Of course, they're not going to tell you that they're nonchalantly listing off places where someone may have just died. You're not going to learn the name of anyone who was rushed to the hospital. You won't know the story of the woman on foot just trying to cross the road to the bus stop, the name of the bicyclist on the way from their retail job to their evening shift at a restaurant, the outcome of the emergency surgery performed on the father whose teenage daughter, his passenger, will suffer neck pain for years as a result of the crash, along with a feeling of terror that wells back up whenever she crosses a bridge.In the Tampa area, apparently the station he listens to has the regular host reading the report, and the crashes are predictably on the stroads. There might be other stations with dedicated "traffic reporters" (sometimes in an airplane or a helicopter) and in the bigger metro it's all you can do to enumerate troubles on the expressways, e.g. "Forty from Thorndale to the Ryan, 30 back to Mannheim, an hour from O'Hare to the Byrne, it's a parking lot from the Ohio Feeder to the Junction" and there's almost always something gone wrong with the semis along 80-94 for or from Indiana. Call the roll.
The list of traffic jams the upbeat DJ wants to inform you about over a techno beat as you plan your commute is, in some measure, a list of places that people have just been injured or killed. In the five Tampa Bay Area counties covered by our local radio market, 562 people died in traffic collisions in 2019, or an average of three people every two days. That's out of a total of 68,652 crashes, from which there were 47,655 injuries. That’s 130 injuries per day.He amuses himself by keeping track of where the congestion and crashing hot spots are.
There's almost never snow to make getting there even more challenging where he's listening.
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