Death in a Parking Lot

Late in my teenage years in early 1980, a long-time family friend was killed by a driver in a mall parking lot.

She was a short, wiry 81-year-old woman named Clara Reger who was almost a third grandmother to my family. She was a ham radio operator, and probably one of the best-known women hams in the country. She was also a pianist who had played in silent movie theaters. She was a swimmer who taught me how to float on my back. She gave me Evening in Paris perfume one year when I was a kid, for some reason. I kept that little blue bottle for a really long time, though I never used the perfume.

Clara was a widow whose husband, I knew, had died from an aspirin overdose, or maybe an allergic reaction, years earlier. She lived in Buffalo, where we visited her, right next to the old Bills stadium.

I knew that she was active in the regional networks of radio operators, passing traffic, which was part of maintaining U.S. civil defense. I didn't know the specifics of the work she had done for that effort during World War II until after she died, or that in later years she worked with severely injured people to get their radio licenses, making adaptations possible for them to send and receive Morse Code.

In addition to working with handicapped ham radio operators, at the time she died she was still running courses to teach young people Morse Code and judging New York's state competitions for best receiving. She was still the official American Red Cross amateur station for Buffalo.

The insurance company of the driver who killed her tried to decrease its liability by saying that her "useful and productive life" was over. Clara's granddaughter gathered evidence that such was not the case. I don't know what came of it, but I hope she was able to prove it was not true.

I thought of all this today when I saw this from David Zipper on BlueSky. An 80-year-old Canadian woman was killed by the driver of a pickup truck in a Walmart parking lot:

The truck that killed Clara was probably not nearly so oversized, but Clara was also less than 5' tall, so it may have been similar in its effect on her body. The driver in Clara's case claimed he was blinded by the sun, and that he was only going 5 or 10 miles per hour.

Zipper concludes with this: 

In the US, the federal government doesn't count crashes that happen on private property like parking lots (where big cars are deadly).

That omission leads to an undercounting of pedestrian deaths, which are at a 40-yr high (even with incomplete data).

Here is the chart of U.S. pedestrian fatalities since 1980:

The 2010 inflection point is when smart phones had become ubiquitous and about when SUVs and pickup trucks began their march toward greater size, front-end height, and increasing prevalence.

As Zipper says, all of those numbers omit privately owned spaces like parking lots, and as most of us know from personal experience, there can be many conflict points between drivers and pedestrians in parking lots. The fact that there is no data on that is highly disturbing.