Pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in Halifax are all incompetent jerks. Agree?

It’s the message people like to give when talking about our streets. Such simple statements are fun and easy to make, but they’re also wrong. To make progress, we need cooler thinking.

I posted online this week that we should appreciate the restraint of Halifax drivers, since the majority are courteous and careful with pedestrians. Here’s a sample of the response:

“I want to think is sarcasm ... but nope?”

“We shouldn’t have to offer public appreciation to drivers for driving carefully. It’s the expectation. It’s the bare minimum.”

“Thank you so much for not murdering me with your car.”

“I do not appreciate drivers. They should stop driving and take a bike, take a bus, take a walk. I wish urban planners would stop appreciating drivers and start to appreciate the rest.”

We’ve all seen the exact same kind of messages directed at pedestrians and cyclists. I guess everyone hates everyone. It’s odd, because most Halifax residents like each other well enough, until the moment anyone uses transportation of any kind.

This is not the way that a healthy society talks about problems and fixes them.

This extreme way of talking resembles the kind of pathological thought patterns that, according to cognitive behavioural theorists, lead to anxiety and depression. Two of these patterns are “overgeneralizing” and “labelling.” When depressed people have one or two bad experiences, they are prone to jumping to conclusions, such as, “My friends are always unreliable,” or “Everyone is a liar.”

When a driver ignores a pedestrian in a crosswalk, it stands out in the mind. Suddenly, all Halifax drivers are jerks. The same goes for people on foot or bike. If you go outside right now and look at the street, however, it’s obvious that the vast majority of people are actually acting courteously.

Overgeneralizing is counterproductive for two reasons. First, it’s inaccurate. Changing 1 per cent of a population’s behaviour is a different kind of problem than changing 90 per cent.

Second, overgeneralizing plays into the “us versus them” mentality that prevents people from working together on solutions.

Take a controversial issue like bike lanes. People opposed to them often start by saying how cyclists are insane, listing all the terrible things they’ve seen them do. Any of us could also list the crazy things we’ve seen people walking or driving do, but what would that accomplish? Should we make it illegal to walk, bike or drive?

What we need are reasonable conversations about practical solutions to improve safe behaviour. Demonizing thousands of people based only on how they get to work is silly, and it gets in the way of constructive communication.

Another pathological thought pattern: When people explain away anything good as unimportant, something called “disqualifying the positive.” If family members are supportive, it doesn’t matter because it’s their job to be supportive.

By the same line of thinking, if the vast majority of drivers are courteous with pedestrians, it’s not a good thing. It’s just “the bare minimum.”

I recently visited Cairo. That city no longer has crosswalks because so many drivers ignored them. To cross a busy street, pedestrians must walk out into traffic, pausing while cars fly by on both sides at high speed. That terrifying experience was the original motivation for my post online.

The majority of humans on this planet live in cities where traffic is far more dangerous than here. We should be grateful for the social norms that make our streets safe, so we remember to work hard to keep them.

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It is also true, however, that in the context of Canada, Halifax has among the worst rates of traffic accidents. So, which fact matters more?

Both matter, of course. We cannot understand the problem accurately without recognizing both what we are doing well and why we should do much better.

A bit of realistic gratitude will help reduce the divisiveness and name-calling that gets in the way of making Halifax streets safer. We should open up our eyes, and see that most of us are working hard to not hurt each other.

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