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Want to end traffic violence in the United States? Tell the stories of its victims.
Here at Streetsblog, we routinely advocate for dedicated, hardened infrastructure that encourages people to get out of their cars and onto trains, bikes, and walking paths. The idea is to create transportation systems that don’t rely on the goodwill of individual car drivers in order to function.
The disturbing rise of hit-and-run crashes, however, presents a unique challenge for advocates who are reluctant to emphasize personal responsibility when promoting safer streets. These collisions produce victims whose lives cannot be fixed by a new bulb-out or greenway— and their stories are worth telling.
In this week’s Friday video, Streetsblog USA senior editor Kea Wilson sits down with Tiffanie Stanfield, who founded the non-profit organization Fighting H.A.R.D. (Hit and Run Driving) after a car driver murdered her sister, Jameca, in 2016.
Wilson and Stanfield discuss the impact of hit-on-runs on underprivileged communities, the trauma of driving past the scene of a crash on a still-unsafe street, and much more. When Stanfield asks how Wilson might encourage people affected by hit-and-run drivers but still feel unheard, the Streetsblog editor emphasizes the political significance of telling victims’ stories:
The voices of people who have had their lives rocked by these kinds of tragedies — those are the things that really move the needle.
When you talk about countries like the Netherlands, which we think of as these paradises of biking and walking where everybody’s really safe, the way they got to where they are was not through white papers and reports and people who had fancy degrees on their walls. … It was through a movement called Stop the Child Murder. It was through people standing up and saying ‘We’re murdering children, and we need to stop.’ It was protests in the streets.
You can watch the full conversation between Wilson and Stanfield below:
