Friday morning.

Van Diviner told police he ran over Goad because he feared Goad, a 45-year-old construction worker from West Salem, posed a danger to others. Van Diviner did not give any reason for this fear, other than an "intense overwhelming feeling," according to a probable cause statement filed in Marion County.
Wow. Just wow.

Since it appears to be a murder with a car as weapon and also probably a mental health matter, it is not so much a road safety matter. It's hard to say there is any amount of better road engineering or other safety changes that could prevent this. Vision Zero and other safety programming almost certainly has nothing further to offer.

Heartfelt condolences to the friends and family of Bradly Goad.

December 2016
Also over the weekend, you might have seen the piece about a driving school and failing a driving test while using a calculator for some basic math with the off-hand.

One thing that may not have been stressed enough was just how slow is driving around the cones in a parking lot. The test isn't conducted at normal urban driving speeds of 25 to 40 mph - not to mention customary 85th percentile urban speeds of 35 to near 70 mph.

Even when there is emergency room personnel discussing the actual gory facts of trauma and death in addition to the driving experience, I wonder if these cone tests at slow speeds still minimize the true lethality and power of automobiles.

August 2015
The school approach also really focuses on individual responsibility and assumes that it is possible to drive safely with proper care. The problems are bad actors, not bad systems.

Food is unexceptional and seems benign, but it's a distraction also
But we have vast systems working to clutter our dashboards and phones with distraction. The auto marketers want us distracted with gadgets, they show us dangerous driving to sell cars (only in the small type does it say "professional driver on a closed course"), and by means of 85th percentile speeds our road engineering keeps rounding up design speeds and creating implicit expectations for greater speed over posted speed limits.

All of our cultural cues point to faster, more distracted driving.

via Placemakers
And even at 40mph, a lawful driver is nearly certain to kill a person on foot.

There's no way enforcement can keep up. Enforcement shouldn't have to keep up. We should have systems in place for slower, safer driving well before we need to invoke enforcement. (That's an important part of vision zero initiatives.)

April 2016
So here we are, another name to add to the awful list.

We say "troubling"
but really, how troubled are we?
Killed in 2016:
Killed in 2015:

1 comment:

Salem Breakfast on Bikes said...

From the paper this afternoon:

"Dillon Van Diviner was found guilty except for insanity of murder and hit-and-run for killing Bradley Goad.

He was sentenced to as much as a lifetime of jurisdiction under the Psychiatric Security Review Board.

According to a mental health evaluation, Van Diviner, 22, has schizophrenia
."