Distracting from Driving: The Elephant in the Room

In the overlap of our housing crisis and our road safety crisis, this week the housing discourse has swamped most everything, erasing the driver and prompting a loss of focus as if we had one crisis only.

Back in February, and again last week, impaired drivers speeding recklessly on wide avenues, streets overdesigned for speed, left the roadway and killed people who were asleep.

An even earlier instance in 2017, via Twitter

In one instance people were inside a house. In another instance people were camping in tents. 

But instead of focusing on the problem and cause common to both, we have become distracted by the unsightliness of camping and assigned blame to it.

Back in February

Housing and the cost of housing is indeed a great problem. But having a house was no protection for Moira Hughes and George Heitz. You may recall also when a driver killed Srabonti Haque while she was sleeping in her own house (at top).

Instead of differentiating between the deaths of people sleeping in houses and of people sleeping in tents, we should see them as part of a common pattern of problem driving. The quality or cost or even location of one's home is a red herring here.

Front page last week

Newspaper coverage and especially other commentary generally also extended more sympathy to the couple housed permanently.

Following on all this, in the paper today three pieces, one on the protected bike lane proposal and two on roadside camping, treat them as disconnected issues and do not connect enough to "unmanaged driving" and to roadways engineered for speed. Instead we have "unmanaged camping" and a bit of bicyclists and their special interests. But the common denominator, the common problem, is drivers, driving, and roadways designed for speed.

Three headlines today about road safety

You may recall that a driver killed Selma Pierce while she was out on a walk on one of Salem's roadsides. She was not camping but was still vulnerable to a driver, even at lawful speed.

Housed people, like people on foot or people on bike, were no less vulnerable to a driver employing lethal speed.  People wanting better bike lanes share vulnerability with people in tents, people out on a walk, and sometimes even people sleeping in a house.

Any real solution, any improvement in safety, partial or full, will be applicable to the situation in all the crashes, not just the crash last week into a roadside camp.

In these crashes driving and speed together are the problem, not "unmanaged camping."

There are important reasons to make progress on our housing crisis, but using "unmanaged driving" as an excuse to police campers even more closely deflects from the immediate safety problem of drivers and roads.