Making Room in the Streets For Everyone: A Young Woman's Death
It's a truism. But it's a true truism. A million deaths are a 
statistic, but one death is a tragedy. 

For me lately, that one death has been that of Liz Padilla, a 28 
year old lawyer who was hit by a truck while bicycling to work as a 
pro bono attorney at the offices of the Family Center in Brooklyn.

I didn't know all those details until a few days ago, after I did 
some checking. All I knew previously came from walking by the 
intersection where she was killed, at 5th Avenue and Prospect Place 
in Brooklyn, and seeing a "ghost bicycle," a woman's bicycle spray-
painted white and chained to a street sign. Attached there also was 
a small hand-lettered plaque that said Liz Padilla, age 28, was 
killed here by a truck on June 9, 2005. Just one year ago. This 
month is the anniversary of Padilla's death. 

It turns out the bicycle was donated by Visual Resistance, a group 
that commemorates cycling deaths by putting up ghost bicycles. It's 
an effective device. I walk by there probably once a week, and never 
do I not at least mentally pause and wonder about the circumstances 
of her death, and whether more could have been done to prevent it. 
Finally I looked into the circumstances of her death more closely.

Of course, as someone who has written about bicycling safety, 
Padilla's death had special resonance to me. Was she wearing a 
helmet, I wondered? I have written about how wearing helmets, while 
certainly a good idea, is not the best path to making cycling safer 
in general, particularly from a policy point of view. See 
HYPERLINK "http://www.governing.com/articles/10trans.htm"; 
http://www.governing.com/articles/10trans.htm. As I say in that 
column, to make cycling safer, you need to focus more on the actions 
of those around a cyclist, and less on whether he or she is wearing 
a helmet. 

It turns out Padilla was wearing a helmet. It did not do her any 
good against a truck. 

What could have done some good? The answer is to do what big cycling 
countries like Holland and Denmark have done, which is to legally 
put pedestrians and cyclists first, and cars, trucks and other 
vehicles last. What this means is that whenever there is any contact 
between a vehicle and a cyclist (or pedestrian), the driver is at 
fault. Period. Even if a cyclist has run a red light or a stop sign, 
for example, the driver of the vehicle who hits the cyclist would 
get severe penalties, both legally and in fines. While this may seem 
unfair to drivers, what it acknowledges is that there can be no 
meeting of equals between two objects so unequally sized. It also 
acknowledges a less appealing side of human nature. Although no 
driver wants to hurt or kill a cyclist or pedestrian, they will on 
average be much less likely to if they know that severe penalties 
will be incurred if they do. 

Such laws are probably the main reason why cycling deaths per capita 
are so much lower in Scandinavian countries. Even though few people 
wear helmets there. Although the comparisons aren't exact because of 
differences in the way statistics are kept, it appears that you are 
about ten times more likely to die in a cycling accident when you 
venture out on a bicycle in the United States, than in Holland.

I cycled in rush-hour traffic one morning in Amsterdam. Hordes of 
cyclists streamed amid hordes of cars. A Dutch friend assured me 
that I was perfectly safe. The drivers, he said, knew that they came 
last.

Transportation Alternatives, a group in New York City that promotes 
cycling and other means of getting around as alternatives to cars, 
held a bicycle ride last week to commemorate Padilla's death. On 
Monday, June 27th at 6 pm, a film sponsored by Transportation 
Alternatives called Contested Streets: Breaking the New York City 
Gridlock, will premiere at the IFC Film Center at 323 6th Avenue in 
Greenwich Village. On the anniversary of Elizabeth Kasulis Padilla's 
death, it is appropriate to continue a conversation about the best 
use of our city streets.

– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region






 
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