The death of this 7-year-old girl hit by a driver upsets us all. Since then, commentators have been scrambling to demand simple, often simplistic, and immediate action to a complex problem. Invited to Newscast 6 p.m., Valérie Plante had a hard time reasoning with an excited Patrice Roy who wanted to see public works install speed bumps the next day. The mayoress tried in vain to explain to him that the problem is not so much speed as the ever-increasing number of vehicles in the city and the poor behavior of motorists. It must be recognized that the calls for appeasement and benevolence on the road are annihilated by the messages which aggravate the problem. Year after year, the SAAQ invests approximately $6 million in its awareness campaigns. For their part, car manufacturers spend $500 million annually, in Quebec alone, to perpetuate the self-centered model of cities where people can move freely and quickly, without obstacles, human or otherwise, and where the attitude towards their fellow human beings boils down to “vroom, vroom” or to a “quiet down, uncle”. A third of the advertisements we are repeatedly bombarded with in the media concern the automobile, where convoluted texts advocate individualism, gigantism, speed and all-out domination. Pedestrians and cyclists have no place in this fantasy world. The purpose of marketing is not to achieve the common good, simply to sell the product to those who pay for it. Without regulation, good feelings rarely have the capacity to counter the financial means of those who work to hold us back in the march towards a better world. Everything goes, without morality or restraint, you have to sell. It is time to attack this aspect of the problem, one of the causes of road carnage.
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