Lorraine Explains: Calgary cops can’t stop victim-blaming

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“Speed, possible medical incident investigated as factors in fatal bus shelter crash,” read the headline.

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Factual, explanatory, direct. Fatal tragedies play out on our roads every day, unfortunately. Calgary police say a man in his 70s apparently lost control of his Dodge Ram pickup and slammed into a bus shelter, killing the man who was inside it. The optics are horrible to contemplate; the outcome was even worse. 

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But what followed? “Police also looking into why the pedestrian, who owned a vehicle, was in the shelter.”

Of course, they’re looking for witnesses and dashcam footage to investigate why the driver of the truck went through an intersection, mounted the curb, glanced off the wall of a building before hitting the bus shelter, and finally, another building. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why, in the same breath, they were also confounded that a 42-year-old man would be in a bus shelter at 9:30 on a Sunday morning when he had a perfectly good car he should have been driving.

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“It is our understanding that he does have a vehicle, and he would have been using that vehicle to get to work or wherever he was going,” [the officer] said. “So, I’m not quite sure why he was in the bus shelter. And that’s something that we’re also investigating — to try and piece together what his movements were.”

The poor man is dead, and instead of being focused on the person who took that life, authorities instead are entertaining the many reasons why he might be responsible for his own death? There are many possibilities for him to have been in a bus shelter, and most of them aren’t much of a reach. The maybes:

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It would be understandable for family to wonder about anything that may seem out of the ordinary when learning of something so horrific, but the fact that someone who owns a car is taking a bus should not be some head-scratchingly weird event. The fact that a huge pickup truck is embedded into a bus shelter should be the shock, not the fact someone was in a pedestrian space. 

Many cities are experiencing drastically rising rates of unhoused populations. Some may seek reprieve in places like public bus shelters. They don’t deserve to be hit by vehicles, either. 

A similar incident happened in Hamilton in March of this year. A driver in a stolen Prius was speeding downtown at 2 a.m. and leapt the curb, killing three men standing there. It turned out that two of them were working on equipment in the pizza place at the scene. Whether they’d stepped out for tools or a smoke is irrelevant: pedestrians don’t have to have a reason for standing on the sidewalk. Drivers, however, do have to answer for driving on it. 

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A few days ago in Edmonton, a two-year-old was injured when the stroller they were in was hit by a vehicle. A parent was pushing the stroller in a marked crosswalk with the crossing lights activated. We do not need to investigate why someone crossing with a light in a proper crosswalk is doing so, yet repeatedly we search for reasons why crashes are the fault of people outside the car. 

Every aspect of a collision deserves to be investigated and should be — it’s just time we started using a different vernacular. A famous YouTuber was speeding and crashed head-on into a taxi in Mexico City recently, killing six people in that car. It was repeatedly called an “accident” in some reports. It was not an accident. 

Do pedestrians and cyclists make mistakes? Of course. Do they break the law? Yes. Reading about the child in the stroller, I was desperate to find out if the parent had the right of way. But then I realized that our reluctance to hold drivers accountable is so bad that unless we find a perfect victim, we keep accepting a car-centric landscape where other road users who should be safe to freely and lawfully navigate those roads must instead defend their right to even use them.