Michael Swickard
Quick, what is the main purpose of city streets? It is to get the citizens to where each of us is going in the safest and most efficient manner. Note that safest is said before efficient in that sentence – and hopefully in the design of our city streets.
Safety engineers have spent decades making us safer as we travel. However, people have purposefully made our divided streets ever so much more dangerous, and they will be downright crabby if we complain about their actions. I can stand the criticism much more than I can stand needless deaths on our city streets.
I am talking about the medians that separate the two directions of travel on our divided city streets. It seems someone got the bright idea a few years ago that those medians should be “improved” – that they should be “beautified” by the addition of trees, rocks and boulders. I like that kind of landscaping in yards, but not in the street medians.
Medians of divided streets are specifically constructed to give drivers safety space in case “stuff” happens. Example: People on motorcycles will tell you that occasionally a driver in a car is inattentive. The driver of the motorcycle can just let the car run over them (not much fun) or they can move out of the way by driving onto the median long enough to escape. At least that is the plan of streets with a median.
They can, unless beautification project people have put trees, rocks and boulders in the median. The unexpected happens and in an instant, BLAM! – someone hits a ton of boulder instead of just safety space.
For those “whoops” moments
I am thinking of myself much like I do with the seatbelt and helmet laws: At times my driving has small moments when, frankly, it sucks. If I am lucky no one is close and I say to myself, “Whoops” and get back where I should be.
But if I make incidental contact with, say, a motorcycle I would hope and pray they are well enough protected that they just say to me, “Michael, you must be more careful” or words to that effect instead of the incidental contact leading me to cause their death.
We should not put ANYTHING at all in the street medians that would degrade safety. This is a test of thinking: If people say we need the beauty and it only kills a couple people a year, we need to remove them from a position of leadership. If they admit they had not thought of it and now that they see how dangerous this is, well, pat them on the back and support them.
Likewise Las Cruces has been trying to get a grip on a sign ordinance. The sticking point is they want signs that are not distracting. HELLO, no business wants a sign that is not distracting. But that is why the city council gets the big bucks to think carefully. Obviously safety must be included in the sign ordinance.
The core job of government
The core job of government is to protect citizens. It is so easy to be distracted by all of the other interests in a community, but safety is the central aspect of government. Often what starts out as a genuine concern for the safety of citizens gets hijacked by the fact it produces revenue.
We see that many of the traffic laws in our towns and cities were initially tied to safety. But each municipality has long since come to depend on the revenue from the tickets, which seems a bit strange. It puts them in the business of hoping citizens offend because they need the money. How sad.
What the last century has shown is if our towns truly want people to stop offending by doing things that are unsafe; collecting a nuisance tax does not get it done. It seems to say that we are very concerned with safety but we are more concerned with collecting money.
This just does not look right for the kids. They think we are stupid and they are right. We say our first goal is safety and then we do all of these other things instead of focusing on safety.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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