Humbled that the family of Shirley Howard spoke with me a week after their sister was killed by a driver while pushing a stroller in the street next to an unplowed sidewalk. There is so much more to her story than local news is putting out there, and so much more we could do to save lives. 🧵 - ThreadSky

keawilson.bsky.social • 35 days ago

Humbled that the family of Shirley Howard spoke with me a week after their sister was killed by a driver while pushing a stroller in the street next to an unplowed sidewalk. There is so much more to her story than local news is putting out there, and so much more we could do to save lives. 🧵

Comments

workthecycle.bsky.social•35 days ago

This is not how I wanted to discover you are now on Bluesky. Thank you for doing the important work.

lealeander.bsky.social•35 days ago

Why hasn't the killer been charged? Maybe 80 is too old to drive a car. I say this a someone is almost 70. I don't have a car.

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

If I had to guess: there's a possibility he hit black ice and will never be charged. There's a possibility he'll be cited for lane departure/v. manslaughter but not face many consequences. Or they'll throw the book at him, and other drivers will keep killing people on this deadly road.

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

Point is: the driver is not really the point. There are a mountain of systemic solutions that might have saved Shirley Howard's life. We can't afford to ignore them.

followmal.bsky.social•35 days ago

📌

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

Shirley's siblings described her not just as a warm, loving, strong woman, but as the lynchpin of a lot of people's lives, including her four kids and her own mother, for whom she was a caretaker. And she did all this despite an epilepsy diagnosis that meant she couldn't drive.

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

When the city didn't plow her neighborhood's sidewalks, though, even this amazingly tenacious woman couldn't meet all her family's needs. When her sister took custody of Shirley's five year-old after his mother's death, she learned the streets to school were so icy he hadn't been in a week.

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

So much research shows people in both paid and unpaid caregiving roles like Shirley — a group that is overwhelmingly women, and disproportionately Black, brown, and low income — suffer disproportionately when cities deprioritize their travel needs. And sidewalks are at the top of the list.

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

Cities that rely mainly on property owners to shovel sidewalks have terrible clearance rates, especially in areas with high vacancy, absentee landlords, poverty, and elderly residents with disabilities. The neighborhood where Shirley lived and died seemingly had all those features.

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

That deeply fragile system gets even more broken when the city plows snow from the driving lane onto the sidewalk. West Florissant avenue, where Shirley was killed, is one of north city's few arterial snow routes.

It's also among the city's five-highest pedestrian crash corridors.

keawilson.bsky.social•35 days ago

We can do a lot better as a city, and I outline some ways in the article with the help of @americawalks.bsky.social. But it starts with recognizing that sidewalks are a human right — and which humans, specifically, lose their lives, independence, and ability to thrive when we ignore them.

bettybarcode.bsky.social•35 days ago

Plus there's the problem of the city itself not clearing sidewalks in front of city-owned properties, esp. in disinvested neighborhoods where they own properties via tax forfeiture.
#PlowSidewalksToo

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