February 2005
The New Los Angeles?
Seattle might drive to the same tragic road of pedestrian deaths and a loss of civility—unless we avoid the collision
by Silja J.A. Talvi
I’ll get this out as quickly as possible: I was raised in Los Angeles.
I’m not actually a native of Los Angeles—I was born in Helsinki, Finland, to be absolutely precise—but I spent my formative years living in what used to be considered The Ultimate City of Smog, Freeways and Urban Sprawl.
These days I’m a very devoted and involved resident of this Emerald City. In fact, from the day I started visiting my family here (in the mid-1980s), to the day that I moved here (in early 1998), I’ve been enraptured by the eco-utopian potential of the Puget Sound. Even back when I felt like Seattle didn’t have enough by way of cultural heterogeneity to offer me, I still felt like I was experiencing a part of a world that seemed less preoccupied with wealth and material gain than with the overriding concern of environmental conservation and individual freedom.
I’m not an Angeleno after any stereotypical fashion. In fact, I’d like to think I represent the Los Angeles that never actually migrates out of the city to poison other parts of the country. I haven’t had plastic surgery, I don’t bleach my hair and I don’t believe in pursuing material things for the sake of simply having things.
Perhaps the most significant distinction is simply that I don’t believe in cars.
I didn’t bring car culture with me; I didn’t even bring a car with me. To be even more specific, I didn’t even bring a driver’s license with me.
I do not drive. I probably never will.
A lifetime of teasing and pressuring hasn’t changed that.
I swear by public transit and human-powered transportation, and I wish Seattle supported more of that kind of culture. That does not mean that I will not gratefully accept a ride from a safe and responsible driver to go snowboarding—or to help get me home at two in the morning after a night of clubbing—but I simply do not like cars.
It’s not as if I didn’t have every opportunity to be influenced otherwise. Hollywood’s mean and gritty streets in the early and mid-1980s were my stomping grounds. I walked and rode the bus through every grimy intersection that the city had to offer before it cleaned up—on the surface, at least. When some of my peers at Fairfax High turned 16, their parents were at the ready with access to family cars—or even new cars for their kids’ individual use. To be honest, if my mom had been able to give me a car, I wouldn’t have accepted it.
My family moved from Finland to L.A. in 1977. I got hit by a car four years later, a few blocks from home. The driver, who was drunk, tried to drive off, but in his inebriated state, he ran into a bunch of bushes on the sidewalk. Two years later, a driver clipped me while I was riding my bike to my junior high. No injuries, but I was freaked out. And when it happened again, I simply gave up riding my bike.
My ex-husband convinced me to take up bike riding when I was in my early 20s and living in San Francisco. As a result, I became a fiercer, stronger and braver rider. But the danger presented by incredibly aggressive drivers was a daily reality. At the time, San Francisco had one of the highest death rates for bicyclists in the nation. (Bicyclists used to stencil “Death Machines Ahead” on the bike paths in the Panhandle leading up to Golden Gate Park, as a way of warning cyclists of impending car traffic.)
It might seem extreme to refer to cars as “death machines.” But that’s exactly what they are capable of being. A car moving at 60 or even 20 miles per hour can wipe away a pedestrian’s or cyclist’s life in a heartbeat.
When I finally moved up here in ’98, I breathed a sigh of relief when I rode the roads on my bike. People seemed far more polite, more cognizant of what it meant to “share the road.”
But lately, things have changed for the worse.
Last November, my stepmother’s mom was hit by a car shortly after she stepped off a bus in Bothell. She went into a coma. Shortly thereafter, she died from her injuries at the age of 82. My family doesn’t blame the driver—Fran was hard of hearing and was somewhat oblivious to car traffic—but I personally frame her death in the context of the rash of other pedestrian deaths over the past year.
In December, a Mean Streets 2004 report by the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org) and Surface Transportation Policy Project confirmed that walking remains the most dangerous mode of transportation in the U.S.
Although the Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton region is not (yet) at the top of the list, our pedestrian deaths climbed from 45 in 2002 to 55 in 2003.
After that report came out—shortly after my step-grandmother died—things only seemed to worsen. Several fatal hit-and-runs have made the papers as of late, including the horrific case of Heja Hahn, a 65-year-old Skyway resident and Korean immigrant and mother of two. Hahn was hit twice by two different cars (a third nearly hit her and kept going). The two drivers who actually struck and killed her drove off into the night, and still have not been found.
I find that inexcusable—and indicative, on another level, of just how bad things have become.
So here’s my simple plea for all of you car drivers out there: Slow down and pay more attention. You hold pedestrians’ lives—including mine—in your hands when you get behind the wheel of a car. And all of us on foot and bike would sincerely appreciate it if you thought about that while you drive around this beautiful city of ours.
I didn’t move here for another Los Angeles. Native or not, my guess is that’s not what you want for our little corner of the world, either.
Silja J.A. Talvi is an Evergreen Monthly columnist and voice for “people who would not otherwise have an easy time getting a voice in the media.”
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