Part 2

In the fall of 2001, I was working as a long term substitute math teacher to cover for a real math teacher on an unexpected medical leave. Math teachers are apparently in high demand. They must be, otherwise why would a school system hire someone with a degree in English to play at being one? Desperate times, desperate measures, and on the theme of desperation, just before that, a group of people were upset enough with this country that their anger was manipulated into flying planes into buildings here.

The last class in my daily schedule as a teacher was Probability and Statistics, and fortunately, the teacher who taught my total knowledge of the subject had a desk ten feet away from mine in the math department office, and he graciously gave me refresher lessons as I needed them. He's a gracious person, with a good sense of humor, who had a bumper sticker pinned above his desk which read, "Lottery: A Tax On People Who Are Bad At Math," but he was too nice to upset anyone in the general public by displaying it on his car. Ironically, the parting gift given to me by the school's math teachers at the end of my stint was a collection of lottery scratch tickets. Probably works. I didn't win.

Probably does work, and so I also find it ironic that airplane ticket prices plummeted right after the eleventh of September that year. For my probability class, I used my newly learned knowledge, that at any given time, there were roughly 1,000 aircraft aloft in US airspace, to point out, that even for a person who happened to be flying at the time of the hijackings, there was an only 0.4% chance of being aboard one of the ill fated flights.

Yes, yes, 0% is a better number, but I compared other numbers in the aftermath of the years that followed. Just under 3,000 people died in those attacks, and the combined costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were 4.3 trillion dollars, not to mention all the freedoms surrendered to the Patriot Act. Meanwhile, every year, year aftet year, 30,000 to 40,000 people die on roads in the US. I guessed it might be possible to save 10% of those lives for far less than the war costs if the government started subsidizing the cost in engineering hours needed to build safer car structures, and improve the design of our roads.

Thanks to warcosts.org

According to Killed by a Traffic Engineer, the sentiment in road engineering is similar. They claim they could make our roads safer if they just had more money. The problem, according to Wes Marshall, is those engineers would then use that money to make the roads faster, while carrying more cars, and in reality, kill and injure more human beings. Traffic engineers are convinced, and train new engineers in the same, that increasing flow capacity of a road will increase its safety. Unfortunately, like this country's response to the 9/11 attacks, that response isn't supported by real world data. In fact, slow streets kill and harm fewer people.

A couple decades later, a driver drove into me on a straight section of road with a 40mph speed limit a half mile from my house. I was hospitalized for just over a month, half of which I remember. Yup, I'm a concerned party. Less than a year later, I met one of my neighbors, and when they learned I was the person who was hit, they told me of an earlier fatality from when two people were walking the same section of road. I know, call me crazy, the deficient person with a damaged brain, but if the town had mortal evidence that the road was unsafe, why is the legal speed still 40mph? Speed limit signs are relatively cheap.

I had seen these photos,

 possibly while still in the hospital,

 of the helmet that saved my life, 

and just recently received copies.

It's not minor

 to completely separate a helmet section,

 including the shell, 

but I've often contemplated 

how much worse it would've looked 

if I hadn't apparently tucked.

I likely never would have seen those pictures.