Last Saturday I published a post about the danger and inefficiency of the 1.6 mile section of MassDOT Stroad 6 that cuts through our town. That same day, this happened on that very stretch of stroad:
No one died in this crash due to both luck and decades of tireless work by consumer safety advocates (which brought us things like seatbelts, airbags, and crumple zones). A few witnesses sitting on the porch of a house across the street tell me that the Ford Explorer pictured here was driven by a teenage boy who was speeding eastbound coming off of the bridge and somehow lost control, hitting another car and causing a collision with the car behind it.
The neighbors on the porch also pointed out to me this giant gap in their fence:
A car recently flew off of this same stretch of MassDOT Stroad 6, and drove through their fence and into their backyard. Incidents like these are common along stroads like this. I remember when my kid’s daycare on MassDOT Stroad 6 in Dartmouth was hit by a car that drove through a wall. Thankfully there were no people in the room where the car landed.
When I was chatting with one of the leaders of the response after the crash on Route 6, I mentioned that I had just written a piece about the faulty design of this road.
His response? “Yeah, but that kid was speeding!“
The kid was speeding. The elderly neighbor was wearing dark clothing while crossing the street she lived on all her life. The pedestrian was jay-walking. The driver was distracted. The driver was drinking. The boy was biking in the middle of a residential street.
Once we’re able to assign individual blame, we wash our hands of it and content ourselves with the knowledge that we’re not careless. We’re not the knucklehead. But I think on some level we all know that it’s just dumb luck we weren’t chosen in the Stroad Death Lottery this year.
It’s time to end the lottery. And it’s time to stop wasting time on a blame game where the key culprit is never named. It’s time we acknowledge that a piece of infrastructure that with some regularity sends 3,000 pound projectiles through people’s backyards or through daycares is not something that we want running through the middle of our town. Nor do we want to stand by idly as our taxpayer dollars are used to “improve” this piece of infrastructure by increasing its capacity, meaning congestion on more lanes (yes even adding “stacking” lanes and turning lanes counts as stroad feeding) during peak hours and faster speeds between signals every other hour of the day.
Teenagers will always have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. While we can do our best to teach them safe driving skills and follow up with enforcement, ultimately our roads will still be full of teenagers, as well as distracted people and yes, intoxicated people. See here for a great article by Charles Marohn about this. We will never be able to prevent all of these people from driving or from making mistakes behind the wheel. That’s why the work of auto safety advocates is so important and why state highway engineers do such an impressive job making our highways safe at deadly speeds, regardless of driver error.
We know that street design determines driving speed. We know that driving speed is what turns a small mistake on the road into a life-altering and deadly crash. It’s time that we prioritize safety and prosperity in the design of our neighborhood streets. Otherwise, we’re all just playing a game where everyone loses.
Will, what is a Stroad? Eileen