It was just a matter of time before a World Trade Center survivor became a victim of a different sort of terrorism: death by automobile.
It finally happened last month, in lower Manhattan, when a speeding sport utility vehicle struck and killed a woman who had fled the Twin Towers on 9/11.
Florence Cioffi was leaving a dinner celebrating her upcoming 60th birthday when a Mercedes-Benz SUV slammed into her on Water Street at 60 miles an hour, according to a Manhattan assistant district attorney.
Six years, four months, and thirteen days earlier, Ms. Cioffi narrowly averted death when she ducked out of her office on the 36th floor of the North Tower to get a coffee minutes before the plane struck.
The driver who succeeded where al-Qaeda failed, George W. Anderson, has no known ties to Osama bin Laden. He does not come from Afghanistan, but Long Island. He is not a mullah or an imam, but the founder and CEO of a financial software company.
Yet on the night of Jan. 24, Mr. Anderson became a terrorist, though his weapon of choice was his luxury GL450 SUV rather than a hijacked jetliner.
Were Anderson's actions premeditated? No. Doesn't that make Ms. Cioffi's death an accident? Not really. Based on press accounts, the fatal crash can be traced directly to Anderson's own deliberate choices. These include his decision to get plastered before getting behind the wheel (he refused to take a Breathalyzer test), and then to drive through the narrow, pedestrian-filled streets of the Financial District at twice the speed limit.
Anderson has been charged with vehicular manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and leaving the scene. Results of the BAC test are pending.
Anderson will doubtless field a high-powered legal team; he sold a beachfront house in the Hamptons for more than $6 million last May. But the odds of his seeing the inside of a jail cell are relatively promising, at least compared to bin Laden -- and compared to the thousands of other killer-drivers who walk, or rather drive, away from the scene of their crimes every year and return to their homes, without any need to hole up in Waziristan.
Foreign terrorists come and go, but 40,000 Americans die in motor vehicle crashes every year. Color-coded terror alerts come and go, but drivers in New York City kill 200 pedestrians and bicycle-riders every year. The Department of Homeland Security spends $50 billion a year on an ever-more-elaborate regimen of snooping and surveillance, but no U.S. city has taken more than a few halting steps to implement the simple, straightforward pedestrian agenda laid out in Right Of Way's 1999 manifesto, Killed By Automobile (PDF).
Here are three planks from that agenda:
- See that the police enforce all vehicular traffic laws that protect pedestrians and cyclists.
- Jawbone the district attorneys to prosecute all dangerous driving, not just DWI.
- Conduct inquests into all pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, and make the findings public.
But municipal measures like these, while worthwhile and essential, are only part of the picture. A change of mentality, or better, of heart, is what really matters. The idea that it's ever okay to endanger others through one's driving -- aggressive driving, distracted driving, reckless driving, entitled driving -- has to be called out for what it is.
Like terrorists, definitions of terrorism come and go. But if terrorism is the practice of getting what you want by killing people here and there to frighten all the others, then our American street regime is a reign of terror.
Photo: Peter Meitzler
Comments
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VTpowderhound Posted 5:48 am
08 Feb 2008
If found guilty (i.e. assuming the deceased woman didn't just wander out into traffic), I hope they throw the book at him.
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suzannah Posted 6:10 am
08 Feb 2008
This is one of those incidents we'd like to read meaning into where there isn't any. A woman died in a senseless, random tragedy. She was not a player in a larger drama. Have you read Bonfire of the Vanities? You're voluntarily play-acting in an updated version of Tom Wolfe's drama; the woman who died here was not.
Oceana: Protecting the world's oceans.
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:16 am
08 Feb 2008
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GRLCowan Posted 6:33 am
08 Feb 2008
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
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caniscandida Posted 6:37 am
08 Feb 2008
But it is certainly a great moral failure of US society, that so many of us feel entitled to drive cars where and how we please, and any restriction on that alleged entitlement should be viewed as a damnable un-American assault on our freedom. It is by similarly flawed logic that the NRA would like to put guns in the hands of all school children -- to make them better and more patriotic Americans, for the love of God.
Anyway, Jon (who is an even greater city-lover than I) is certainly right, that we should get cars off of many streets in Manhattan.
Having once seen a slow old woman killed and splattered (there was a huge pool of blood) by a hit-and-run delivery truck while she was trying to cross Broadway at 110th Street, I would wish that much more of Manhattan be off-limits to motor vehicles than just the narrow streets of downtown.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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spaceshaper Posted 7:06 am
08 Feb 2008
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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paderget Posted 7:52 am
08 Feb 2008
The speaker is Death
There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
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wiscidea Posted 8:02 am
08 Feb 2008
http://www.peterrussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
... death caused by the following, so far TODAY....
31,600 cardiovascular disease
13,700 cancer
7,000 respiratory disease
3,700 digestive disease
2,100 psychiatric conditions
5,900 STD/HIV/AIDS
3,500 diarrhoeal disease
2,900 TB
7,600 respiratory infections
2,300 traffic accidents
Traffic accidents ARE the number one cause of death due to injury, which you'll see if you go to the above web site. But for each person killed by an SUV, one might say 14 were killed by cardiovascular disease, 6 were killed by cancer, 3 were killed by respiratory disease, 1 was killed by a psychiatric condition, et cetera. Surprisingly, very few were killed by war. It is likely that numerous people who escaped from the World Trade Center were killed by other events. Did Grist discuss their deaths here? Or do you care only about people you can adopt as a martyr for your own cause?
That said, the terrorist have won in the sense that they pissed off American voters, pissed off George W. Bush, and encouraged a whole bunch of idiots to attack not the terrorists but a country that had absolutley nothing to do with 9/11. And all the wealth squandered in the Quagmire in Iraq might have enabled us to save people from far greater threats to their lives than Al Queda or any other terrorist organization. How much infrastructure improvement, say pedestrian crossings, and law inforcement functions are neglected because of the Quagmire in Iraq?
The terrorist won the moment Americans allowed themselves to be drawn into a shooting war we did not have to fight.
The original post at the top of this thread has absolutely nothing to do with preserving our environment. Hey... it is your website though. Post whatever you want. But there are times when you might want to consider deleting the "environmental news & commentary" line from your header.
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wiscidea Posted 8:15 am
08 Feb 2008
Will Grist contributors be calling for a complete ban on alcohol sale and consumption in the U.S. as strongly as they call for restricting automobile use?
Intoxicated drivers have to be rmoved from the road, but the current system is not working. Sure, there are people who drink and do not drive. But isn't the risk of someone drinking, getting into an auto or driving a bus or at the controls of a subway train, and killing someone so high... even if it harms just one person... so dangerous that our society should ban all alcohol?
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wiscidea Posted 8:23 am
08 Feb 2008
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:04 am
08 Feb 2008
As far as inebriation, wiscidea, one has to ask if large, dangerous vehicles should be driven by nonprofessionals. The death rate from trains is about 1% the death rate from automobiles, and it's similar for buses, part of the reason is that there are very skilled drivers (and the same logic applies to planes). Plane and train crashes merit large amounts of media attention, but not so the orders of magnitude greater destruction from automobiles. Again, a social decision, for which guilt tripping is totally useless, in my opinion, the question is to make different social decisions.
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Sam Wells Posted 11:14 am
08 Feb 2008
It is similar to use the term "war" when talking about the war on drugs, when there is no condition of war.
By appealing to base emotions such as "terrorism" evokes is exactly the same social conservative plank that got us here, such as the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are not even ... wars.
If you want to co-opt the Republican Neo-Con play book be my guest, but consider yourself as tarred with the tame rhetorical brush.
-sammie
Onward through the fog
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Sam Wells Posted 11:15 am
08 Feb 2008
Onward through the fog
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Richard Grossman Posted 12:13 pm
08 Feb 2008
But Charlie's title and context is not helpful for seeing past the professional propagandists of violence and empire. Or for thinking critically about what September 11 was or was not; what the War on Terrorism is or is not; what the USA is and is not.
Florence was not killed by evil people lurking in foreign lands.
That deed was done by the SUV driver...The driver had unflagging help from great champions of this country: directors and stockholders of automobile & truck manufacturing & selling corporations; banking and insurance corporations; advertising, news, entertainment and liquor corporations; mining and chemical corporations; weapons of mass destruction corporations; spy corporations; lawyer corporations; their non-profit lobby corporations (such as the American Manufacturing Association, the Chamber of Commerce); news, entertainment and advertising corporations; along with their shills in legislatures, courts, city halls, governors' mansions; not to mention in the Democratic and Republican parties...
For generations, these representatives of what Eugene Debs
called the "small class" -- the corporate class of this nation and of the world -- have been up to their eyeballs in usurpations and destructions. With their legal treatises, constitutional gobbledygook, judge-made law, illegitimate legislation, lawsuits and lucre galore, these humans long ago corporatized governance on transportation (and everything else that matters, of course).
In the process they wrote laws and legal doctrines stripping municipalities and neighborhoods of their authority to govern themselves.
That is today's true terror -- long homegrown and gone to fat. These honored and well-compensated terrorists, wrapped in stars and stripes, crooning patriotic songs and dripping with blood, win every day...year in and day out.
May Florence rest in peace.
For the living, who harbor these All-American terrorists in our midst, can there be either rest or peace?
R Grossman
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jdrusso Posted 12:51 pm
08 Feb 2008
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RHY Posted 2:22 pm
08 Feb 2008
Was the "hit-n-run" driver one of the beneficiaries?
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spaceshaper Posted 10:33 pm
08 Feb 2008
Ah, but you say, 9/11 was an intentional evil. Bad, foolish, manipulated, misguided people caused it on purpose. There are sins of commission and sins of omission, and the first are surely the worst? Well, sorry to say I have found the lack of strict intentionality on the part of the perpetrators to have little palliative effect on the sufferings of those I know who who have lost a loved one beneath the wheels of the juggernaut we call a transportation system. I have no personal acquaintance with any family which has lost a loved one to terrorism, either through the 9/11 events or through the military actions which they purportedly engendered. Statistically-speaking, my experience would seem to be true of most Americans. My closest personal connection to the Iraq fiasco is to a young English soldier, the son of friends, who quite fortuitously was sent on an errand at the moment that a suicide bomber detonated her device and blew herself and his checkpoint comrade to bits. My list of dead friends and children of friends sacrificed on the altar of personal mobility is much longer. A few: the young man who blinks his eyelids to communicate with his mother, and will never be capable of more. The young gardener, poet, musician, lover of life, buried in a quiet spot in Virginia. The woman who raises her grandchildren alone after her son died bleeding beside the highway, and his wife followed him a few days later when a quarter-million dollars worth of life support was turned off.
Then there are those we read or hear about in the local news - though only the more extravagant of these deaths seem to attract much attention. Now this in breaking news! Carload of teenagers rolls from a highway off-ramp at ninety miles an hour! Bring on the death-counselors at the local high school! But don't fix the actual problem. Don't question the relentlessly sexy zoom-zoom ads on the teevee. Don't halt the development of car-fixating strip malls and exurbs. Don't stop building our schools miles from the communities which they serve, and don't whatever you do improve the pedestrian safety and comfort of our downtowns or our school walk-zones.
Are these environmental issues? Environmentalism demands that we hold ourselves accountable for the full costs and consequences of our activities.
These are grave costs and serious consequences, and undoubtedly they result from our activities and ours alone. So how are they NOT environmental issues?
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:31 am
09 Feb 2008
One of my first acts after being appointed by the Mayor to the Kent Bicycle Advisory Board was to solicity the public liaison from the Kent Police Department to present statistics on Pedestrian-Car and Bicycle-Car accidents and to find out how often the Negligent Driving statute of the law was applied.
The numbers were quite high for our small city.
As anyone who read the book "Freaknomics" knows, there are many aspects of daily life that are far more life threatening than terrorism. An above ground swimming pool, for example, is far more deadly (childen are naturally attacted to the water and end up drowning) than almost anything including not wearing seat belts.
Truly, our cities and streets are ruled not by people but by cars. I have given up on trying to draw "bike lanes" on car dominated streets and am searching for ways to use layered topologies that minimize car-bike-people interaction.
But we have to realize...ever since WWII, our domestic infrastructure, including our roads, houses, buildings, cities...have been designed for war. The Interstate Highway system is a way to move military equipment around the country (the height of overpasses is not set by trucks, but by convoys). It's by design, and until there is some kind of safety in the world, and our enemies have been vanquished, I don't know if there's much we can do about anything...
jabailo.johnmccain.com
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Charles Komanoff Posted 7:55 am
09 Feb 2008
I wholeheartedly concur that the greatest tragedy of 9/11 has been the Bush Administration's use of it to mount the Iraq atrocity. But that's not the issue here. I chose to resurrect the tired expression "The terrorists have won" and apply it to the killing of 9/11 survivor Florence Cioffi by a driver to draw attention to the reign of terror that is, for walkers and bicycle riders, the American street regime.
You say, "It is likely that numerous people who escaped from the World Trade Center were killed by other events." This formulation is curiously passive (as is your account of how Bush & Co. used 9/11 to make war on Iraq). "Events" didn't kill Ms. Cioffi. George Anderson, the driver, did.
You also imply that conditions for walker and bicyclists might have been made better by resources that have been squandered in Iraq. I have participated in and even led efforts to improve those conditions for over two decades, and I can tell you that a lack of resources is the least of the obstacles.
To Richard Grossman:
I'm sorry my piece didn't go nearly deep enough for you. (Which is probably true as well for my comment above that the driver, rather than the sovereignty of corporations, caused the death of Ms. Cioffi.) Let's take another bicycle trip and hash this out!
Charles
http://www.komanoff.net
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:46 am
09 Feb 2008
By the way, former Speaker Jim Wright once told a bunch of us how they had to make the interstate highway system a "defense" system in order to get it passed in the Congress. Maybe you can figure out a way to sell barrier-bike lanes as part of an energy security policy.
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Delay And Deny Posted 12:32 pm
09 Feb 2008
No.
But I do know that such a thing is the exact opposite of what I wrote.
Next...
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:14 pm
09 Feb 2008
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MarkUK Posted 8:03 pm
09 Feb 2008
Any idea how much it costs to build roads? yet when it comes to cycle lanes the cost becomes to high...
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traveler255 Posted 11:03 pm
11 Feb 2008
C'mon guys, this irrelevant story just shows the daily insanity on our streets. You make a mountain out of a molehill.
Never stop using your brain!
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spaceshaper Posted 11:19 pm
11 Feb 2008
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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