TRAINS DON'T WANDER ALL OVER THE MAP.

A Burma-Shave jingle continued, "Because nobody sits on the engineer's lap."

In Ann Arbor, though, an editorial asserts, "Cars should not crash into buildings."  There's nothing in the article about lap-sitting.

This year, the Ann Arbor area has seen a slew of cars crash into buildings, including a Subway, a pub, an optometrist’s office, a supermarket and even someone’s house, despite the fact that businesses, homeowners, pedestrians and society as a whole seem to prefer cars not collide with their buildings. Per one estimate, at least 100 cars crash into buildings every day, and research suggests the death and injury toll of vehicle-in-building crashes is in the thousands.

This is not a stand-alone phenomenon — it’s a symbol of our increasingly dangerous roadways that injure and kill drivers and pedestrians, whether there’s a building involved or not. Traffic fatality rates, despite declining last year, remain among the highest they’ve been in the past decade. In the first six months of 2023, 21,130 people died in motor vehicle crashes. Roads ought to be designed to protect human life first, not to misguidedly focus on rapidly pushing cars from one destination to the next through residential areas.

In most of the United States, roads are measured using a metric called “level of service.” Transportation departments grade roads from A through F based on the speed at which vehicles can pass through an area. Of the five Ann Arbor-area crashes referred to prior, four occurred on wide, fast-moving roads. The fifth was on a neighborhood street.

The article continues with instructive material on the way road design provides visual cues to drive faster than the speed limit.  Those cars into buildings?  Operator error.

One-fifth of car-building crashes are caused by “pedal error.” This occurs when a driver presses the accelerator instead of the brake pedal, resulting in a crash. Technological improvements in forward-collision mitigation can help reduce this share of car-building crashes, and speed limits can be lowered to reduce the severity of collisions. Humans, not cars, should be put first in the design of our transportation.

That might be so, and yet, operator error combined with a lack of situational awareness contributes to those broken buildings.    Consider one house in Chicago.

Things like that have been happening to the house at North Cicero Avenue and West Ainslie Street for decades.

The crashes have left the northeast corner of the house looking like a T. rex took a gigantic bite out of it. His wrought-iron fence is buckled, entire sections of it flattened. Splintered wood and chunks of concrete litter the sidewalk.

A neighbor who has lived in the same block for decades estimates that the house has been crashed into “at least a couple of hundred times” over the past 10 years.

It isn’t that [Robert] Christie, an auto mechanic, has enemies who’d purposely crash into his house. It’s that truck drivers seem not to be paying enough attention to the signs that warn of a low-clearance bridge at Cicero Avenue and Gunnison Street just south of his bungalow. When they get there and realize their trucks aren’t going to make it through the underpass, they start backing up — often into Christie’s house.

Even the truckers who take care not to back into a house create havoc getting out of there.

Even if the truckers backing up avoid hitting Christie’s house, they often take out the side mirrors of cars parked on Ainslie.

“There are cars down Ainslie that get destroyed,” said Eric Turunen, who has lived two houses away for 15 years and figures his vehicles have lost 10 wing mirrors in that time.

And traffic taming measures? We're dealing with Illinois drivers here, who might be more careless than their Michigan counterparts.

Christie and several neighbors have asked City Hall for help. Last year, the city’s Department of Transportation installed “bump outs” on Ainslie — raised rectangles of concrete that narrow the road at Cicero in hopes they will deter truck drivers from backing up on Christie’s street.

The agency also added and improved signs that warn truckers not to head south on Cicero if their trucks are taller than 13 feet, 2 inches, a spokeswoman said.

But none of that seems to have helped, according to neighbors. Truck drivers just back up straight over the bump outs and ignore the new signs, and cars run into each other now that the two-way street has been narrowed.

“The city does goofy things from time to time, and that was one of them,” one neighbor, who didn’t want his name published, said of the bump outs that narrowed the street, giving truckers less room to maneuver.

After cities have tried everything else, will they consider special movement permits for any truck larger than a medium pickup?