In today's paper is another story of jaydriving, but the story erases the driver, ascribing agency to the truck: "the truck did not obey road signs and was too tall...."
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| Today's paper |
The headline on photos and video online and not yet accompanied by a story also erases the driver in talk about a "truck that drove into south Salem house."
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| Online only today |
And last week in Salem Reporter about the sign, "frequently wrecked by car crashes," recently removed at the border with Keizer, the language is about a problematic sign well off the roadway and not anything about jaydriving or drivers who keep hitting the sign:
Now, Salem officials plan to replace the sign with a new one that is more financially sustainable for the city and easier for its Public Works Department to replace, according to Kathleen Swarm, the city’s recreation program manager.
“This sign has been causing problems for years and years, and is a huge burden for this city to keep up,” Swarm said at a Salem Public Arts Commission meeting on Nov. 13.
The sign was most recently hit around April and then sat dented for seven months, with the brick wall behind it broken into pieces. This time, fixing it would have cost around $40,000....
The frequent damage to the sign began a year after it was built.
There are two big problems here in the way we talk about these crashes.
First, in every instance of a crash there is a person operating and in charge of a motor vehicle. There is a driver with primary agency. We are not yet talking about robot cars.
Second, whether it's a bridge with prominent warning signs, a house set back from the street, or a welcome sign also well recessed from the street, drivers zoom along too fast on our streets and cause great damage.
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| Not the solution! via the former Twitter |
Did we fail to put high-viz safety gear on the bridge, house, and welcome sign? If bridges aren't safe, and houses aren't safe, and brick welcome signs aren't safe, why do we keep insisting that people on foot or on bike are primarily responsible for safety? And why do we keep talking around the agency of drivers?
It's the cars and their drivers. We have a car problem and driving problem. As we move to a "safe system" approach, we still need to center motor vehicles, their operators, and speed.
Previously:
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