When I was a child, visiting an anthropology conference, Margaret Mead had me sit on her lap. My recollection is vague yet always is flavored by my mother telling me Mead asked me questions and wanted to know how I would evolve with two anthropologists as parents.
If Mead were alive today I’d maybe disappoint her to admit I strayed from anthropology into being a student of history instead. And I might defend my choice by telling her it helped me better understand stories she told such as this one:
Anthropological Intelligence, David Price, page 287
It surely sounds good for anthropologists to say they were engaged in a form of historic exceptionalism by serving to defeat fascism in the 1940s. However, historians probably could disagree with that framing and say an eternally valid moral choice was being made more than an historic one.
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think. They must be taught that many ways are open to them.
The question then seems to be whether we can or would want to restrict “ways” for people (even anthropologists, or sons of anthropologists) by teaching how to think.
Who reasonably would predict (based on history) where a child will lead in the future? And I guess that was the point of Mead having me sit on her lap for questioning.
The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE™) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors (CWE Top 25) is a demonstrative list of the most widespread and critical weaknesses that can lead to serious vulnerabilities in software. These weaknesses are often easy to find and exploit.
The top error “score” of 76 for “Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer” stands far above the total distribution, and about half are above a score of 10:
Special consideration will be given to creators who promote a vibrant commons; increase users’ autonomy, privacy, and control over their own data; promote diversity and inclusion on the internet; and increase access to the full capacity of the internet, both for content consumption and content creation, and for communities and individuals that have historically been marginalized, disadvantaged, or without access
It will be interesting to see whether such a large nudge can reverse the information “targeting” models that thirsty Facebook and Google executives notoriously have banked upon.
Angela van der Kloof, a cycling expert and project leader with the Delft mobility consultancy Mobycon, told me, “From a young age in the Netherlands, we’re trained to take note of others. Not by a teacher but by the way we do things. I think we are very much used to physical negotiation.” Dutch people live in small houses, ride on crowded trains, and generally jostle against one another—the Netherlands has the sixteenth-highest population density in the world. Navigating complicated traffic situations, calmly and systematically, came naturally to our neighbors.
The key to this story is actually how Dutch women had the power to organize and campaign for protecting children from being murdered by people operating cars:
With cars came carnage. In 1971 alone, thirty-three hundred people—including more than four hundred children—were killed on Dutch roads. A number of organizations, including a group named Stop de Kindermoord, or Stop the Child Murder, began agitating to take the streets back from automobiles.
Contrast this story with America, where cars are treated like guns and operators are allowed to commit indiscriminate murder as an expression of an individual’s power over society, which Next City has explained in qualitative examples:
Morgan stayed in the intensive care unit for another month. For the first two weeks, the doctors weren’t positive she would survive. By the end of it all, medical expenses totaled more than $500,000.
“I was scared to death,” says her husband, David Morgan.
His fear would soon turn to anger when he realized that local police had no interest in pursuing charges against the woman who nearly killed his wife. After the State Highway Patrol’s investigation concluded that there were no grounds for felony charges, the district attorney also demurred from pressing charges.
“As far as the state of Mississippi goes, you could be an armadillo hit on the road, and the state treats you just the same as a… cyclist,” Morgan says.
What the New Yorker article about cycling in Holland misses entirely, ironically, is that the density of crowds cited by those living in Holland is not a sufficient ingredient on its own. Next City explains this using NYC quantitative data. Clearly NYC is an American city where people also are used to physical negotiation:
Consider crash data from New York City, which has installed more than 350 miles of bike lanes. There were 14,327 pedestrian and cyclist injuries in 2012 as a result of vehicle crashes, but police cited only 101 motorists with careless driving, a rate of less than 1 percent.
The actual difference is thus not growing up in density, but rather the levels of political engagement by women.
Cycling historically has been described as an independence movement for women, which should put male-dominated legislative action impeding people cycling in its proper perspective. Also women cyclists in America tend to be more at risk from cars and thus more likely to design safety infrastructure, as drivers put them more at risk:
“What we found was that female cyclists had a significantly different experience riding than the male riders did. … Female riders tend to have more aggressive interactions with drivers than male riders did.” …researchers found — no surprise — that protected bike lanes offered the best protection. Cars stayed an average 7.5 feet from cyclists cruising along a bike lane separated from traffic by bollards. No bike lanes, more close calls.
A campaign like “Stop de Kindermoord, or Stop the Child Murder” emphasizes the rights of children to live free from harm by adults in cars. America is about as likely to see a campaign like that succeed as elect a woman President instead of a man repeatedly accused of harming children for his self-benefit.
Don’t forget, America remains the only country in the world that has failed to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The bottom line is that the safety of roads is about political power. That is why putting on helmets is the wrong answer. When cycling below 12 mph, which is the vast majority of commuter cyclists, the right answer is to place responsibility of safety upon those operating heavily armored machinery.
In a world where others may be harmed by their actions, machine operators must be accountable. If you think this is foreshadowing the problem of holding drone owners responsible for killing people, you are right.
Bay Area Bicycle Law points out that from 2013 to 2017 3,958 Cyclists have died across the U.S. for an average of 792 each year. 98% (777 of the 792) were in accidents with motor vehicles and 83% of cyclists had helmets on when they were murdered.
Let me say that again, 98% were in accidents with motor vehicles and a whopping 83% died with helmets on. Do you see the problem?
Peter Jacobsen, a Sacramento-based public health consultant, believes helmet laws may make streets less safe for cyclists. Australia and New Zealand recently introduced compulsory helmet laws, and bike use fell by 33 percent, he said. Numerous reports have found that cycling conditions improve with more riders on streets. By reducing the number of cyclists through helmet laws, conditions actually get more dangerous.
He also said studies have shown that motorists drive closer to cyclists with helmets on, and that helmets only reduce minor injuries, not fatalities. “Bike helmets are padding; they’re not armor,” he said.
Cars are armor. If cyclists put on armor, they’d be a car.
Not only do helmet laws decrease cycling by a significant amount, they do not show any real decrease in the death rate. In other words, data repeatedly shows how helmets impede cycling and thus make it less safe for the vast majority of cyclists.
Exceptions do exist and are important: habitually unsteady high-risk riders such as children and racers. These exceptions are easily handled, however, such as requiring helmets to compete in a race where contestants will gladly abide for the chance of winning.
The right formula is encourage more cyclists operating at speeds averaging below 12 mph in physically separated lanes, with NO adult requirement for helmets, and strict accountability for those who operate heavy (i.e. dangerous) machinery in the midst. Protecting the vulnerable shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out for our streets.
“The absolute number of child fatalities dropped by 98% over a period of time when the population size and the proportion of trips made by bicycle both rose significantly.”
The answer to the problem of cars killing cyclists is directly related to how the American political system allows care and consideration for vulnerable populations at risk of being harmed due to a weapon authorization for individuals.
We need to be intelligent enough to start the move away from these American headlines:
Which means sites like Twitter need to recognize the harm from its role in peddling active calls to use cars to murder non-whites, and how this propaganda relates to “Republicans want to legalize running over pedestrians“:
…state Rep. Keith Kempenich, perversely suggested that shielding drivers who kill protesters was a necessary anti-terrorism measure.
All that being said, there recently have been at least two notable exceptions to the sad state of weaponized roadways in America:
