Paul Berton: Danger on our car-crazy streets: Can something good come from Boris Brott’s death?

People often look to make sense out of senseless tragedies.

And they regularly seek help in understanding it from the local newspaper.

The death this week of Boris Brott is no different. People are shocked and saddened and distraught. The community has lost a leader, a creative force, a part of its soul.

It isn't the first pedestrian death this year, as documented this week in The Spectator, and it may not be the last.

There have been serious pedestrian injuries this week, too. Thursday night, a man in his 60s was taken to hospital after being struck by a car in Stoney Creek. Friday morning, a 42-year-old pedestrian was struck on Upper Wentworth Street, suffering critical, life-threatening injuries.

And for what?

A dangerous driver? Ineffective safety precautions on our streets? Insufficient law enforcement?

A municipality that has put vehicles ahead of pedestrians? An automotive industry that still markets cars as toys rather than transportation?

Drivers, some with revoked licences, who weaponize vehicles?

Upstanding citizens who consider speeding necessary because they are in a rush." Others who think driving is a right, not a privilege?

Horn-honking, fist-wagging, road-raging outlaws infuriated because others stay within the speed limit?

And a general philosophy across the province and indeed the continent that prioritizes the fluid movement of single-occupant vehicles over all else?

Why, a half century after the heyday of the personal automobile, do we still tolerate this?

Why do we have so many one-way streets in Hamilton more than a decade after city council decided to eliminate many of them? Why do many development laws still insist on parking spaces for cars, but not many insist on traffic calming?

A city that is not safe for pedestrians is not the best place to raise a child and age successfully," to quote the city's vision statement.

As a community, we need to refocus on this. We owe it to the fallen and their families.

Yes, traffic needs to move efficiently, but how efficiently? Those definitions are changing as we examine progressive thinking and changes in other cities around the world.

After a century of giving ground to automobiles, many cities, including Hamilton, are starting to take some of it back - enhancing public transit, building better sidewalks and bikeways, planting trees, introducing traffic calming, and closing entire streets to cars and giving them to pedestrians.

Over the next weeks and months, The Spectator will examine it all, and ask experts, politicians, city administrators, and readers if it is enough.

Paul Berton is editor-in-chief at The Hamilton Spectator. pberton@thespec.com