The mean streets of suburbia
It's conventional wisdom that you're more likely to come to a violent end in a dense, urban place than out in the suburbs. I haven't seen any statistics, but I've come to question that idea. In the past year, a 21-year-old woman met her demise on the street right outside the window of my suburban office. Two months later, two teenagers were killed a few miles down the road.
None of this had anything to do with shootings or gang violence or anything like that. These three fatalities were all due to automobile accidents. All the news media in Chicago have been reporting this week on a particularly horrific accident in Oswego in which four of nine occupants of a single vehicle were killed, and this comes after the Chicago Tribune has spent the last several months editorializing on fatal car accidents involving teenagers. While the driver in the Oswego incident was 23, the victims were all teenagers, and so the story has been made to fit the narrative that teenage drivers are dangerous.
It is true that teenagers, more so than people well into adulthood, are inexperienced drivers and may be prone to lapses in judgment. But how do we explain why a large majority of fatal accidents involving teenagers in the Chicago area occur in the suburbs rather than in the city proper? I suspect that the differential owes much to the design of the streets; suburban roadways are designed to be dangerous. In some cases they might be built to allow for traffic moving at sixty miles an hour, and then we wonder why people won't limit their speed to the posted thirty-five. On these streets, it is much more possible to drive at high speed.
In the city, on the other hand, narrow streets, frequent intersections, cars parked along the curb, the occasional double-parked car, as well as a number of traffic-calming devices (speed humps and traffic circles) all make it harder to drive fast. The city still has its drivers who exhibit poor judgment, but they don't attain lethal speeds as often as they do in the suburbs.
posted by Mark M @ 2/17/2007 03:05:00 PM
2 Comments:
Tony... Your comment about the SUV's reminds me of when they first became popular, and we'd hear about them rolling over. I think a lot of people thought they were inherently unsafe because of this, but the biggest factor was that they were being driven recklessly.
Tony: I checked out the YouTube. (It might have been more appropriate under the entry: The Trout.) That's really amazing. You might think that Peter and the Wolf is a simple children's piece, but the flute part is notorious for its difficulty. In fact you'll find it in most books of orchestral excerpts for auditions.
I've never seen that technique before... Usually, you have to coordinate your breathing, lips, tongue and fingers, which is hard enough. But this guy is doing one thing with his fingers (melody) and another with his breathing (percussion). Also, the "normal" way to play is to make the tone as clear as possible; the flutist in the video intentionally makes some of the notes sound airy -- that can be hard to control.
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