Why a Memorial for Victims of Traffic Violence Matters

We hear the statistic often, as if the number itself will move us: On American roads and streets, traffic violence kills about 40,000 people each year. But such recitations have done little or nothing to change road safety policy or driver behavior.

We can do better. We have examples to learn from.

Today, 50 years after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, visitors to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C., are likely to witness a phenomenon they cannot expect to see anywhere else in the country: public grief.

Few remember the intense controversy that greeted Maya Lin’s stark design. Facing ridicule, derision and even hate for daring to conceive a memorial that refuses to complicate grief with other messages, 21-year-old Lin would not compromise. Flags and statues have their place, she agreed, but not in a memorial to lives that could not be lived, to hopes erased, to loving bonds violently severed. For this purpose, Lin chose 144 unadorned slabs of black granite.  

Within a few years, the controversy was over. Lin was right. At the Wall, people of diverse values – hawks and doves, hardhats and hippies, patriots and peaceniks – lost their distinctions.

In its very starkness, the memorial – originally attacked as divisive – united. Those who wept there – those who made a rubbing of a loved one’s name, who tucked notes into the seams between the slabs, who left an offering at a slab’s base – were united in grief’s bottomless sea.

Soon the angry demands to remove or modify the memorial were forgotten. In fact the need to connect with the Wall grew so intense that a half-size replica was made in 1984. The Moving Wall toured the country for 20 years, and its replacement is still on the road today. It has been to all 50 states, red and blue alike. Though it memorializes Americans who died in a profoundly divisive war, it remains a rare and precious force for unity.

The Wall works because it names those who died. It makes the names tangible and brings them physically together. It connects isolated, individual, private losses, uniting them into a common public loss.

The Wall transforms statistics into people, and people into stories. It makes grief possible, expressible and shareable.

By making the costs of war tangible, the Wall contributed to a new degree of caution in U.S. foreign policy, helping prevent overseas deployments on anything close to the scale at which U.S. soldiers were deployed in Vietnam.

The Wall works because it taps a force that unites a deeply divided population – the force of loving attachments, manifested in the common human experience of grief that knows no distinction of religious or party affiliation. It gives visitors of all political convictions cause to question those who would send young people off to distant battlefields, some of them to early graves.

Every 18 months, as many Americans are killed on roads and streets as were killed in the decade of the American war in Vietnam. No end is in sight, and we have no good reason even to anticipate a steady decline.

Understandably, some conclude that Americans just don’t care. Not enough, at least, to support any significant policy changes or any new constraints on driving.

But this conclusion is wrong. The Wall teaches us that statistics alone are not enough to move us. The losses we suffer on roads and streets have all of the terrible finality of the losses that American families suffered when war took their loved ones away. As Maya Lin did for Americans who died in Vietnam, we again need ways to turn statistics into people, to give names to them, and to tell and share their stories.

We do not need 144 slabs of granite. A more accessible digital memorial can be made online – and the people who have lost loved ones to traffic violence can make it together ourselves. 

Families for Safe Streets has begun building just such a memorial. Founded in 2014 by the loved ones of people who had been killed or injured in traffic violence in New York City, it’s now a national movement committed to making traffic violence preventable by making its human cost visible.  

Like Maya Lin, Families for Safe Streets knows the first step is to publicly acknowledge the losses and to name the fallen. Members use photographs and names to turn statistics into people and to bring pressure to bear on the policymakers and the voters whose decisions can make streets safer. By bringing members together, Families for Safe Streets turns their individual stories of private loss into a common, public purpose of necessary change.

Now Families for Safe Streets has a new Community Story Map where anyone who can get online can enter their loss on a map, tell their loved one’s story, and post a portrait.

As at the Wall, a visitor to the Story Map may be a person without a personal connection to the memorial, but for whom the site will be a transformative experience of lasting significance. And as at the Wall, people who come to the map to grieve can do more than visit; they can leave stories, memories and photographs. They are the mapmakers, gradually weaving together the stories of a continent into a memorial that will never be finished but which is all the more moving as a work in perpetual progress.

Individual memorials have long been common. My own middle name, Daniel, is a memorial to an uncle I never met, lost to traffic violence with three other young people six years before I was born.

The Community Story Map is not the first collective memorial to people who lost their lives to traffic violence. In 1922 Baltimore erected a monument to children killed on the city’s streets in 1921; several other cities imitated its example. In 1935 the Chicago Tribune quantified and personalized that year’s traffic toll in Cook County: 780 killed. A two-page photo spread crowded portraits of 594 of those lost. In 1938 the Chicago Herald and Examiner planted 1,100 crosses across a half mile stretch of Grant Park – one cross for each person killed by traffic violence in or near Chicago in 1937.

Yet until now, no national monument has ever begun to unite the names and portraits of the people torn away from us too soon, or of those who have endured grave injuries. 

The Community Story Map will never be finished. But through the perpetual process of making it together, people who have lost loved ones to traffic violence or who have survived crashes themselves can tell their stories – to each other and to wider audiences.

The general public is not indifferent. It is fragmented through the lonely isolation of individual losses and through the invisibility of others’ stories. Where there is isolation, the Community Story Map weaves connection. Where there is ignorance, the map instills awareness. Where there are faceless numbers, it reveals names, portraits and stories.

The Community Story Map is an opportunity to channel a common anguish and unite a divided country behind an aspiration we all share: ending traffic violence. If you have a story to tell, offer it at the map. If you or a relative was gravely injured in traffic violence, or if you have lost a loved one, the map has a place waiting for your offering.