{"id":2264,"date":"2022-09-09T02:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-09-09T10:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=2264"},"modified":"2022-09-08T14:48:42","modified_gmt":"2022-09-08T22:48:42","slug":"accidents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2022\/09\/09\/accidents\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Accidents&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.simonandschuster.com\/books\/There-Are-No-Accidents\/Jessie-Singer\/9781982129668\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net\/book_images\/onix\/cvr9781982129668\/there-are-no-accidents-9781982129668_lg.jpg\" alt=\"There Are No Accidents -- book by Jessie Singer\" width=\"264\" height=\"400\" \/><\/a>When I read nonfiction, I usually have one of three responses:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">Wow, that\u2019s interesting. I never thought about it like that before.<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">Some of this is interesting, but I disagree with parts of it.<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">This book isn\u2019t worth my time \u2013 it is either so wrong as to be laughable or so simplistic as to be useless.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But when I read <a href=\"https:\/\/www.simonandschuster.com\/books\/There-Are-No-Accidents\/Jessie-Singer\/9781982129668\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>There Are No Accidents <\/i>by Jessie Singer<\/a>, I had a fourth reaction: I could have written this book. By which I mean I know something about most of what she covered and agreed with her analysis.<\/p>\n<p>This isn\u2019t jealousy \u2013 I haven\u2019t done the research and interviews that she did and had no plans to write such a book. It\u2019s gratitude. Not only did she pull all those points together in an excellent book, but also she let me realize that I am not a lone voice crying into the wind on a number of subjects related to \u201caccidents.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The whole point of this book is that so many things we dismiss as accidents \u2013 including the ones that cause serious injury and death \u2013 are in fact the result of terrible systems that build acceptance of a certain number of deaths into their design.<\/p>\n<p>Singer came to this subject because her best friend was killed by a drunk motorist when riding his bicycle. In looking into the circumstances, she realized that the supposedly safe bike path her friend was using was in fact not protected from bad drivers.<\/p>\n<p>In this country, transportation has been built around the car, and the design of our systems sacrifices safety for speed and ease of car use. We blame the resulting \u201caccidents\u201d on bad driving \u2013 or on bad bicycling or bad walking.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking as someone who drives a car, rides a bike, and walks, I can guarantee you that everyone who does those things makes mistakes, even if we\u2019re cold sober. We get distracted. We screw up shifting gears on the bike. We look down at our phones while crossing the street.<\/p>\n<p>Based on my experience \u2013 and I have fortunately never been injured in a car accident \u2013 I think we make the most mistakes while driving because it is virtually impossible to pay attention to everything we need to do, and it gets harder the faster you go.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, did you know that the speed limit on highways is calculated by figuring out how fast the fastest 15 percent of drivers drive, and then setting the limit at the lowest speed for that 15 percent? This is one of the things in the book I didn\u2019t know, though I often feel the speed limit on highways is too high for the amount of traffic and the quality of the road. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>As Singer points out, before cars roads were used by all forms of transportation, including walking. But the car companies pushed the idea that the rules should favor cars, inventing the idea of the \u201cjaywalker\u201d and putting bicyclists and others at greater risk.<\/p>\n<p>We could design systems that favor walkers and bikers. Some countries in Europe do a nice job of this. We could also do a great deal more with public transit in cities. And we could stop making cars that make it very difficult for drivers to see pedestrians, such as the oversized SUVs that are common in U.S. cities.<\/p>\n<p>I live in a very walkable city in a state that purports to require cars to stop for all pedestrians and I take my life into my hands when crossing some major streets at a crosswalk with the light in my favor.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s much worse elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>Singer doesn\u2019t stop with the systems that underlie the 42,000 traffic deaths each year in the U.S., a number that increased during the pandemic. She looks at many other kinds of problems that have systemic roots, from airplane crashes caused by a known defect to the errors that led to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown to deaths in hospitals.<\/p>\n<p>She talks about things that should be regulated and about the use of tort law (personal injury and product liability suits) to push companies to do a better job of protecting their customers. This is another area I know well, since I spent years working on publications that dealt with product liability and regulation. Her takes are very accurate.<\/p>\n<p>What may have impressed me most about the book was her section on prevention, which included a discussion of falling. There is a great deal of concern in the world about elderly people and falls, because the injuries can be quite serious and even fatal.<\/p>\n<p>But the response is not to tell people \u201cdon\u2019t fall.\u201d That\u2019s impossible. Everybody falls. You\u2019re going to trip on the sidewalk or miss a step going downstairs or even faint.<\/p>\n<p>Singer\u2019s solution is the same as mine: teach people how to fall. I\u2019ve been saying this for years and have even done a little of it. There are some very basic rules, such as tuck your chin so you don\u2019t hit the back of your head and don\u2019t try to break your fall with your hand and wrist alone \u2013 use your whole forearm.<\/p>\n<p>Hitting the back of your head causes concussions. Wrists break easily; forearms don\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever read a book before that managed to incorporate my pedestrian rights attitude (and rage at car culture), my legal reporting experience, and my Aikido background.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I highly recommend <i>There Are No Accidents<\/i>. It\u2019s time to change the idea that certain kinds of risks are acceptable and time to stop putting the responsibility for minimizing those risks on individuals.<\/p>\n<p>We can have safe roads, safe products, safe underlying systems, but we have to begin by deciding we won\u2019t tolerate so many deaths that could be prevented. Given that we\u2019re apparently on track to \u201ctolerate\u201d the number of deaths the country suffered on September 11 every week due to our lack of good public health polices on the pandemic, I suspect it will be hard to get people to understand that we don\u2019t have to put up with so much suffering.<\/p>\n<p>It was, in fact, my rage over the indifference to the Covid death rate that motivated me to pick up Singer\u2019s book. Now I\u2019m thinking that we have to address many more defective systems.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, I\u2019ve been putting \u201caccidents\u201d in scare quotes because that\u2019s Singer\u2019s theory: these things aren\u2019t accidents. We can build systems that minimize the risk from human mistakes \u2013 the kind of mistakes everyone makes. We don\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not an accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I read nonfiction, I usually have one of three responses: Wow, that\u2019s interesting. I never thought about it like that before. Some of this is interesting, but I disagree with parts of it. This book isn\u2019t worth my time \u2013 it is either so wrong as to be laughable or so simplistic as to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10],"tags":[590,589],"class_list":["post-2264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews","tag-jessie-singer","tag-there-are-no-accidents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2264"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2266,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions\/2266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}