It seems that every time a car strikes a pedestrian in Humboldt County, as seems to happen with alarming frequency, there are nearly invariably those who will instantly assume that the pedestrian must be at fault. Check the threads below — the very act of walking someplace, it seems, qualifies as suspicious behavior, to some.

This week the great radio show 99% Invisible takes us back to the 1920s, when cars first began to arrive on streets in great number. Pedestrians and cars were quickly at war with one another, in a very literal sense — people were being killed by the very fact that men and machine now shared the same roadway.

One of the most fascinating twists in the story is that the concept of “pedestrian recklessness” so in evidence today, was, in fact, invented by an automobile industry association as a counterweight to then-prevalent outrage over the rapid rise of cars on city streets. That, plus the related repurposing of the term “jaywalking” by a related industry group, secured the automobile’s eventual victory over the pedestrian.

Give this thing a listen. It’s fantastic. Beneath it, take a gander at the sheer number of auto-pedestrian collisions that have taken place over the last year in Humboldt County — or the ones that made the LoCO, anyway.  

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