When I began writing about the disturbing rise in pedestrian fatalities a couple of years ago, I was struck by the reaction the stories generated.
Many readers, seeing a worsening crisis of loss and despair in fatality numbers that are hard to comprehend, were pleased that the issue was getting attention. Others? Not so much.
When I and several colleagues finished our investigation into the role larger vehicles play in the fatality numbers — “Death on foot: America’s love of SUVs is killing pedestrians” — readers tuned in. It was a topic that generated heated debate about what or who was to blame for the thousands of men, women and children who are killed walking on and along this country’s roads every year.
And the numbers of dead have continued to climb, although COVID-19, as it has for every other aspect of American life, will leave its own mark on how this ongoing tragedy unfolds.
Earlier this year, preliminary data released by the Governors Highway Safety Association put the yearly deaths of pedestrians at 6,590, just for 2019. That places the number of dead pedestrians in this country from 2009-2019 in the same ballpark as the number of Americans lost in the entire Vietnam War.
Many responses to Free Press reporting on this issue have focused on blaming the pedestrians, essentially, in my reading, that they deserved what they got because people, and I’m projecting here, are always walking out in front of me.
Imagine deserving to die because you’re walking somewhere. Maybe you don’t have a car. Maybe you crossed the street to avoid tacking on an extra 10 or 15 minutes to get to a crosswalk. Maybe you’re a 5-year-old and you ran into the street. And yes, maybe you were looking at your cellphone when you should have been paying closer attention to your surroundings.
Of course, crosswalks are no defense against a driver running a red light or checking his own phone when his eyes should be on the road or driving onto a sidewalk, and there isn’t always a sidewalk. And regulators have known for years that SUVs and trucks, which represent more of the vehicles on the road now, tend to be more deadly when they hit people than a smaller car.
I’m not sure why but the reaction to the pedestrian death reporting, the blame part, came to mind as I saw the comments on another tragic story, the push to find a technological solution to the deaths of kids in hot cars. The numbers, although not as large, are still staggering when you consider what the loss of a child represents. Almost 1,000 children have died in hot cars in this country in the last few decades, with the numbers increasing to their highest annual points in the past couple of years.
Blame the parents, right?
After all, it feels righteous to call out people who left their children to die in a sweltering car.
Who would do such a thing, right?
I’ve struggled, too, with the idea, but I know the many times I’ve neglected to grab something before heading out the door that I had tried my best to remember to take with me. In the case of these vehicular heatstroke deaths, the ones when a parent or caregiver leaves a child in the back seat, experts point to a type of memory failure.
More: Death on foot: America’s love of SUVs is killing pedestrians
More: Pedestrian deaths continue rise in 2019; shift to SUVs gets partial blame
More: More vehicles are sitting parked during coronavirus — and they’re a risk to kids
And in what appears to be the unintended result of an attempt to save lives, the rise in hot car deaths “has been linked to the installation of air bags in the front seat of vehicles in the 1990s, when drivers were first compelled to place small children in the back seat where they would not be harmed by air-bag deployment,” according to University of South Florida psychology Professor David Diamond.
A troubling aspect of this year’s hot car deaths is that a higher percentage of them have resulted from children climbing into vehicles on their own. People often leave their vehicles unlocked. Can you say for certain that you always, and I mean every second of the day, know exactly where your child is and that you always leave your vehicle locked and the key fob out of reach?
Janette Fennell, founder of the advocacy group KidsandCars.org, talked about the fog of that first year of a child’s life, when parents are stressed and sleep-deprived. Parents who lose their children in hot cars include all kinds of people, and Fennell said intent is not at work. Losing a child would be, from this vantage point as a parent myself, the worst thing a person could go through.
Tossing some righteous blame onto that cauldron of emotions seems beyond pointless.
Searching for solutions to prevent tragedies doesn’t sound like it should be a controversial action, whether we’re talking about children who die in hot cars or children (and adults) who die walking along our roads.
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @_ericdlawrence.
Some tips on preventing hot car deaths
- Never leave children alone in or around cars.
- Open the back door every time you park to ensure no one is left behind.
- Place an item that you can’t start your day without — employee badge,
laptop, phone, handbag — in the back seat. - Never leave car keys or fobs within reach of children.
- Teach children to honk the horn if they become stuck inside a car.
- Ask your child care provider to call you right away if your child hasn’t arrived as scheduled.
- If a child goes missing, immediately check the inside passenger compartments and trunks of all vehicles in the area carefully, even if they are locked. Children may lock the car doors after entering a vehicle on their own, but may not be able to unlock them.
- If you see a child alone in a vehicle, call 911 immediately. If the child seems hot or sick, get him or her out of the vehicle as quickly as possible.
- Be careful during busy times, schedule changes and periods of crisis or holidays. This is when many tragedies occur.
- Use drive-through services when available (restaurant, bank, pharmacy, dry cleaner) and pay for gas at the pump.
- Be aware that vehicles have “temperature zones” and the back seat may not be the same temperature as the front seat. Make sure rear vents are open and that the area your children are riding in is a safe temperature.
Source: KidsandCars.org
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