Dear Editor,
The language in your article, "New Details on Fatal Pedestrian Accident at National Blvd Intersection" normalizes traffic deaths and essentially treats pedestrian life as expendable in the name of vehicle speed.
First, the title: Why no mention of a vehicle? It's like the title implies some agreement with readers that our streets should be deadly if you step into them and that being designed for speed (and death) is good and unavoidable. Was this just a pedestrian tripping and hitting their head on the ground? No, it was a vehicle that struck and killed the pedestrian. You don't have to agree that the street should be reconfigured to simply acknowledge that speed caused the pedestrian's death.
No request for clarification from the "authorities" who said, "the pedestrian unsafely entered the roadway and was struck by a vehicle"? Wait, so it's safe to have roads that are designed for speeds fast enough to kill with narrow sidewalks and few crosswalks, yet all that happened is a pedestrian "unsafely" entered and mysteriously got hit by a car?
You say, "Authorities have disclosed that neither impairment nor speed played a role in the deadly event." The latter's not true. Speed was crucial to killing this person. There's a hidden judgment in this statement, which is that speed did kill the pedestrian, but on some level we deem that acceptable, so we won't acknowledge it as that might point to our callousness at death in the face of perceived driver convenience.
And what on earth did you mean by, "Despite these findings, sorrow still colors the narrative, the department extends "our deepest sympathy to all affected by the collision."" Despite? Like, "We all know the deceased had it coming, but it's hard not to feel sorry for the guy."
Does no one think to question why such deadly street design is so normal that death for entering it on foot is somehow hand waved away as the cost of driving our overpriced, over engineered cars?
Don't you think that's symptomatic of how indifferent we are to death and bad street design, and therefore worth interrogating? What if it would prevent another such tragedy
Angelo Mike
Los Angeles
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