A young boy is in a coma after being hit by a car in my old home town. He was just meandering down the sidewalk outside the local car wash when a car came out of the bay and the driver apparently lost control, hitting the boy and slamming into a restaurant across the street, injuring four others inside. While the accident is still under investigation, it seems to me from what I know of the location that the driver pulled off the car wash tracks too quickly and slid on the wet pavement.
Every day I see cars driving way too fast in quiet residential areas. These are neighborhoods where kids are playing and people are walking their dogs. Children walk to school each day while cars whizz by, even in school speed zones. Why are we in such a hurry?
Cars are so ubiquitous that people fail to have a healthy fear of them. In reality, the average vehicle can be a 1-2-ton instrument of destruction and death. And while car manufacturers continue to make safety improvements for drivers and passengers (The driver of the accident was unharmed.), those protections don’t help people unlucky enough to be in the path of a fast-moving machine.
In our modern world, we always seem to be pressed for time. We’re running late, so we gun it down the street. And we get so used to speeding along that we continue to do so even when there is no urgency. Sometimes this is the fault of governments. The speed limit in our sleepy neighborhood near the lake is 40 mph. That’s entirely too fast and makes walking along the road much too hazardous. But in most residential neighborhoods, the speed limit is 25 mph. Even at that speed, damage can be done, of course. But drivers routinely drive 40 mph in these areas. Sure, they may be courting a speeding ticket. But local police can only do so much to slow drivers down.
My former community has united in prayer for the 14-year-old child clinging to life in a Chicago hospital. His devastated family can only wait. No doubt the driver of that car has lost sleep thinking about what they have wrought, however accidentally.
But just as with gun violence, there are things we can do to avoid such horrific tragedies. And the one action all drivers can take today is simple: slow down.
Because I Said So 