Odds and Ends

The On Your Side column, which I regularly read in the Post-Dispatch, is featuring the crumbling but still salvageable Carr School in the Near North Side this week.

Also, what I found interesting in light of a recent conversation with a colleague, it seems that suburban roads of St. Charles were a more dangerous place to be this weekend than the mean, big, nasty city of St. Louis. As I was dozing off Sunday evening watching the nightly news, expecting the normal litany of murders in North St. Louis that the media sensationalizes, I realized that the first three or four news articles were actually about drunken/reckless driving crashes with serious injuries or fatalities in St. Charles County.

This is not surprising to me, as you are more likely to be killed by a stranger in an automobile on the roads of America than you are to be gunned down by a complete stranger on the streets of a major city. One of the years I lived in DC, the police stated that only 10 of the 180 murders in the city that year were between two complete strangers.

Remember last year when two MoDot construction workers were killed by drunk drivers heading back to St. Charles County after a night of boozing it up in St. Louis City? I don't blame them for not wanting to hang out in St. Charles on the weekend, but why are we developing metropolitan areas that encourage people to drink and drive? How many drunk driving deaths do you think there were in 1910? People stumbled home drunk the block or two from the local tavern, and the most people had to worry about was people urinating on their front stoop.

This is to compare to my near misses with obviously drunk drivers in St. Louis County over every one of the last three weekends. The one two weeks ago literally forced to me swerve off of Highway 40 to avoid him from crashing into me from behind. Isn't it time that we have an honest debate about the 50,000 plus people who die on the roads of America every year?