Two stories have been floating around in my head in the past 24 hours, the cognitive dissonance so deafening it’s hard to think about anything else. One is the news that Mayor Jenny Durkan has purchased five trucks and funded a program to more quickly respond to and clear the scenes of traffic collisions. The other is a powerful story Owen Pickford wrote at The Urbanist about a devastating moment 17 years ago when he was riding in the backseat of a friend’s station wagon. They collided with a box truck while making a left turn.

The feeling of autumn compounds the mood I get from this memory–its fuzzy edges and vivid snippets. There was yelling just before we were hit. Afterwards, I think my door wouldn’t open and I slid across the backseat, exiting on the driver’s side. I saw a friend on his phone. I laid down on the ground.

I’m unsure how long it took for the paramedics to arrive. They asked if I was hurt and I said I couldn’t breathe. There was an ambulance ride. Then at some point, my mom was standing next to my bed. She told me that one of my friends had died and I remember crying.

My friend, who was killed, sat in the front seat directly ahead of me. He was a few fractions of a second further, directly in the path of the oncoming vehicle. I had broken ribs, a partially collapsed lung, a lacerated liver, and internal bleeding.

Owen, Executive Director of The Urbanist, shared his powerful story this week. Everyone should read it in full.

The pain, both physical and emotional, that Owen has endured and continues to endure due to this one traffic collision is immense. Yet his friend was only one out of the 42,196 people who died in U.S. traffic collisions that year. And Owen was only one of hundreds of thousands of people who were seriously injured that year, and one of millions who had a friend or family member killed or seriously injured. (more…)