The good news is that people seem to be getting the message
about drinking and driving.
The good news is that people seem to be getting the message about drinking and driving. Over the last two decades a massive public relations effort combined with stricter penalties has raised public awareness of the dangers of drunk driving, and people have responded to the message. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the percentage of traffic fatalities linked to drunk driving decreased by more than 33 percent between 1982 and 1999. Over the recent holiday season, the number of DUIs served out by Gilroy and Morgan Hill law enforcement dropped again from the previous year.
The bad news: while people are getting the message regarding drinking and driving, they are not getting the message regarding stressing and driving. Many people are still driving too fast and with little regard for the safety of others.
The number of recent pedestrian fatalities serves as a sobering reminder that you don’t necessarily have to be drunk to be dangerous behind the wheel. In December alone, six pedestrians were killed by cars driven restlessly and without regard through residential and business areas between south San Jose and Gilroy.
Just a week before Christmas, Jim Osterhoff, a homeless handyman who was a fixture on the west side of Gilroy, was hit and killed by a truck driven too fast through a rain-slickened intersection at Kern Avenue and First Street (Jim’s killer remains unidentified). Earlier in December, two men were struck and killed while trying to cross Monterey Highway during the early morning commute. Many of the pedestrian fatalities in Santa Clara County during the past six months were elderly persons simply trying to cross the street at marked intersections.
Let’s remember that any time we get behind the wheel, we are putting others at risk. Stress, like alcohol, gives us a distorted perception of physical reality and our ability as drivers. The higher the driver’s stress level, the greater the tendency to speed, overtake, be inattentive and generally take risks. Add to the mix rainy winter weather and the popularity of larger, less maneuverable, harder-to-control vehicles, and you have gone a long way to explaining the recent increase in car-on-pedestrian accidents and fatalities.
The message is simple: Slow down in town. Just look around and you can see that this isn’t Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, or San Francisco, where the act of driving is a desperate race against the clock, a frenetic struggle against congestion, crowds and a scarcity of parking spaces. We don’t have the kind of population density that warrants road jockeying on city streets. Parking is plentiful and any momentary traffic congestion we might experience becomes quickly unsnarled.
A big part of the South Valley’s charm is its laid-back pace, its marked lack of anxiety that a stressed-out Silicon Valley executive might find infuriating. Excessive lane-changing and rolling through right turns ahead of pedestrians crossing is still considered unnecessary and inappropriate down here. Let’s remind ourselves of where we are and who we are and with the rise in local pedestrian fatalities, let’s remember to slow down.
