Time to slow down to save our children

We value our cars more than our own children in California. That much, at least, is clear to anyone willing to look at the situation honestly.

As I write this, the nine-year-old son of one of my dearest friends lies in intensive care at Children's Hospital, starting to rebuild his life after being run over while crossing the street outside his home in Mira Mesa. Doctors are doing what they can, but right now this young boy's future is in God's hands.

Witnesses say he was waiting to cross the busy residential street his family lives on, and finally cars stopped to let him and his friend go. Except for one driver, who reportedly swerved around the stopped traffic – too busy or important – and ran right over him.

And now a little boy is fighting to regain his life.

It's only a matter of time until the same thing happens to a child in my neighborhood. I live on East Fifth in Old Escondido. The speed limit is posted as 25 mph, but 45 is more the norm and at night you can hear the cars bottoming out as they cross Hickory at 55 and up. Afternoons and mornings, as the children head to school, traffic barely slows. At some point, a homework assignment will be lost into the street or a ball will leave the yard, a child will follow and another family will sit in anguish in a waiting room.

The same is true in neighborhoods throughout San Diego County. All of us know of residential streets where the traffic is more like that of a freeway than a place where families live and try to raise their children.

When I called Escondido City Hall a few years back after first moving into to this neighborhood, I received a rather curt education in what kind of value we put on our children – at least in comparison to what we place on our cars. I was told first of all that stop signs cannot be used to try to control speed – they are limited to regulating flow only. More surprisingly, it seems there is little cities can do to regulate speed on their streets anyway – that court decisions banning speed traps in California dictate that if a certain percentage of the people regularly travel at a given speed on any stretch of road, that that speed will become the new posted limit.

Even our courts, it seems, value our cars more than our children in California.

Should the driver who ran over my friend's son be prosecuted, and even convicted, any kind of real punishment is unlikely. We simply don't put nice middle-class drivers in jail for running over children. A suspended sentence or probation is more likely, perhaps a loss of driving privileges for six months or so. The insurance company may have to pay some money to my friend's family – if the driver is insured – but the driver won't actually have to pay out of pocket.

See, the rest of us secretly sympathize with the driver. All of us – myself included – have driven too fast in someone else's neighborhood. Have become impatient or outraged at a slow driver and either passed them illegally or fantasized about it. We understand her. The child .... well, why can't they just stay in their backyards and out of our very important way?

Even when we overcome our own guilt and complicity in this system of putting our right to rush about ahead of the well-being of our children and try to improve the safety of our neighborhoods, the going is rough. When neighborhoods throughout the county have tried to get traffic-control systems onto their streets, they're fought at every turn by civil libertarians who argue that speed bumps and stop signs and more active enforcement violate the rights of drivers.

Civil liberties, it would seem, do not extend to the right of children to be safe and secure in their own neighborhood, to have the right to chase a ball into the street without paying with their little lives. Not when self-important adults like us are in a hurry.

It was educational to drive cross-county last summer with my family. In the rest of the nation, people slow down in residential neighborhoods. Drive safely. Stop signs at every corner are the norm. In some places, the speed limit in residential neighborhoods is 20 or even 15 mph, and there didn't seem to be any nonsense of raising the limit if a majority of drivers were irresponsible twits who preferred to do 45 or 50.

If we really valued children in California, we'd have meaningful traffic controls in our residential neighborhoods. We'd have legislators who would introduce bills to overturn lunatic court decisions placing traffic-control decisions in the hands of our most irresponsible drivers. We'd have city councils who would stand up for our children and decide that every child has a right to be safe, not just those in neighborhoods where a majority vote for speed bumps or other controls.

And the rest of us would think of the children before our own sense of importance, and slow down in everyone's neighborhood, not just our own.