One Crash Shows How Reckless Car Drivers Ruin Kids’ Childhoods
We want our kids off their phones and reading books in the library. Too bad drivers don’t give a shit.
The latest example? Metropolitan Avenue. Forest Hills. A dappled afternoon. Two kids. One “Walk” sign. A reckless driver. Three millimeters from monstrous carnage.
Fair warning: the video below shows it all in graphic detail.
So what happened on Monday, Sept. 28? This is what we know: Just outside the frame, the kids’ mom was fumbling with her car, so the kids, seeing not only a “Walk” sign, but the white-rectangled carpet of a crosswalk in front of them, and that traffic was indeed stopped to allow them to cross safely, started to cross to the North Forest Park branch of the Queens Public Library.
The kids’ mom comes into the frame just as the children begin crossing.
Notice the double-parked FedEx truck. It plays a supporting, though uncredited, role in this drama.
The kids get to about three-quarters of the way across the two-way street when the driver of a massive Chevy pickup truck — which weighs more than two tons empty — ran the red light and kept on going, striking both kids before pulling over to the curb.
The mother, having seen the “every parent’s worst nightmare” leap from the pages of a gutter tabloid into real life, runs over in terror. If the sound of her screams don’t make you drive five miles per hour slower for the rest of your life, you obviously don’t believe in the concept of a heaven or hell.
The younger boy, hit a split-second after the other child, gets the worst of it: He’s thrown to the pavement like a rag doll, arms and legs are unnatural angles, and skids about 20 feet on his side. The other victim, in shock, gets to his feet immediately and joins the mom as they rush to the boy.
The driver has a brief moment of concern, but as the video cuts out, he is merely gesturing towards the intersection.
He is, in short, a scoundrel.
How do I know this? The NYPD offered this account to Streetsblog: “The 25-year-old male operator of a Chevrolet SUV reported that he was traveling westbound on Metropolitan Avenue with the green light when the 6-year-old male and 7-year-old male pedestrians ran across the street causing him to strike both pedestrians.”
But the video shows he did not have the green light. And the presence of pedestrians in a crosswalk with the light should not cause anyone to do anything but smile and wave.
And you don’t only have to believe the cops. A witness to the aftermath, Juliana Zakowski, told me that the driver was initially concerned for the kids’ well-being, but his “demeanor changed completely” when the video of the crash was shown to him.
“He said, ‘Fuck, this makes me so mad! They just ran out, I had the light,'” Zakowski told Streetsblog.
On the plus side, cops on the scene didn’t buy it: The driver was issued a summons for failure to yield to pedestrians, said an NYPD spokesperson, who declined to provide the driver’s name.
The aftermath of the crash challenges my understanding of my fellow humans: When the video was posted on social media, many anonymous commenters blamed the mother for not holding her childrens’ hands as they crossed a street — in a crosswalk and with the light — inches away from her.
“Mom should’ve never let the kids cross alone,” posted a loathsome figured hiding behind the screen name stravduhgod. “They’re obviously too young to be crossing on their own.”
Other people said and thought such things, too. These are people who want to shift the blame from a reckless car driver, or a badly designed two-way road that encourages FedEx drivers to double-park, onto pedestrians doing what pedestrians are supposed to do: cross at the light, with a crosswalk. Such commenters are also part of a culture that blinds us to the literal elephant in the room — the gargantuan size, and unsafe blind spots, of the vehicles that our elected officials allow to ply streets filled with our kids.
Because [checks Big Auto balance sheets] a few deaths are the cost of doing business in this country.
I’m not alone in believing that this video — which depicts just one of the 200-plus reported crashes in New York City on Sept. 28 — is a microcosm of what has gone wrong with our understanding of safety and the world we have created for our kids.
Worse, such reactions are a self-own: Today’s BARNYs — the dinosaurs who scream at community board meetings that they are “Born And Raise New Yorkers” — are often bemoaning how we’ve lost the “good ol’ days” in this city. But, tell me friend, weren’t the “good ol’ days” when kids could walk to the library to read books all by themselves? You can’t complain about “helicopter parents” and then turn around and complain that they don’t hover enough.
Obviously, some people in Forest Hills get it. A few days after the crash, a local resident, Carly Tribull, emailed me because she was angry at some of the comments she saw.
“As a new parent, I desperately want my child to have an independent childhood, off screens, and be able to walk to her own library!” she wrote me.
“One of the reasons I’ve chosen to stay in New York City instead of fleeing for the suburbs is because I grew up in the suburbs, and I remember how terrible it was having to have my parents drive me everywhere,” she added. “Here, [my daughter will] have culture at her fingertips! Museums, concerts, art exhibitions — and she’ll be able to get to it all by taking transit. But for her to get to that point as a teenager, she’ll need to build independence as a child. You remember the ‘Sesame Street’ bit where the little girl has to remember the ‘loaf of bread, container of milk, and stick of butter’ to get from the store? That’s what I want my kid to be able to do. And libraries! Libraries are a gift for children. The library where the collision occurred is a five-minute walk away — easily something an 8-year-old should be able to do on their own.
“We keep talking about wanting kids to be off screens and to be more resilient,” she added. “Well, if we want that, we need our streets to be safe for them so that they can explore. I’ll teach her never to trust cars, to look both ways, to only cross when she has the walk sign, and to have her head on a swivel, but that’s not enough. … The entire street needs to be redesigned to be safer for pedestrians of all ages. The answer can’t just be, ‘Never let your kids go out alone at any age’ or to blame parents when these collisions happen. We should be raging at the city and the car-centered infrastructure that leads to them.”
Pedro Rodriguez, another area resident and street safety advocate, was also appalled at some of his neighbors’ attitudes.
“I wonder what we have traded our children’s independence for,” he wrote in a sort-of open letter to his neighbors. “What did we gain? So that we can feel like big men driving fast in unnecessarily large cars? To save five minutes on a commute? To avoid walking a couple of blocks?
“Even as a kid, I roamed my hometown unsupervised. Many of you likely did the same; if not, your parents probably did (go ask them),” he added.
He also made the same pitch I always make: stop blaming the victims of the car-dominated world we’ve created. Instead, how about working to change it?
“This incident highlights [that] our streets are inherently dangerous,” he wrote. “When you finally decide to give your child a little independence — just the chance to cross a road ahead of you by a handful of feet — they can get hurt or die, and you will be blamed for it.
“Do we really expect our children to act like adults,” he said, “just so adults can act like children?”
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