Last weekend, three people were hit by cars in Queens, and died. In two of those cases, the driver was speeding. In the other, the driver was drunk. In all three cases, the streets were highly residential.
When you’re drunk, you make poor decisions because your judgement has been impaired by alcohol. When you’re sober, you’re fully aware of your bad decisions. You’re fully capable of weighing the likely results of those decisions. So if you kill someone as a result of thoughtlessness, why is that more excusable?
Out of those three fatal accidents, only one driver – the one that had been drinking – has been charged with a crime so far. Of the two speeders, one drove away and has yet to be caught, and the other was charged with nothing.
Don’t get us wrong here. Drunk driving is a horrific crime, that should absolutely result in jail time. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only crime one can commit in a car. Speeding is also a crime.
It is, in fact, illegal to speed now. That’s why the speed limit is posted. So drivers know how fast you’re allowed to go, and no faster.
These limits weren’t just made up, either. Studies were done, to determine how fast one could safely go on a given street. The studies consider sight lines, traffic density, the amount of foot traffic, the chance that the sun will glint off of a windshield at sunset. Can these drivers really say they put as much thought into the decision to go faster than that carefully set limit?
Killing someone through speeding isn’t malicious – it’s thoughtless, and that’s almost worse. How skewed have our priorities become, if preserving perfectly healthy lives isn’t one of them?
It’s appalling that people have died – and will continue to die – because other people cannot be bothered to consider how their actions might affect the people around them. In a city with more than 8 million people, we can’t afford that kind of thinking.
A number of studies conducted in different countries, across several different decades all come up with the same results: if you speed, even a little bit, the chances that you’ll kill someone increase exponentially.
For example, if you’re going 20 miles per hour, and you hit someone, there’s a 5 percent chance that person will die. Now let’s say you’re running a little late. You bump it up to 30 miles per hour. Doesn’t seem that bad – you’re probably only going 5 miles over the limit. But if you’re going 30 when you hit that person, the chance of death goes from 5 percent to 40 percent.
If you get hit by a car traveling faster than 50 miles per hour – and don’t tell us you’ve never seen someone do just that on our boulevards – you have a nearly 100 percent chance of death. And if that speeding driver wasn’t drunk, you’ll still be dead, and they won’t be in jail.
Back in February a woman was killed by a vehicle as she tried to carry her shopping across 157th Avenue at its intersection with Cross Bay Boulevard. Her death was largely unnoticed. Most media ignored it, no caution signs went up to alert other pedestrians. The only sign that anything untoward had happened there was a small memorial set up on a nearby telephone pole by her daughter.
It seems as if, in Queens, to die because you were hit by a car is just like dieing of natural causes. No one gets punished, no one is to blame. Just check off ‘natural causes, hit by car in Queens’ on the autopsy report and you’re all set.
If we’ve really reached the stage where it’s not even noteworthy to be run down by a car, something needs to change.
Since when is “Whoops” an acceptable defense? What trials those would be:
Prosecutor: Did you know what you were doing was wrong? That it was dangerous, and could harm or kill yourself or others?
Defendant: Yes.
Judge: Oh, okay then. Stop everything, case dismissed. You can head on home now.
We need laws to protect us. We need the people we’ve elected to look around, see a problematic situation and take proactive steps to prevent its recurrence in the future.
We need our elected officials to see what a huge problem this has become, and take steps to fix it before anyone else gets killed. Perhaps if there were stricter penalties – or any real penalties – in place for speeding drivers who kill pedestrians, less drivers would carelessly speed.
That’s what elected officials are there for – to work to make things better, safer. To improve tomorrow. Not just to hold press conference after the fact and look pretty.
We know cars are dangerous. There will undoubtedly be some pedestrian fatalities that are unavoidable, no matter what precautions we take. Accidents happen. But speeding is no accident. It’s a crime that needs be punished.
