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Our most basic form of transportation is an abject fucking failure. Because what else cab you call a system that demands 38,000, 39,000, 40,000 or more human lives every year as tribute, just to get us all from here to there.

Enough already!

It doesn’t matter whether you do everything right, or everything wrong. Fuck up badly enough in the right place, at the right time, and you can walk away. Do everything right, follow every law, dress up like a neon clown and light up your bike and person like a Christmas tree, and you can still lose your life to a drunk, a stoner, a distracted driver texting with their thumbs while they try to grip the wheel.

Wear a helmet, or don’t. It might protect your skull if you fall off your bike. But it doesn’t do a damn thing to protect your midsection or keep your limbs attached.

Drivers seem to think it’s some sort of magic talisman to ward off injury and evil sprits, equivalent to a seat belt or an airbag, encased in a steel frame. Yet it’s only designed to protect against impacts at a whopping 12.5 mph.

But that’s more protection than pedestrians get. They get a couple of parallel white stripes drivers are supposed to stop for, but usually don’t. Or a curb that’s somehow supposed to halt a four-wheeled ballistic missile from slamming into an outdoor diner or a daycare.

Forty-fucking-thousand people every year, give or take. That’s a small city. And that’s just in the US.

Add in all the other people killed in traffic violence in all the other countries in the world, and you’re up to nearly 1.2 million lives lost. That’s like a WMD somehow wiped Dallas, Texas off the face of the earth.

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