Commentary
My daughters were born 65 years ago yesterday. Debra Joyce Donlevy and Donna Leslie Cline shared the same birthday and were fated to have their lives changed forever on the same night.
Debbie and Donna met in Phoenix in 1978. They became instant bff’s (best friends forever). Debbie was visiting relatives and Donna came with her to drive home to Carson City.
Neither made it. It was the typical Nevada rollover: A dark, two-lane highway with a soft shoulder; auto drifted right; driver over-corrected; wheel planted in the earth; car rolled.
Both girls, then 19, were ejected. Debra, a victim of the usual rural Nevada health care, died enroute to Reno. (Barbwire 4-2-2006 and many updates thereafter.) Donna was paralyzed for life. She went on to become Miss Wheelchair Nevada, Miss Wheelchair America and a TV news anchor in Arizona, southern Nevada and Texas where she finally died of her old injuries at 40.
Debra (Carson High ‘77) was my wife Betty’s firstborn and strikingly beautiful. I have made it one of my lifelong missions to tell the story of my erstwhile daughters at every opportunity. Another came last Sunday.
First responders were called to a rollover crash in northwest Reno on Leadership Parkway, north of McCarran Blvd.: “1 killed, 2 injured in rollover accident.”
Three of five occupants were ejected.
“Police say speed was a factor. Alcohol impairment was not suspected.”
For me, it was déjà vu all over again.
The New York Times Magazine might well have used the Reno flipout as an example..
Last Sunday’s Matthew Shaer magnum opus “The Road to Ruin” might was quite appropriately focused on Nevada, especially Gomorrah South.
Over the decades, I’ve had many former Las Vegans like me remark how much slower northern Nevadans drive. Alas and alack, perhaps not anymore after this region turned on the red light and became another Teslatute.
“After decades of declining fatality rates, why has dangerous driving surged again in America?” Shaer asked.
One of his principal sources is Dr. Debra Kuhls at the UNLV School of Medicine.
Before I even moved there more than five decades ago, friends told me how easy it was to navigate Las Vegas.
“All the streets are wide and run at right angles,” a frycook buddy advised.
Indeed. To get a taste of that, look no further than E. Moana Lane in Reno, a two-way highway seven lanes wide. The zooming hardware quickly gets just plain scary. I cringed after seeing some hearty souls cross the shooting gallery on foot. One guy even stood in the middle of the road after navigating halfway, waiting for the other lanes to clear. I got out my phone ready to call 911 if he guessed wrong,
In LV, “many roads are flat and fast and conducive to speeding, which remains a reliable predictor of the severity of injury,” Shaer reported.
Back in my talk show days (returning soon), I did a schtik about visitors from other worlds coming here and never to return: “The dominant life form is possessed of suicidal rituals. Millions of them are addicted to boarding explosive metallic mobile canisters and propelling them toward each other at higher and higher speeds, resulting in mass death and destruction. Recommendation: avoid that primitive planet.”
Tell me I’m wrong.
The pandemic just made things worse. I’ve noticed and so have experts. Seatbelt use is down, drivers are increasingly plowing thru intersections.
“To Dr. Kuhls, it felt as if all the deadly habits that were on such flagrant display during the early months of the pandemic had become normalized,” Shaer noted.
“New cars are stronger and less prone to spontaneously explode,” he wrote. Alas, today’s vehicles are “also taller and heavier. Pickup trucks have added an average of 1,300 pounds since 1990, while the average full-size SUV now weighs around 5,000 pounds, at least a thousand more than mid-century sedans.”
Transportation planner Angie Schmidt called this “the truckfication of the family car.”
Think heavier means safer? Think again.
“The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords and the more destruction in can wreak,” Shaer wrote.
SUVs or vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches, a dominant manufacturing specification, “are 45 percent more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars.”
Which explains the curious increase in pedestrian and cyclist deaths in these parts.
Combine that with neglected roads, a few beers and pissed off people and you have the recipe for an epidemic.
“If I was to set out to create a situation that would make most people act badly and angrily, I couldn’t come up with anything better than driving,” said University of Wisconsin psychologist Ryan Martin.
Wise man George Carlin stated it better years ago when he re-defined two words: “A maniac is somebody driving faster than you. An asshole is somebody driving slower than you.”
Add cell-phones and other distracted driving and you’ve got a worldwide recipe for carnage. Guns and cars kill at about the same numbers in today’s America. Occasionally, both are involved.
Roundabouts, speed bumps, rumble strips, pedestrian bridges and narrower streets have all been effective at reducing death and dismemberment.
Traffic cameras to bust speeding drivers have also prove effective.
But not in Nevada where drunk or stoned driving is considered a
constitutional right. The Silver State Legislature banned traffic cams years ago.
“A lot of people, a lot of politicians, consider us to be a frontier state with all the liberty that implies,” Dr. Kuhls stated.
Critics of a piece like this often rebut these issues as insensitive to the needs of rural Nevada with its long lonely highways where speed limits are basically non-existent. Nonsense.
The AAA Foundation recently noted that “a motorist’s need for speed consistently fails to deliver shorter travel times. It would take driving 100 miles at 80 mph instead of 75 mph to shave just five minutes off the trip.”
Tell that to the suicide jockeys on E. Moana Lane.
Drive — and walk — at your own risk.
Be careful out there.
Vaxx up, stay safe, pray for Ukraine and almost 100 other currently war-torn lands.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 55-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us Links with this column at NevadaLabor.com/
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