A beauty of a killer.
A beauty of a killer. Charles Mudede

Yesterday, a pedestrian on a crosswalk in Belltown was hit by a car. The crosswalk is on First Avenue and Broad Street. The pedestrian was "transported to Harborview Medical Center with life-threatening injuries," SPD says. The driver who hit the pedestrian is 85 years old. According to the blogging officer, Lauren Lovanhill, the senior driver "was evaluated and showed no signs of impairment." Apparently, old age is not considered an impairment for operating a massive amount metal and machinery in a crowded city.

The thing I reflect on as I read this report, however, is not so much that more and more old people are in cars as our society ages, but that cars are simply very dangerous. One only has to look at an SPD Twitter fed to see that car collisions are a common feature of city life. And if one turns to statistics on car accidents, the picture becomes grim.

In a blog post called "We don't really care about automobile accidents," Kevin Klinkenberg, an architect and urban planner, states that around 35,000 people in the US are killed in car accidents annually. He also points out that by July of this year, 716 people perished on Georgia's roadways alone. That is a lot of dead people. To put this into perspective, Klinkenberg asks us to imagine what would happen if once every month a plane carrying 100 people crashed and killed every passenger. Yes, exactly: Ticket sales for flights would plummet, the airline industry would come to a standstill, and our skies would be as peaceful as they were right after 9/11.

What is depressing about our society is that we have left old people with almost no other option than the car, which is a dangerous form of transportation. And though younger people are driving less, we are still building for a future with cars and more cars.