Crash Hospitalizes 2

Ella T Grasso is where I learned to look both ways before crossing the street . . . in my CAR, with a GREEN light.

Drivers around here are idiots.

V,
Part of the issue is poor driving, but most of the problems come from the haphazard design of the Boulevard (its not even a Boulevard, by the way) south of Chapel. A lot of the bad driving is actually derived from the poor design of the road.
Some higher density development, proper sidewalks and a median would help improve the Boulevard drastically and create an environment where people, cars, transit and relaxing can occur simultaneously and safely, while also sharing the same space.

DEAR GOD HOPKINS! Does everything have a root social cause that absolves people of basic personal responsibility, easily encapsulated in a neat little comment-sized lecture?

For f---k sake, yes, there are social roots to many of our problems. Are we, as human beings, not capable of overcoming these problems and acting in a responsible manner which benefits ourselves as much as the rest of society? Or would you have our social ills absolve us of all personal responsibility?

I have to leave the NHI again for a new months. You people give progressives a bad name, and it just gets me far too worked up.

Does anyone know why almost every other city in the country uses red light cameras (the kind that give you a parking ticket if you run a red) to prevent this kind of daily death and destruction... but New Haven doesn't yet?

>Does anyone know why almost every other city in the country uses red >light cameras (the kind that give you a parking ticket if you run a red) to >prevent this kind of daily death and destruction… but New Haven >doesn't yet?

Yes. Because the State of Connecticut does not allow it.

People from New Haven, including those representing the City of New Haven have been petitioning the State for several years to fix the law, and allow red light cameras. See articles such as:

http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2009/03/10/news/doc49b65df711e10301281493.txt

http://www.acluct.org/aboutus/pressroom/redlightcamerabillkilled.htm

Hey, John Hopkins, "bad design" doesn't cause people to blow through a red light at 45+mph.

That's just bad driving.

It's like blaming a lack of trash cans for littering along highways. Responsible people do the right thing.

James,
My comment was directed more towards the general problems of the Boulevard and less so about this specific incident, which is the fault of the one person operating their car improperly. However, the conditions in our built environment effect behavior more than you would probably like to accept.
As for the other stuff, I assume you are referring to posts where I've talked about loss of jobs and social degradation. We should conduct an experiment:
I take you and you're entire family and take all your money and make you forget everything you've learned in school and do the same to your friends. Then I move you all to a new town out in the midwest. At the same time I take away all the unskilled manufacturing jobs that you needed from that town and move them elsewhere to a place that I ban you from going to. After a decade, I'll take all the retail and move it to this banned place. A decade after that I'll take all the business and move it to this other place as well. I 100% guarantee that what develops is a violent sub culture driven by underground markets that vastly outweighs any other lifestyle and you will be no more immune to it than waves of Puerto Rican immigrants and black migrants were and still are. This is what actually happened in every industrial city in the northeast United States. Families came with nothing in search of work only to have the rug pulled from underneath their feet with no education or money to fall back on and with non of the opportunity that had welcomes European immigrants for centuries.
I am not a 'progressive', I am a realist. Democratic machines across the northeast in cities destroyed their urban centers in the 60s. This was done to address the problems created with deindustrialization. It did not work. Massive social problems were created over decades. I would love for private development and personal responsibility to fix this issues, but we've been waiting for about 6 decades now AKA it ain't gunna happen that way. So realistically what must happen is massive federal investments aimed at fundamentally changing the organization of our habitat to benefit all people and correct historic wrongs. Similar to what happened in the 40s and 50s (and continues today), but without the entitlements and dependence that was created. This federal action should not be sustained, it should be a one time shot that is implemented in a way that once is over, the private section takes control and things continue back on the course we derailed from back in the 1940s.

V is incorrect. People drive at the speed for which the road is designed. If the road is designed at width and geometry for 60 mile per hour traffic, as the Boulevard is, that's what people will do. It doesn't matter what the speed limit is.

In other words, yes, the engineers who designed this road are directly responsible for the crashes and deaths here. If you are an architect and design a building to collapse, and it then collapses and kills people, you are responsible. Same for a road.

To be fair, the engineers were told by someone at ConnDOT to design the boulevard as a superhighway - but clearly that needs to change, and do so pronto.

Design the roads using urban standards, short pedestrian crossings, integrated bus stops and 20 mile per hour speed limits, like what NYC, London, Cambridge MA, etc., are now doing throughout the entire city, and you'll eliminate about 90% of red light running and speeding. You'll also greatly reduce the likelihood of extreme cases (i.e., if the road is posted and designed for 20, the 45 observed here will be very rare).

By doing so, you'll also help turn this area back into the neighborhood it once was -- a place where people choose to live, invest in real estate and raise children, and spend time outside getting to know their neighbors.

Most importantly, you will save numerous lives. These effects are so well documented that they are impossible to argue.

Write our local representatives (state senators and state reps) and let them know that we need red light cameras in New Haven and in CT. A dedicated group of local citizens have been trying to get the cameras to try to train drivers to behave better and more safely here, but we keep getting ignored or shot down. The more of us who demand action, the more likely we will get these safety devices. If these red light runners knew there were cameras watching them, waiting to ticket, they might not have run that light and caused that accident.

anon - I disagree. Do wider roads affect the speed at which people drive, yes, that has been documented. That isn't the case for everyone nor is it an excuse for reckless and irresponsible driving.

"engineers who designed this road are directly responsible for the crashes and deaths here"
Seriously? I suppose if someone runs a stop sign, the manufacturer of the stop sign should be sued...or should it be the guy who installed it?

Responsible drivers do pay attention to and follow the speed limit, no matter what the road "feels" like. They also stop at stop signs, don't tailgate and the other niceties of common decent behavior. Please don't make excuses for bad drivers. If people can't read or won't follow the speed limit, they should stay off the road.

ali,
There is an important difference between the words "excuse" and "explanation".
This is a very complicated issue that has several layers. One great point that anon made was that when a building fails, the architect is to blame. Same goes for bridges and engineers. Is it a person's fault for walking on an improperly designed floor that fails? Is it a driver's fault for driving on an improperly designed bridge that collapses? Of course not.
Roads should be designed properly for appropriate use and spacial definition. The general problems of the road are mostly the traffic engineers fault for designing the Boulevard so poorly. However, this particular incident is mostly the fault of the reckless driver, but it is not so far-fetched to understand that bad driving behavior is partially derived from years of driving on poorly designed roads. The Boulevard has the geometries, lane widths, road accessories, etc of a limited access highway so people treat it as such. We have such a plethora of bad roads that the bad driving habits that are fostered on those roads actually carry over to streets that are not meant for high speeds and lots of traffic.

Both the drivers and the engineers (to be fair, whose hands are forced by lobbyists from the auto industry and trucking companies) are at fault in instances like these.

Since wide roads designed for high speeds (like Whalley Avenue, currently being widened by the state and city) are directly linked to speeding, death, destruction and loss of community, why wouldn't we put some, if not most, of the blame on the society that built them?

It is the mission of society to promote the general welfare and reduce harm. We spend billions of dollars per year regulating food, air travel, kids toys, smoking advertisements, etc: clearly, "personal responsibility" is not viewed as the cause of death from food poisoning, air crashes, choking children, or smoking.

So why is arguably the #1 killer of all individuals age 1 to 35, and particularly children and the disabled -- badly-engineered traffic infrastructure that is "designed for death" -- treated so differently in the United States than it is in so many other countries?

Jonathan-

One thing I don't think anon mentioned - but you alluded to in this instance - is the fact that people have choices, and they sometimes choose poorly and with disastrous results.

People choose to slow down or blow through the yellow light, people choose to talk and the phone while driving or not, or to follow the speed limit or not. This is why I think saying poor road design is at fault is an excuse.

There is also a difference between negligence in design (improper calculations of loads, poor quality material etc) and blaming design for failing to protect everyone from themselves. What about "proper use" which is the responsibility of the user? Design, even good design, can't protect people from their own idiocy.

Wouldn't you also agree that speeding is more prevalent now than it was, say 40 years ago, despite the fact that we are all driving on the same roads - the roads that were designed years ago? How does that fit into the equation?

I do think some things would be helped by changes in design but the majority of the problem seems to be with whether or not people feel obligated, for whatever reason, to follow the law or to drive with regard for their fellow humans.

ali,
You make some good points. But when it comes to road design specifically, there has been an incredibly insidious trend developing in traffic engineering, which is to create more generous roads with wider lanes, more lanes, more signs, more painted lines, more intense lighting, etc. These measures are exactly wrong. This, in large part, explains faster driving. Newer roads follow newer design standards, and the standards have been getting more and more dangerous because the design community to creates the standard is fundamentally flawed in the way they think. As we've gotten further and further away from roads that are designed by people who understand spacial quality as well as function, we have created more and more dangerous roads and therefore more dangerous driving habits. Social and cultural degradation can also be tied to bad driving habits, and that degradation is usually derived from economic problems that produce employment and family disintegration.
So, if we were to redesign streets to be more spacial defined with buildings and trees supplemented with road and lane widths that are scaled within relation to slow speeds, then yes, driving behavior would improve across the board. Unfortunately, the amount of resources needed to undo the damage that's been done in the last 60+ years is immense.

One of the difficulties here is that cause, fault and blame are three different things and yet we often talk about them as though they're interchangeable. 'Cause' might be seen as fairly value-neutral; 'Fault' is useful in a legal context while 'Blame' carries a moral and emotional weight.

Take this crash as a fairly typical scenario: one part of the 'cause' is the design of the road, which, as has been pointed out, enables dangerous speeds. I wouldn't go so far as to say the engineers who designed it 40 years ago or whenever should be sought out and sued, but it's worth noting.

The 'fault' is of course easy to assign when filing criminal charges or bringing a case in civil court. Which driver had the right-of-way? Which one failed to obey the rules of the road?

Finally, 'blame' carries the weight of moral judgment and casting blame or finding forgiveness is going to partly be a function of one's own moral standards and guidelines. I'll leave that one to the philosophers.

The point is that, yeah, anon and JH, responsible drivers do the right thing and don't blow through lights, regardless of how the road is designed. But also, V, yes, the bigger causes of dangerous driving--the contributing factors--or as they're called in reference to addiction, "enabling behaviors"--need to be considered as well. It's not good enough to write off the 40,000 or so people killed each year in car crashes as the sole result of isolated bad behavior by individual drivers.

A study should be undertaken immediately to evaluate whether this intersection would be a good candidate for conversion from signalized intersection to a modern roundabout (http://www.railtec.org/Site/Modern_Roundabouts.html) I wouldn't be surprised if it is.