Once upon a time…
Motorist – "Hello, killed anything?" Sportsman – "No, have you?"
Found in the transportation section of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Display caption: Like railroads, trolleys, buggies, horses and ships, automobiles kill and injure people. In 1913, more than 4,000 people died in car accidents. But the 1930s, more than 30,000 people died every year. In an effort to lower accident and death rates, safety advocates stressed the Three Es: engineering, enforcement and education. Since most safety advocates—like most Americans—assumed that careless people were the cause of wrecks, early safety efforts focused on educating drivers and pedestrians, rather than designing and producing safer automobiles and highways.
I totally had to save that picture. So. Awesome.
“…safety advocates…assumed that careless people were the cause of wrecks, early safety efforts focused on educating drivers and pedestrians, rather than designing and producing safer automobiles and highways.”
We’ve clearly turned that around, haven’t we? Our motor vehicles and roads are as idiot-proof as possible, yet we seem to turn out better and better idiots every year. Rather than teach them to be better drivers, we build Nerf highways and Nerf cars. Then the same rationale gets applied to bicyclists, perhaps with the caveat that they’re not smart enough to educate in the first place, so they require specially designed Nerf facilities too.
All this ignores the simple reality that it ain’t a Nerf world out there. It’s full of sharp edges and hard objects, and the very best way to deal with them is to learn how to better avoid them.