Imagine that you get hit by a car when you’re trying to cross a busy road in a place where you can’t even see the nearest crosswalk. You’re airlifted to a hospital for treatment of your injuries.
And before you leave, you get a traffic ticket.
Yes, that really happened.
You can hear people talk about how our built environment discriminates against pedestrians, and how engineers are trained to build for cars rather than people. You can read about how law enforcement is biased in favor of people who drive over people who walk.
But nothing has quite as much impact as actually seeing the things you’re talking about. In this video, photographer Jay Mallin shows us the place in Virginia where not one but two men were struck by drivers when trying to cross a four-lane road, a couple of hours apart on the same day. In both cases, the injured pedestrians were charged by the police with the offense of “careless interference with traffic.”
Mallin’s video does a great job of illustrating just how bleak the landscape is for pedestrians, and just how absurd our current priorities are. Watch.
(First seen on TBD.com.)
