I got hit by a car in a crosswalk two Fridays ago. I'm fine. I was mostly able to dodge the car, and I caught it on video as it sped off. When I made a post online about the incident, I mentioned that things could have been worse if I had been pushing a stroller. Someone responded with a police scanner, from that same day, describing a crash in which a child was loaded into an ambulance after a stroller was hit by a vehicle. Chattanooga has made remarkable progress reducing violent crime. Overall, it has fallen for multiple years in a row, and homicides continue to trend downward. Here, the city identified a public safety problem, collected data, assigned responsibility and acted with urgency. Yet we approach traffic violence very differently. Traffic crashes continue to kill and seriously injure Chattanoogans every year, but we often treat them as unavoidable. We call them accidents and rarely ask why they keep happening. Rarely do we ask whether the streets themselves are contributing to the outcome. (IN THE NEWS: Jury finds driver guilty after 2023 Frazier Avenue crash) In a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of 29 wealthy nations, the United States ranked worst for traffic deaths. The difference isn't genetics or driving skill. It's that many peer countries design their roads around the reality that humans make mistakes. That is why I was initially excited to learn Chattanooga was pursuing a $17 million Safe Streets for All grant. This is one of the few federal funding sources specifically aimed at transportation safety. Before I go any further, let me be clear: I am not opposed to data, research, technology or Chattanooga's Smart City initiatives. The problem is when information becomes a substitute for action. The grant proposal describes