My View at the Transportation Safety Commitee Meeting
Understanding Safety
What transportation method is safe? here's what the statistics say...
According to BicycleSafe.com, around 44,000 people die in car crashes in the U.S. each year. About 1 in 45 is a bicyclist.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for the year 2003, of 42,643 total highway related fatalities, 622 Pedalcyclists, 4,749 Pedestrians, and 19,480 Passenger car occupants died.
If safety is the real concern, it would be logical to regulate the use of passenger cars over pedestrian and cycling forms of transportation. Additionally, a passenger car outweighs a cyclist/pedestrian, therefore, if safety is a real concern, passenger cars would be more heavily regulated than cyclists. Let's also not forget, that at any time, a passenger car driver can steer into on-coming traffic, wreck, and die, in a split second.
What is safe?.. and to whom is it "safe"?
What is safety? Dictionary.com defines "safety" as:
"The condition of being safe; freedom from danger, risk, or injury."
Life is full of unsafe events. Our need, as Americans, to do things today, twice as fast as yesterday, is probably our most unsafe addiction. Below is a list of unsafe activities:
- Playing football, soccer, basketball or most any contact sport
- Using a fork or knife while eating
- Sun contact without sunscreen
- Traveling in an airplane, bus, car, bicycle, scooter or on your own two feet
- Eating food older than its expiration date
- Working on a roof, building a house, pouring concrete, or any other trade
- ... Driving to this council meeting on my motorized foot scooter as I could have been hit by a council member driving an SUV, who, if concerned with safety other than their own, could save an Iraqy baby's life, and my life, by more efficiently utilizing the fuel needed to transport themselves by the use of anything literally smaller than a tank.
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Everything is relative" --Albert Einstein
One may conclude, that without a balance, safety is just another word.
