How Cars Victimize the Old and Young
Last week, 37-year-old Amy Marie Delettre, of Raleigh, North Carolina, was killed by a driver in the town of Cary, right outside Raleigh where I was born.
It’s nauseating to read the tributes offered by her brothers.
“According to them, Amy Delettre was not just a great sister but also a cherished friend and, at times, even assumed the role of a mother figure, displaying deep care for everyone in her life,” WRAL reported.
The article says she loved sports, comic cons, and was unapologetically opinionated.
“Fiercely passionate,” her brother Brian Delettre reflected in the article. “I think that would be an accurate way to describe her.”
According to the article, Amy Delettre was crossing an intersection when she was struck by 82-year-old Richard Yoneoka.
We cannot numb ourselves to the genocide of people killed by cars in this country. Utterly innocent pedestrians like Amy, guilty of nothing more than wanting to cross the street, are splattered every single day -- so much so, that it hardly constitutes news.
Make no mistake. Amy’s death, like that of nearly 45,000 others killed by motorists every year, is not just a tragedy. It’s an injustice. One that is the result of deliberate policy choices we make in the way we design cities and towns round the automobile rather than the human being.
Crossing the street should not be a life-threatening activity. And it is radical that we’ve allowed it to become one.
Killings like Amy’s are commonplace. But I think this situation sheds unique light on the way both the killed and the killer can be considered victims of our car-centric dystopia.
The driver who killed Amy is 82 years old. One’s first thought is probably that he shouldn’t have been driving. And that’s true. But what choice does he have? If Cary, NC is anything like any other town in America, I’m guessing it’s impossible to walk anywhere -- let alone as an 82-year-old -- and public transit either doesn’t exist or may as well not.
How, then, can we reasonably blame an 82-year-old man for accidentally killing someone with his car? We know 82-year-olds, for the most part, should not be operating dangerous heavy machinery. Yet we design our towns in such a way that we leave them no choice.
Either the elderly must drive in order to access their most basic needs -- thus threatening themselves and anyone in their path -- or be reduced to immobility, unable to go anywhere or do anything without someone else driving them.
I feel bad for that old man because I am sure he did not intend to kill that young woman. I am sure he would have preferred to use his legs or some safer form of transportation to get where he needed to go. But he couldn’t do that, because our infrastructure didn’t allow him.
Now an innocent woman is dead. Her family is bereaved. And a largely innocent old man will go to jail for a crime that, in my eyes, belongs to our Department of Transportation.
As baby boomers continue to wrinkle and drive, I wonder how many grandparents will die in prison, and how many children will be buried, because we have decided cars deserve more protection than human beings?
