So I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent sentencing of Antonio Cellestine in the hit-and-run death of Gordon Patterson. Mr. Cellestine was, by his own testimony and subpoenaed cel phone records, texting at the time (and smoking a cigar). He was also driving with a suspended license, and had previously been arrested twice for driving without a license and driving without insurance. Mr. Patterson, a popular high school teacher, regular church-goer, father of three, and by all accounts swell guy, was riding his bike home in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland. Judge Roger Bennett sentenced Cellestine to 5 years in prison, with a special plea bargain to ensure that this doesn’t count as Cellestine’s “first strike” in Washington’s Three Strikes system. He also has a special dispensation for early release, meaning he’ll likely be out in two years. He’ll never be able to buy a firearm in Washington, but — and this is galling part — he’ll be eligible to renew his driver’s license a year after his release.

As a fun parenthesis, consider Cellestine’s girlfriend — a wonderful piece of work in herself — who held a carwash fundraiser for the victim’s family but may have used the money to (try to) post bail for Mr. Cellestine.

I pay pretty close attention to all the cyclist-involved collision around Portland, for reasons of self-interest as much as advocacy. But this one really struck a nerve. The discussion around this case, and its outcome, suggests a peculiar myopia in regards to the moral weight of killing someone with a car.

On Tom Vanderbilt’s How We Drive blog, Vanderbilt relays this bit of drama from the courtroom:

The text-messaging motorist who struck and killed his former high school teacher told the court: “This was not intentional. It was an accident. I’m so sorry.”

Clark County (Vancouver, Washington) Superior Court Judge Roger Bennett didn’t buy it.

“I’ve heard the term ‘accident’ used quite a bit today. But this was no accident.”

This led to an interesting discussion where famed bicycle framebuilder Dave Moulton, one of my personal cycling heroes, objected to Vanderbilt’s insistence that car crashes aren’t “accidents:”

I’m generally uncomfortable with the hijacking of language for the purpose of demonization. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an accident is “an unexpected undesirable event,” “an unforeseen incident,” “lack of intention; chance.” Seems to me that the crash described probably fits this definition, as well as the definition of a crash (the two are NOT mutually exclusive). I have no opinion about whether or not the judge was right to convict, or whether the sentence is appropriate. I do have an opinion about the judge’s apparent lack of literacy.

I joined the dogpile on Mr. Moulton (who, I must say, has a certain point about the “intentionality” aspect of “accident”):

There’s a lot about this “accident” that was eminently foreseeable. Like Mr. Cellestine driving with a suspended license. And driving without insurance. And he had two previous convictions for driving without a license. And surely his license was suspended twice for reasons of some sort (I don’t know what) — in Washington that pretty much means repeated convictions for reckless driving, or Minor in Possession, or drug offenses. And consider that he was only 18 years old, so he had only two years in which to generate this sparkling record.

...

But there are more people culpable in this instance than Mr. Cellestine. This was not an “accident” on his part, because he knew the dangers of driving while severely distracted. And it was not an “accident” on the part of the State of Washington, who damn well knew he was a menace but failed to keep him off the road, and will fail to do so again in 2-5 years. So not only was Mr. Cellestine’s “accident” completely foreseeable, I’ll go one better and foresee his next potentially fatal “accident”, unless Washingtonians get their crap together, pass some tough laws and tighten up their licensing requirements.

Mr. Moulton had a rejoinder (“an event can be both an accident and negligent”)...but this seemed lacking to me. I tried to get the last word in, something I usually loathe:

It’s interesting that one seldom hears the phrase “airplane accident.”

People believe that when a plane crashes, someone is culpable — designers, flight crew, maintenance crew, traffic controllers, weather monitoring systems, terrorists, terrorist-minded security personnel, etc. This attitude — “there are no ‘plane accidents’” — has led to a situation where the most potentially dangerous form of transportation is actually the safest.

But somehow car crashes “just happen.” “It was an accident.” Y’know, just like knocking over a glass of milk.

Everything about Mr. Cellestine suggested he was a menace and incapable of safely driving a car, thus his suspended license. Simply getting behind the wheel that night was an intentionally hazardous act. That he no longer had a valid driver’s license was his signal not to drive, yet he disregarded it. Even by Mr. Moulton’s conservative definition of “accident” this was no accident.

I see Mr. Moulton’s point here — Mr. Cellestine had no intention of murdering anyone. But he committed the legal equivalent of pointing a gun in the air and pulling the trigger. This was Judge Bennett’s whole point. That bullet was gonna land somewhere, and it had the bad fortune of landing on a nice guy like Mr. Patterson.

(All of which, of course, leaves aside the “running away” part of this crime. Mr. Cellestine, upon committing a fatal crime, failed to own up to it. If that doesn’t negate the sense of “accident” as “unintentional” here, I don’t know what does.)

If government — if laws, and police, and courts — have any fundamental purpose at all in a free society, it is to protect the weak from the predations of the strong. It is to keep Swell Guys like Mr. Patterson safe from Raging Menaces like Mr. Cellestine. If Antonio Cellestine had indeed fired a gun into the air and “accidentally” killed Gordon Patterson, I doubt anyone would find fault in this logic. A Raging Menace killed a Swell Guy and deserves harsh punishment, after all that’s what laws are for, right? But somehow, when the weapon is a car, that logic gets turned off.

Mr. Cellestine might be a Swell Guy in some other fashion, but in regards to his abilities and judgement related to driving a car, he has amply demonstrated that he is indeed a Raging Menace. If stuff like “laws” and “morality” and “personal responsibility” have any meaning to our society, those meanings should be clear in this very case. That Mr. Cellestine could be back on the roads — our roads — inside of six years suggests that, in regards to cars, “laws,” and “morality” and “personal responsibility” have very little meaning.

On the bikeportland blog, I tried to express this notion a bit more pithily.

Everyone who ventures off their own property — by foot, bike, motorcycle, or car — ought to consider how easy it is for someone like Mr. Cellestine to keep getting back behind the wheel. In 2-5 years he’ll be back there again.

It's far too easy to get, keep, and regain a driver's license, and we are far too lenient on those who thumb their noses at the law and common human decency.

...has not apparently rendered Oregon drivers any less inattentive.

I’m all YAY for this new law but it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Hell, it feels like writing a strongly-worded letter to the White Star Lines home office regarding the disposition of seating arrangements on the Titanic. My usual hobbyhorse regarding the scatterbrained drool-producers who do crap like text while driving down the bus-only lane on Sixth Avenue (which I witnessed this very morning...) isn’t:

“we need more laws against driving down the bus-only lane on Sixth Avenue while texting”

but rather:

“getting and keeping a driver’s license should be so difficult that people stupid enough to drive down the bus-only lane on Sixth Avenue while texting will be unable to do so.”

All of which occasioned me to reflect on how little I’ve had to do to prove myself worthy of pushing two tons of metal around at 75mph.

When I was sixteen years old — the same age at which I thought it was a good idea to cut my own hair with dog clippers — I took a driving test that lasted 30 minutes. And I passed a written test that I could have opted to have read to me in case I were illiterate. (Can I suggest that, just for starters, you need to be able to read English to take a driver’s test?). That was in 1987. I passed these two tests 22 years ago and that was apprently good enough. FOREVER.

In 1996 the State of Oregon, in order to verify that the State of Nebraska had done its job nine years earlier, made me take their written test. Which was on a video. And which I could again have read to me. They also checked my eyesight.

That was the last time — 13 years ago! — that I had to demonstrate my mental or physical capacity to drive a car.

Is driving a “right?” That’s not was Mr. Seng told me in Driver’s Ed, 22 years ago. His exact phrase was “driving is a privilege, not a right.” If it’s not a right, why do we go so far out of our way to make it easy to pass the driver’s test?

Cars are ultra super deadly. They are the most common cause of death for people under 25 in the United States. 35,000 Americans die in car crashes every year and another 100,000 are injured. This is serious stuff. Driving a car is difficult and potentially fatal.

So, YAY for the new hands-free law. Now that we’re discussing the deck chairs can we direct our attention back to the iceberg?

By which I mean: they don't understand basic principles of operating a motor vehicle.

This has been a painful realization for me. For most of my life, most bad drivers were people who either knew the law but chose to drive otherwise, or who simply didn't know the law. It was only a tiny subset of drivers who showed no indication of, for example, the size of their vehicle, or how long it would take to bring it to a stop, or how to park. (Not parallel park, just regular park. Like the kind of parking where you just point the front of your car at the place you want to park it, and then put it in that place. I see someone stymied by this intractable puzzle almost daily.)

The last couple of years I've noticed a rash of people who not only don't know the law, they show no clue of knowing how to drive. They don't know how wide their cars are, whether their turn signals are on, how fast they're going, whether the stoplight is green, or other basic driving facts.

I don't think we need to outlaw texting, or improve road safety with hinky methods with roundabouts or somesuch. I just think that getting a driver's license should be at least as hard as passing seventh grade.

Responding to Ryan Avent on the subject of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, Patrick tosses out this old chestnut:

but the roads for bikes wouldn't exist without the cars

Which prompted me to reply:

If this is the best argument you can muster for the continued existence of cars, I heartily endorse the alternative.

I have two bikes that frankly ride better without any roads at all. And the other two bikes would do just fine with a strip of concrete about 4' wide (OK, 8' wide for two-way traffic). You know, the kind of sidewalk you can pour for yourself on a weekend for a few thousand bucks.

Roads exist for the health and pleasure of cars, and if the “price” we pay for a car-free world is no roads ... crap, hang on, “price” isn't the right word at all. It’d be like walking into a nice restaurant and the waiter says, “please take this food off our hands for us. We’ll give you $5 if you’d just eat some of it for us.”

I think about this particular issue a lot, because every so often someone will have the brilliant flash that cyclists should “pay for their share of the road.” Let’s set aside the fact that, in Oregon at least, roads are subsidized from the general fund (so therefore cyclists pay more for the road than motorists); and let’s also aside the relative wear-and-tear a car causes a road vs. a bike; and we won’t even get into the degree of engineering required to build a road for such wear-and-tear. And the incidental costs of collisions (and resulting funerals), and the police patrols required to reduce same. Let’s just set that all aside. If the alternative to “bicycles should pay road taxes” is “let’s not have any roads,” well Option Number Two works just fine for me.

Let’s be clear: I own a car and like driving places. I like living in a civilized world where we can drive to the hospital when we’re ready to have a baby (instead of ride bikes, I guess). But this is a crap-awful argument, both against bikes and for roads.

What if Americans aren’t buying American cars because they aren’t buying any cars?

What if no one else on Earth is buying cars either?

What if this has nothing to do with gas prices?

What if mortgages are failing because the houses are mainly vinyl shacks built fifty miles from economically-productive cities?

What if the cost of owning a car was too great for most families, even if gas were free? (And what if gas prices went up again?) What would happen to the value of those vinyl shacks then? (And why haven’t all the mortgage-company bailouts fixed that problem yet?)

What if cars are a fantastically stupid thing around which to organize America’s productive activity? What if we talked about organizing it around something else?