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You Gotta Want It

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Nobody really wants to win this thing. Only one number turned over in the entire month of April with just a single traffic fatality in the region and Springfield recording yet another month without a homicide.

  
The trend extrapolation, as city lover Chris Martenson might say it, would show Springfield with a nearly 70% drop in homicides. I wouldn’t expect the trend to continue, I would expect the year over year pattern to more or less resume with the city probably ending the year somewhere around double digits, though I’d love to be wrong. Needless to say, if the numbers were reversed and the city were on track for a 70% increase in homicides I would expect to see it plastered all over the media. Unfortunately, in reality world this is mostly a non story. 

  
I get it. Writing about who didn’t murder whom doesn’t give a reporter much to dig into.

  
What has been astounding to me has been the massive number of horrific crashes in which no one dies. April was not short at all on “jaws of life extrications”, just on deaths. If I had the resources and/or the media were able to generate accurate data consistently, I would love to produce a crash versus gunshot tally with some sort of corresponding injury scale; perhaps a reverse util. Those numbers would be way more impressive than the 10 to 1 ratio car related deaths have on homicides as the scoreboard stands right now to close out the month of April.

2 is Enough for 22

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  Maps represent place. If you map a series of events you are probably trying to connect “place” to those events in some meaningful way. I have a hypothesis regarding place and danger specifically as it connects to cities: despite the fact that a disproportionate number of murders occur in cities they are not place related, but behavior or identity related. Expressed more broadly, if a person is killed in “a drug deal gone bad” at the corner of Sheldon Street and Main Street in Springfield that person is dead NOT because he was on the corner of Sheldon and Main Streets, but because he was engaged in a drug deal. If an old man is ambushed in his driveway it is probable that the ambushees had him in mind as a target because of who he was, not because of where he was. 

The significance of this is huge. Many people believe that city living is not a realistic option for them because it entails a perceived enormous increased risk related to crime, but despite the media hype, most victims of urban crime are not random, they’re not necessarily even urbanites as we have seen this week. The two examples given above are not hypotheticals, they are the backstories, according to media reports, of the two, count ’em, two, murders which have taken place in Springfield this year. 

  
Right on cue WWLP-TV, “22 News” as they prefer to be known, creates an interactive feature with links to data on both murders. Again, the implication being that these murders are place related despite the fact that it is fairly obvious that they are not. On the other hand, 21 people, 10 times the number of people murdered in Springfield in 2016, have died in the WWLP viewing area on the highways and byways of greater Springfield; no map, no data links. Keep in mind that 8 people died in the first 8 days of the new year in the area, all reported on their station, and that did not spark any sort of interest in interconnectedness. Now two people have been murdered in just over three months and…BAM…interactive murder tracker here we go; guaranteed they were waiting for murder number two all this time to unleash this “OMG, violence is out of control” interactive map.

My hypothesis has a corollary: road deaths ARE place related. This one isn’t really mine, and it isn’t really just a hypothesis. This one is established fact. Rural roads, exurbs and stroads are more dangerous than urban streets. The highest death rates per vehicle mile are in the lowest density places, the lowest are in the highest density places. When you put my hypothesis together with this fact what you get is the paradox that people move away from walkable cities, (where what cars are present tend to move more slowly) to auto-dependent places (where not only is more driving necessary but more driving at high speed takes place) specifically due to concerns about safety and end up putting themselves and their children in much greater danger.   

 
The numbers are staggering. Over 10 times the number of deaths compared to “urban violence” so far this year, and I would venture to say based on my constant perusal of the news for the Death Race 2016 feature, perhaps 50 times as many people seriously injured, and the media never puts any of these events together. Ever. The “stranger danger” element is perhaps the most significant; I am willing to concede, because I think it is demonstrably true, that I am in more danger relative to crime living in the neighborhood I do. What I would hasten to add is that the increased risk is almost immeasurably small, like my increased risk of health problems because I’m not particularly fond of kale. The chances a stray bullet could enter my home, and my cerebellum, following a drug deal gone bad are greater here than in a suburban place. That kind of thing can happen, that kind of thing has happened. But I’m not going to flee a million to one danger to live in a place where my increased use of the automobile puts me at a “stranger danger” risk which, just in this region in 3 months has taken the lives of 16 people. That’s not 16 traffic deaths, that’s 16 people dead because a stranger crashed into them.

Thank you WWLP for proving just how blind the media is to the basic facts regarding all of this. I’ll let our two “death lists” speak for themselves.


Theirs:

January 25, 2016 – Juan Zayas (71) – 38 Brookline Avenue

March 26, 2016 – Jeffrey Freitas (20) – Main and Sheldon Streets


Mine:

March 31, 2016 Death 21 (motorist)
Location: 708 Chestnut Street, Springfield MA
Age: 26
Gender: Male
March 27, 2016 Death 20(motorist)
Location: 28 Mcknight Street, Springfield MA 
Age: 51

Gender: Female

March 23, 2016 Death 19 (Pedestrian-worker directing traffic)
Location: Route 190, Somers, CT 
Age: 52
Gender: Male
March 22, 2016 Death 18 (motorist)
Location: Warren Road, Brimfield MA 
Age: 51
Gender: Female
March 18, 2016 Death 17 (bicyclist)
Location: Sargaent Street, Holyoke, MA 
Age: 64
Gender: Male
March 9, 2016 Death 16 (Motorist)
Location: Route 202 and East Street, South Hadley, MA
Age: 83
Gender: Male
February 17, 2016 Death 15 (Pedestrian)
Location: 77 Ella Grasso Turnpike, Windsor Locks, CT
Age:68

Gender: Female

February 22, 2016: Deaths 13 and 14 (Motorists)
2 killed in Montague car crash; Route 63 reopened to traffic

Location: 250 Federal Street, Montague, MA
Age: 24/24

Gender: Male/Female

February 20, 2016: Death 12 (Motorcyclist)
Montgomery man dead after crash in Huntington
Location: Route 20, Huntington MA
Age: 22
Gender: Male
February 18, 2016: Death 11 (Motorist)
Location: 347 Sewall Street Ludlow MA
Age: 25

Gender: Male

February 17, 2016 Death 10 (Pedestrian)
Location: Route 5, Enfield CT
Age:63
Gender: Male
January 30, 2016: Death 9 (Motorist)
Location: Chicopee
Age: 19
Gender: Female
January 8: Deaths 7-8(motorists)
Location: Route 20, West Springfield MA
Age: 50,24

Gender: Male/Male

January 8: Death 6 (motorist)
Location: I-90 Mass Pike West Springfield MA
Age: 84

Gender: Male

January 4: Death 5 (motorist)

Location: Westfield Road, Holyoke MA

Age: 53
Gender: Female

January 4: Death 4(pedestrian)
Location: Granby Road, South Hadley MA
Age:68

Gender: Male

January 2: Death 3 (motorist)
Location: Main Street, Agawam MA
Age: 48

Gender: Male

January 1: Deaths 1-2 (motorists)
Location: intersection of Hampshire and Chestnut Streets, Holyoke MA

Ages: 48, 52
Gender: Female, Male

Around the First Turn

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As January of 2016 comes to an end, it’s time to check in on “Death Race 2016” to see how things stand. As of today 9 people have died in car related crashes in Greater Springfield, none within the borders of the city itself despite the fact that the city has more streets and has the highest total vehicle miles traveled in the region. 8 of the victims were motorists themselves, 1 was a pedestrian, 6 were men, 3 were women. 

From a media perspective the year began with 9 deaths in 9 days (one pedestrian death occurring on New Years’s Eve) and yet not a single news report from any of the 3 major regional news outlets (Masslive/Republican, WWLP, WesternMassNews) ever mentioned the particularly deadly beginning of the new year. Also, not a single death was given an ordinal number, as in “this was the #th roadway fatality of the year” and not a single article on any of the fatalities referenced any of the other fatalities. I will say that the crash on Route 20 in West Springfield did get mentioned when there was a non-fatal crash the next day on the same section of the roadway.

On the other hand, there was 1 murder in Springfield. While I realize statistics don’t work this way, it was curious that Springfield has averaged a murder every 25 days (I know that because the media saturates us with such statistics) over the last few years and the year’s first murder took place on the 25th. Every news source reported it as the first homicide of the year: 

    
 
Reports are that the deceased was a victim of an ambush and that he was clearly the intended target of the shooting.

The purpose of the data here is to give a more complete picture of dangerousness as it relates to living typology. That is to say that people have said to me on many occasions that one reason they choose to not live in an urban neighborhood is due to concerns about safety. I have pointed out that published, peer reviewed papers have shown that “stranger danger” increases as you move further from a metro center. However, as none of those studies specifically targeted my own metropolitan area, I am doing the best I can to collect that data.

 My hypothesis is this: Most of the danger which people associate with urban areas is actually behavior and relationship connected in a causal way, whereas the place related correlations are not causal. At the same time, living in an auto centered place is actually dangerous in and of itself due to the death and mayhem caused by automobiles moving at high speeds and on certain road types.

Some examples of this might be that a drug dealer could be shot on the same street corner as a drug dealer was shot two years ago, but his shooting was not caused by being on that street corner, but rather by dealing drugs. A person walking by that street corner and being shot accidentally as two drug dealers try to shoot one another would be a place related death as drug dealers are more likely to be on that street corner, apparently, than some other one. The same holds for domestic violence, if a man murders his ex girlfriend then the death is not place but relationship connected, but if a bullet from the abuser’s gun travels through a wall and kills an unintended victim, that would be place related.

On the auto end of the spectrum, people drive the way they do, at the speeds they do, and among the obstacles they do because of the place in which they are driving and therefore any death due to a crash would be place related. Even a drunk leaving a bar and wrapping a tree around a pole is place related because living within walking distance of the bar on a street where cars drive slowly diminishes the likelihood of car crash death substantially. 

Blind Bloody Ignorance

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Here is what I knew going into this: I live in the least violent region of the country and, even here, violent crime has still gone way down over the last two decades; I live in the state with the fewest fatalities per vehicle mile; and I have read in published, peer reviewed papers that “stranger danger” increases as one gets further from a metropolitan center primarily due to the combination of the dangers of driving on high speed undivided roads and the lack of sidewalks. Saying that, I really don’t know precisely how those things relate to one another with respect, specifically, to the place I live.

My frustration with the local media has grown over the last few years as it has become clear to me that one of the greatest obstacles to my hometown experiencing any kind of renaissance is the inaccurate perception of how dangerous it is to live, work, or even visit Springfield for the average person. My primary complaint with the media is that they, seemingly intentionally, fail to comprehend or at the very least fail to communicate, the endemic nature of the violence on which they report while at the same time their style of reporting creates a narrative which expands the threat in the minds of members of the public. On the other hand, the vehicular carnage connected to car crashes, and pedestrian killing and maiming are reported, but never in an interconnected way, never ever in the form of an on-going narrative, and never in such a way that the very real connection to auto-oriented PLACE is ever established.

  
This creates a type of paradox. Criminal violence and murder, while often occurring in an urban environment, actually relate much more closely to behavior and relationships than to place, but the public is lead to believe that merely being in a place exposes them to that danger in a significant way. Conversely, the place many of them have run to to in order to escape the nearly non existent danger, the auto-centered areas of the region, and the obligatory behavior which that entails, extreme amounts of motoring, put them at much higher risk of death and serious injury.

Having grown tired of this I decided weeks ago to track these two currents contemporaneously. I would keep track of traffic fatalities in the official region in which I live, the Springfield, Massachusetts “NECTA”, while at the same time I would rely on the local media to track homicides in the city and that would finally allow me to speak using at least some evidence and data to back up my narrative on the local level because, you see…

I really have no idea how many people die around here in automobile crashes.

I’m in the same state as everyone else. I live in a media bubble in which I can tell you, or find in an instant on Google, the number of homicide victims in my city. But the number of traffic fatalities in my region? No idea. I can find it for several communities using “city data”, perhaps I could find it in some obscure report from the local planning commission, or I could find in both a Massachusetts and a Connecticut state report some data which is correlated to NECTA or to SMSA and which breaks it down year by year. Maybe. But the number of murders in Springfield? Every news outlet provides a running tally at every new occurrence AND at the end of the year they all publish stories with maps, electronic push-pins, and links to each event AND comparisons to last year’s number and perhaps even comparing those numbers to the numbers of neighboring cities. 

So I’m flying blind here.

And this is what has happened: Over the first 8 days of the new year there have been 8 fatalities in the region with perhaps twice that many people being taken to hospitals in “critical condition” with “serious injuries”. There have been a handful of head on crashes, a pedestrian killed, but not one person has died from a crash which took place in the city nor have there been any homicides. And the media has not made note of any of it except to report every event as a discrete occurrence. If one removes the arbitrary barrier of the new year, 9 people have died in 9 days in a region of fewer than 700,000 people. 

And I have no idea what that means. Because I’ve never put all this together before either. 

I honestly don’t think this is normal, but I don’t know enough to know if it is a statistically significant number of deaths in terms of how this…what I assume is an anomalous cluster…relates numerically to the “usual” total of auto-related deaths in the region. 

And that is the point of my Death Race 2016 feature here at Rational Urbanism. I am going to make the links and keep the data which the media ignores. As of right now the score is:

Roadways 8

Springfield 0

You see, I know that the big fat goose egg for Springfield homicides isn’t statistically significant. The city has averaged about 15 murders per year, year over year, for a decade or more. I know that those murders, when they come, will be more or less a dozen young, mostly Black or Hispanic men engaged in the drug trade or involved in gangs, a small number of women whose partners were “bad breaker-uppers”, and at most one or two outliers; last year a food delivery guy, the year before a teen at a party, maybe an innocent bystander in a drive by, or someone shot in a dispute at a bar.

But I’ve gone into this not really having any clue about the other side of the equation, and that, my friends, is the whole point.