Canadian terrorism, an Alphabet City hit-and-run - and the dehumanisation of the streets

It’s one of the excitements – and stresses - of my work that from time to time I have days like October 22. I found myself at the end of the day going to bed in a city – Ottawa – and a country – Canada - that at the start of the day I’d had little inkling I might visit soon.

Canada's parliament, the morning after the rampage

I was sent to the Canadian capital because of the shooting dead earlier that day of Nathan Cirillo, a Canadian soldier who had been on guard at Canada’s national war memorial. The gunman responsible – who seems to have been an Islamist jihadist – then ran into the Canadian parliament building, firing his gun. The parliament’s sergeant-at-arms and others shot him dead. Many streets were still closed when I arrived and the lockdown of parliament hill – imposed in case there was more than one gunman – hadn’t been entirely lifted.

However, an aspect of the stories I wrote over the ensuing few days struck me especially strongly because of my interest in safe streets. The shooting caused particular concern because it came only two days after another attack in which Martin Couture-Rouleau deliberately drove his car at two Canadian soldiers in a car park in Quebec, killing one, Patrice Vincent.

The immediate, unequivocal – and justified – condemnation of Couture-Rouleau’s act made me reflect on why in New York and some other rich-world cities even clearly deliberately dangerous driving often attracts far less censure.

The temporary press pass that got me into parliament in
Ottawa. I heard unequivocal condemnations of Martin
Couture-Rouleau's behaviour - of a kind I'd be surprised
to hear for Jose Henriquez's similar act.

The point resonated with me all the more because in the days before heading to Ottawa I’d been thinking about Jose Henriquez. Mr Henriquez was irritated that a cyclist took the lane ahead of him one day last year, on a narrow street through Alphabet City on New York’s Lower East Side. He then deliberately rammed him from behind, according to reports of witness accounts. He sent the cyclist tumbling over his bike’s handlebars and head-first into the road. He drove around the cyclist – who was injured but survived - and fled.

Just before I went to Ottawa, Steve Vaccaro, the attorney for the victim, announced the district attorney for Manhattan – Cy Vance – had dropped all assault charges against Henriquez. His only punishment will be a $250 fine for leaving the scene of an “accident," as the law deems this assault.

Both Henriquez and Couture-Rouleau had deliberately used their cars to ram other, vulnerable human beings with the intention of causing them injury or death. Couture-Rouleau’s act was worse for having been premeditated, politically motivated and having led to the victim's death. But it was far from clear why one act was roundly condemned in the Canadian parliament and the other treated as little more serious than a technical parking violation.

Pedestrians cross the 1st Avenue bike lane, with the light.
I'd like to think I'd never again cut off a pedestrian crossing
late - but I fear I might.

The two acts, I came to realise, lay on a continuum of deliberate bad behaviour in traffic. It starts with the kind of pre-meditated murder that Couture-Rouleau carried out but goes down as far as acts in which even I find myself engaging. I occasionally start riding when the traffic light turns green even when there’s a pedestrian crossing against the light still in the crosswalk. I do it mainly because I know the pedestrian will hold up motor vehicles and hence represents a chance for me to get a head-start on the accelerating drivers. But I know my practice also reflects my irritation with the way some pedestrians cross when I’m near the front of a line of traffic. I see some looking at me, appearing to calculate, “It’s OK – he’s only a cyclist,” and striding out.

Couture-Rouleau’s attack has, it seems to me, far more in common with other bad behaviour on the roads than might initially appear. To carry out his attack, he will have had mentally to demote Warrant Officer Vincent from being a human being with thoughts, feelings and relationships to a mere symbol of what he wanted to attack – the Canadian military. Jose Henriquez was presumably engaged in a similar mental process when he deliberately accelerated his car behind the stopped cyclist – as witnesses attest he did – and drove at him. The cyclist must have shifted from being a fellow human being into being a mere obstacle, something that could be struck with impunity.

Henriquez's behaviour is certainly not especially unusual.

In 2011, a London bus driver abandoned his bus full of passengers, got out to confront me and smashed out of my hand the phone with which I was recording him. My offence had been to take a picture of him blocking the cycle box by a set of traffic lights.

Some years before that, I was involved in an incident very similar to the one that faced Henriquez's victim. I swore at a motorist that was following me dangerously closely down a street in Brixton, South London. I let the car pass me at the next break in the parked cars but he stopped immediately after passing me. The passenger jumped out to confront me and told the driver to reverse at me.

"We'll be coming for you with a gun next time," one shouted as they drove off after I took shelter on the pavement (sidewalk, American readers).

The floral tributes by Canada's Cenotaph sum up the horror
at the events I covered. Politically-motivated violence
retains - rightly - a capacity to shock that deliberate
traffic violence seems to have lost.

I’ve had many drivers deliberately manoeuvre across my path in irritation that I was in front of them, been dangerously tailgated many, many times - including when with my children - and suffered more times than I could possibly recount passes so close they were clearly meant to send a message. I imagine that most regular commuter cyclists have similar experiences to recount.

I’m also confident that far more fatal and serious crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians have a genesis similar to Henriquez's case than is generally acknowledged. It’s luck rather than the perpetrators’ judgement that none of the incidents I’ve suffered led to serious injury. It must seem far more acceptable in a police interview room to say one didn't see the pedestrian or cyclist one hit than to admit one deliberately drove at the victim out of irritation.

Nor are there clear boundaries to the behaviour that results from this mental dehumanisation of other people on the roads. It’s emerged during the past week that New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles has voided the traffic tickets that were issued to Ahmad Abu-Zayedeha for running over Allison Liao, a three-year-old, as she walked through a crosswalk in Flushing, Queens, in October last year. Video from another driver’s dashboard camera clearly shows that Abu-Zayedeha turned fast and negligently through the crosswalk and cannot have looked properly. He continues to insist, despite the evidence, that Allison broke away from her grandmother, who was accompanying her, and that the collision was unavoidable.

News of the DMV’s action has brought back to my mind a mental picture of Allison’s father at a protest I attended last year to call for better street safety. He stood quietly at the back of the crowd, weeping and holding up a picture of his daughter, as Amy Cohen, mother of Sammy Cohen-Eckstein, described her grief over Sammy, her 12-year-old son. Sammy had been killed only a few weeks before on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn.

It is impossible to imagine that Abu-Zayedeha could have driven as he did – or reacted as he appears to have done since – if he had been fully aware of the humanity of the people he was putting at risk by paying so little attention.

A speeding BMW driver hit and killed Nicholas Soto, 14,
at this corner in Red Hook in June. It wasn't terrorism
and wasn't deliberate. But it surely wouldn't have happened
if the driver had fully recognised Nicholas' humanity.

Yet the failure so far of any law enforcement or licensing authority to take any action over Abu-Zayedeha’s behaviour – and the Manhattan District Attorney’s dropping of the assault charges against Henriquez – illustrate the nature of the problem. Law-enforcement authorities in many countries seem almost explicitly to endorse the idea that drivers can’t be expected to behave responsibly – or rein in their violence or negligence – when behind the wheel of a car. I've seen cyclists suggest on the internet in the wake of the Henriquez decision that the only answer if threatened in such a fashion is violence, given the official passivity. The implications for everyone – pedestrian, cyclist or motorist - if such a sentiment gains ground are alarming.

Couture-Rouleau’s act was certainly more wicked than Henriquez's and I will lose no sleep over his fate. After crashing his car during a police chase, he emerged brandishing a knife and was shot dead. But it is also clear that Canadians are regarding Couture-Rouleau’s act in a different light because of its explicitly political context. It is certainly unimaginable that the Manhattan DA would be taking such a lenient view of Hernandez’s actions if his victim had been, say, a police officer, Henriquez had been an observant Muslim and he had been heard to shout the slogan, “Allahu Akbar!” as he drove at him.

There seems to be a vast range of circumstances where, short of such a clear ideological motivation, violence on the roads is understood, tolerated and, effectively, encouraged. Moral philosophers have warned since the time of the ancient Greeks of the consequences of allowing such amorality to flourish. New York City battled in the 1970s and 1980s with a culture where a range of other violent offences were treated with the same misguided tolerance as motoring violence is currently. Only when society and law enforcement officials start to treat the use of vehicles as weapons with the same seriousness they treat the use of guns will the problem have a chance of being properly resolved.

A Brooklyn Heights commuter, an untimely Queens death - and how attitudes to roads might be the least of our problems

I’ve come across few sights on New York City streets that excited such mixed feelings in me as the one I encountered one morning last month on Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights. Just in front of me in the cycle lane on the street, which fills up with cars and taxis every morning, was the only child – he was probably ten or 11 – I’ve ever encountered riding on his own to school in New York City on the road.

I was, on one level, hugely excited. It would be an enormous improvement for every city in the industrialised world if the queues outside schools in the morning were of children waiting to park their bikes, not sports utility vehicles waiting to double-park. The boy had clearly been thoroughly trained and looked attentively from side to side at every junction.

 

Clinton St at Atlantic Avenue: I was excited to see a child
cycling here - but also apprehensive

But I also, I’ll confess, felt fearful. Motorists are apt to turn left or right suddenly on Clinton St or lurch into the cycle lane to avoid a suddenly-stopped taxi.  Drivers are prone to driving through the slow-moving traffic texting or sending emails. Car doors are apt to spring open or pedestrians to step into the street without looking. Knowing my own concerns about using the street, I willed the young man to make it to school safely. He eventually did.

That young boy’s been back in my mind since I heard on Friday about another boy going to school elsewhere in New York who didn’t make it safely.

On Friday morning, Mauricio Osorio-Palaminos, a truck driver, drove his truck out of 61^st street in Queens left onto Northern Boulevard, cut well onto the side of the street for oncoming traffic and caught Noshat Nahian, eight, with the trailer’s rear wheels. Noshat, who was hurrying to school with his 11-year-old sister, died shortly afterwards in hospital.

The street Osorio-Palaminos was leaving was not, as far as I can tell, a designated truck route. Pictures showed his truck far over to the wrong side of the road. The driver was also the second in recent weeks to kill a pedestrian in New York City while driving commercially with a suspended licence.

 

The Invisible Visible Boy on a truck
meant to show cyclists how hard they are
to see. Let's hope New York's DoT trains
its drivers in spotting cyclists too.

Yet commenters on online news reports about the death homed in instead on police reports that Noshat had his hood up and was looking down when hit. There was abuse for his parents. One commenter said Noshat must have been looking for “suicide by truck”.

Noshat’s death is at least the 11^th of a pedestrian under 13 so far this year in New York. Many people’s instinctive reaction has been to blame the victims.

In November, I attended a rally in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, calling for enforcement of traffic laws after a speeding driver killed Lucian Merryweather, nine, on a sidewalk. The rally heard a brave and heartbreaking speech from the mother of Samuel Cohen Eckstein, 12, who died in October when a car hit him on a crosswalk on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. She was speaking a few days after what should have been Samuel’s bar mitvah.

Many internet commenters on Samuel’s death focused on how he was hit after going after a ball that had bounced into the street. They ignored how he had the light when he entered the crosswalk. Several cars stopped for him before a speeding van hit him.

 

A memorial where Lucian Merryweather died. I'd love
to take half the internet commenters on road safety
to this unspeakably sad spot.

The father of Allison Liao, three, who was killed in October crossing the street in Flushing, Queens, looked on, weeping, as Samuel’s mother spoke. Initial reports on Allison’s death focused on how she had allegedly broken away while crossing the road from her grandmother, who was holding her hand. Yet Allison’s family insist she was holding her grandmother’s hand – and the driver who hit her barged through the crosswalk when he should have yielded.

The circumstances of Noshat’s death are very similar to those surrounding the death in East Harlem in February of Amar Diarassouba, a seven-year-old. He also died under a truck’s rear wheels as he headed to school. Erik Mayor, a restaurateur whose business is near the crash site, despicably tried to blame that crash on Amar’s older brother, saying he “wasn’t paying attention.” The driver involved had, as in other cases, driven through a crosswalk when he should have yielded.

They’re stories that won’t surprise many adults who walk or cycle around New York City – or any other big city in the United States. When I cross streets on foot, vehicles constantly barge through crosswalks when I have the light in my favour. I have found myself caught unawares by the line a truck’s rear wheels have taken through a crosswalk and been forced to jump backwards out of the way.

On my bike, on the 1^st Avenue bike lane in Manhattan, I need constantly to look over my shoulder at westbound cross-streets, knowing that cars will try to turn across my path. I have to signal forcefully to drivers to stop if they’re behaving dangerously. I need the sixth sense of the experienced urban cyclist to spot the vehicles that are about to pull out without looking from a parking space.

There’s an invidious assumption that, if children can’t at least match my skills at navigating streets, they shouldn’t be on the streets at all. The attitude is sometimes reminiscent of the sexual harassment that faces single women in some places in southern Europe. Anyone silly enough to enter the environment, it seems to be assumed, is fair game for any untoward consequences. A responsible parent, it’s  assumed, transports his or her children by car, prioritising their safety over that of others.

A cyclist on 55th Street in Manhattan. Remember: if
anything bad happens to a kid in this traffic,
it's probably the kid's fault.

Looked at dispassionately, however, the adults are behaving like stereotypical children. Many of my closest calls are with drivers who simply lose patience with waiting and pull out without looking from a traffic line. Most parents try to teach their children the kind of patience that drivers who drive while using their mobile telephones haven’t learned. Children are encouraged to face up to their responsibilities – yet many commercial trucking companies seem to employ unlicensed drivers. The police seem to shirk their duty to hold the worst drivers accountable.

I’ve come across plenty of children taking road rules far more seriously than many adults. The boy pedalling down Clinton St was paying far more attention to road conditions than most of the motorists. Esme Bauer, a young woman from Fort Greene, was one of the most powerful speakers at the rally I attended in November.

Many of the adults seem to be products of recent decades when parents feared to teach their children to navigate the streets. Having grown up with parents scared to let them out on the streets, they now sit, sucking their teeth, in their cars. Why, they wonder, are these children wandering about on the streets? What are their parents thinking?

 

New York needs more children commuting like this -
but will it take the steps to get them?

It’s a cycle that it’s obvious needs to be broken. Enforcement, road layout and general attitudes all need to improve to rebalance streets policy in favour of the pedalling boy commuter of Clinton St and away from the bad drivers around him.

It’s a question that goes far beyond transport policy, however. The disdain with which I saw some internet commenters react to Noshat’s death toppled over, it seemed to me, into expressing a generalised contempt for the weak and powerless. It’s an ugly attitude at the best of times. In this case, it was being expressed the week before Christmas about a young Bangladeshi immigrant crushed by a truck as he headed to take part in his public school’s holiday play.

In a city where someone can accuse such a young man of wanting “suicide by truck,” I’m tempted to conclude that New York’s transport problems are, perhaps, only a symptom – albeit a serious one – of a wider social malaise.