A Ticket is all One Woman Received after Plowing Into Another Person, Killing Her Unborn Child

The woman who caused this young woman to lose half of her leg and lose her unborn baby, she was 6 months along, received a ticket. She plowed into this woman going around 70 MPH in a 35 MPH zone. She was texting and speeding.

All of that damage and she received a ticket.

If you want to kill someone in America, do it in a car. You'll probably just get a ticket. We need much stricter laws. Why are we letting people off the hook for killing or maiming others when they are speeding, texting, tailgating? If they don't understand that these actions kill then they should not be given a license or they are too stupid to be driving.

Wake up America.

http://youtu.be/FZHRyk4AbFw

Car Crashes Are The #1 Cause of Death To Kids Ages 1-12

Car crashes are the singular biggest event claiming the lives of our youth.

Car crashes are the #1 KILLER of American kids ages 1-12. 

We all go out while pregnant and make sure we invest in the best car seat, a lot of us go to the local firehouse and have them properly install it. Then we labor for hours, sometimes days and we finally drive our precious newborn home as safely as possible.

If only we always drove home like we do on that drive.

As a mother I of course am trying to encourage other mothers and fathers to help spread the word. Our children are dying in mostly preventable crashes. 

We need to slow down, get off our phones, not tailgate and drive with more care. 

Keeping our kids safe goes beyond the car seat. It frustrates me that the media focuses on freak accidents and we all start to live in fear of events we truly can not predict. But these car crashes, a lot, can be avoided.

Talk about tailgating and using your phone at the dinner table. It is important. 

Confession Time: Sometimes I Talk on The Phone While Driving

I do NOT text and drive.

I rarely ever talk on my phone while driving.

BUT that is going to change because that is not good enough.

I will not be talking on my phone at all anymore while driving. Here is the even bigger step for me. I am going to ask my loved ones to please NOT call me while they are driving.

Now that is a tricky one.

My mom works long hours often we talk while she commutes home on her 45 minute drive, in a crappy tin car on a crowded California freeway.

Sometimes I call my husband, just to check in, even though I know he's on a freeway with my child and it makes me feel nervous knowing he'll have to answer it. I will ask him not to anymore.

I am going to send an email out to my friends telling that I will be doing this in the name of Fix The Toaster and to take it a step further honoring Distracted Driving awareness month.

They will roll their eyes and laugh at me.

But then I will tell them:

**The average text takes your eyes off the road for 5 seconds, so a texting driver is 23 times more likely to crash then a non-texting driver.

**Talking on your phone while driving is as dangerous as drunk driving. (Watch the MythBuster Confirm it) That should be enough right there!!!!!

**They will argue and say, well I use hands free, I will say: Hands free has been proven to be just as dangerous.

Today I did not talk on my phone at all. I drove nearly an hour to meet up with a friend for a hike.

I listened to music, I fidgeted but I know it's the right thing to do.

I hope you too can make this change. 

I get it, I really do.

Fast Facts on Speeding in Residential Areas: Moms Take Note

Some facts from Keep Kids Alive Drive 25. Their PSA says most people who speed are residents OR moms dropping off their kids at school. Come on Moms!!!

• On average, over 93 deaths occur each day from speeding vehicles. (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
• 500 children under 14 years-old were killed while walking in what should be their safe haven - their neighborhood. (NHTSA)
• Each year over 4,000 sons, daughters, mothers & fathers were killed while walking in neighborhoods or crossing streets. (NHTSA)
• Each year 2.5 million people are injured in motor vehicle incidents. (NHTSA)
• The death rate on residential streets is over twice that of
  highways - measured per miles driven. (NHTSA)
• Speeding Triples the Odds of Crashing. (AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety)
• A pedestrian hit in a 30 mph speed zone is 3 times more likely to die than one hit in a 25 mph zone. (General Estimates Database of Police Reported Accidents-NHTS

Modern Society Forgot About The Pedestrian

I do a lot of walking. Mostly because I have 3 kids and by walking I can usually strap one down into a stroller and I can just zone out and walk. Having just left the narrow, windy Hollywood Hills I was used to beaten up sidewalks and a few yahoos cruising up the hills. It wasn't exactly family friendly.

Well now I live in a "family friendly" neighborhood. It does not have sidewalks. And it is not congested. The speed limit is 25. And most people do between 30 and 40.

It is beyond frustrating. I've talked to two women who have stopped walking their kids because they feel it is unsafe. And these are ballsy, cool women.

Our school has sent out a letter to us parents saying "we have a problem" that an area where parents are dropping off their kids is not safe.

People are speeding.

I sometimes walk thru town pushing my baby. I constantly feel as if I'm narrowly escaping being hit. Sometimes, I'll drive to The Rose Bowl and walk around there. Cars routinely fly by at 40.

I'm beginning to feel like we have lost the right, as human beings, to walk safely around. Now maybe it's because I live in LA and I'm paranoid ;)

But honestly, it feels as if our society has been built around cars and f$%^ you if you slow one down.

A great article by Alexander Friedman on LA.StreetsBlog.com addresses this. He says,

It’s time for City of L.A. to step-in, and to build the environment for people, not cars. It’s time to give our sidewalks the deserved width and aesthetics, implement decorative crosswalks, plant deciduous trees and creating buffer zones, build pedestrian plazas, and get rid of blight and concrete.

I’m an advocate for sustainable, family-friendly infrastructure, and decided to create renderings of improved sidewalks.

I like that he says, "pedestrians are treated like second-class citizens.."

I agree. Do you feel safe walking around your neighborhood?

I read recently, on Twitter, that there is a proposal in some European town to reduce the speed to 20 MPH. Traffic calming is a new phrase to me.

According to Wikipedia, In its early development in the UK in the 1930s, traffic calming was based on the idea of residential areas protected from through traffic.

I like that word protected.

We should protect ourselves from cars. We are fragile. Driving a car fast does not give you a big penis.

It does not make you a bad ass chick.

Being bad ass to me, is having the control to slow down and be courteous of life walking by.

My neighborhood is incredibly quiet, it should be filled with people walking around. But it is not due to people not feeling safe. That's a shame.

A friend of mine is a huge fan of walking, Alissa Walker is a well known blogger based out of LA who walks and takes public transportation. Her blog has a lot of insight into doing just that.

Compromising Safety for Seconds

A few days ago a woman passed me on the right, got in front of me and then got to the exit on the freeway 10 seconds before I did. She looked to be in her early 60's. I'm guessing she's a mother or a grandma.

As she sat at the light in front of me all I could think about was how she had just compromised my life, my babies and her life. For seconds.

Why are we rushing to get to the red light? Why do we rush to get somewhere, perhaps 15 minutes faster then we would if we just drove carefully and slowly.

BTW I was driving 65 MPH.

She was angry at me. Angry I wasn't going faster and she wanted to show me. The highway was quite clear, I could have been going faster. But like I have stated before I do not go above 65, I don't want to crash at high speeds. Do you?

Are we, as a society, just incredibly angry and so we get in our cars and put our aggression out here? Obviously living in LA I am in some pretty intense traffic and dealing with people who commute up to 3 hours. A day.

Perhaps, we are not meant to live this way.

Each post seems to go off onto another post but back to the title. It is not worth it, in my mind, to compromise the safety of others just so you can get somewhere faster. Like I tell people who are in my show. It's LA. There will be traffic, please do not call me and tell me you are stuck in traffic. There will probably be traffic.

A young woman visiting America was killed at the corner of Sunset Blvd. and La Brea a few years back. A man saw the light turning from yellow to red and instead of slowing down he sped ahead, ran the light and hit and killed the girl.

Every time I would head south on La Brea and see that light turning from yellow to red I could feel the manic "go, go" from the other cars but I made myself slow down. It's not worth it.