Yeah, the real takeaway is that we need to push for protected bike infrastructure and better public transportation. You get drunk drivers off the road when you get cars off the road. The Netherlands figured this out long ago.
Ngl, can it be a little frustrating when a Lime bike/scooter goes zipping down the sidewalk? Sure. But as a pedestrian, I gotta remember that 70lb bike and its occupant are doing far less damage to me than a 4000lb car is doing to them. Can’t blame them for noping out of sharing the road with death traps.
I was just writing a similar comment on the Jackets board (my home board). The people saying the killer should be killed are understandable, but if you really want to stop this then you can't do it with ever more severe punishments. You have to make drunk driving no longer convenient, you have to make speeding no longer feel right, you have to make gigantic vehicles no longer viable.
These were my comments earlier:
"I spent the whole night checking over and over again to see if it was a hoax.
I'm still shocked. I am also thinking ahead to ways to do something about the senseless loss of life that keeps happening on our roads. We can't bring Johnny back but we can do something for the future. If folks aren't at the point where they're ready to have this sort of conversation then feel free to ignore this.
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The US has far higher road death rates than other developed countries. The other countries have dropping death rates while ours is rising.
Amazingly Russia now has a lower road death rate than the United States. And US pedestrian and cyclist deaths are going up sharply.
There are a lot of reasons for that. But one of them is that we have never taken drunk driving seriously enough. Otherwise good people are having 4-5 beers and still getting behind the wheel. I've seen friends do that. You can't legally open a bar now unless you build a large parking lot for it, it's required in the zoning almost everywhere. And most people parked in the lot are driving drunk. Bars should not even have customer parking!
Our vehicles are obviously also ballooning in size. Heavier = deadlier. Same with the rising hood heights where drivers can't even see children in front of their vehicle.
Per consumer reports: "A recent IIHS study of nearly 18,000 pedestrian crashes found that vehicles with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes." I understand why people do this on an individual level, if you're the one person who doesn't have a giant vehicle, you're roadkill. But collectively it's insane. We need to just ban or tax out these vehicles like a reasonable country would.
I know this is getting esoteric, but another factor is road design. We build roads as wide as possible, straight and unencumbered. But this paradoxically leads to more death, drivers on wide roads naturally feel that the appropriate speed is much higher and drive accordingly. And death rates go up exponentially with higher speed. It doesn't matter what the road
feels like, if it is faster it is deadlier. There's so much more we could talk about like having better cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, but I'll stop here for now. We're still grieving and some folks are just finding out now, so I understand if this conversation will come later."
