Every year, the same awful routine. I send my wife a text message: A bicyclist was killed near Rice, not me.

You see, one time early in my life as a commuter who takes turns walking, bicycling and riding the bus, I did not send a message like that to her, and I did not have my mobile phone ringer on, so she pent an hour trying to reach me and worrying for no reason. Now I'm sure to let her know I'm OK with a quick text.

The next step in the awful routine is to share the opinion pieces and editorials that come out in the Chronicle calling for safer streets.

After Marjorie Corcoran was killed in a collision with a Metro train where Hermann Park, Fannin, Main, Sunset and Rice University meet, I wrote one of those opinion pieces myself because, even though I did not know Professor Corcoran, I cross that intersection daily and I felt connected to her as a fellow employee of the university.

Then, in November of last year, a freelance editor and writer I worked with for 15 years, Polly Koch, was killed while walking her two dogs home from a morning stroll around the Menil Collection.

ZERO VISION: Enough talk. More infrastructure.

Once again, though more powerfully than ever before, I felt compelled to repeat the call for safer streets, but I couldn't do it.

I met with other people who knew her and discussed writing another opinion piece, but I thought, What difference will it make? I have committed my whole life to words, as did Polly, but what have all the editorials added up to?

I applaud the city for putting forward the successful Bayou Greenways bond before voters in 2012. For launching Cigna Sunday Streets HTX in 2014. For adopting a safe passing ordinance in 2015. For passing the Bike Plan in 2017. For announcing a collaboration with Precinct One Commissioner Rodney Ellis that puts several million dollars towards implementing the Bike Plan. I have watched transportation engineers with notepads studying the intersection where Marjorie Corcoran died and noticed little changes to the crossing signal times, the repainting of the crosswalks and the new color schemes for the trains. I have read about METRO's study to decrease collisions near Rice and the Medical Center.

Though I take comfort that my voice was among a chorus of voices asking for these changes, when I read week after week about another deadly crash, when a child like Muhammad Ali Abdullah is killed walking with his brothers to the first day of school, when one of my own colleagues is suddenly gone in such an incomprehensible way, cynicism wells up in me from a place I can't reason away.

We treat one another as disposable. In physical form, in the way policy is enacted, and in social norms, we have created a city that treats fatal crashes as acceptable whether the victim was on a sidewalk or in a car, whether a pregnant scientist, a child, a day laborer or a writer with her dogs. The slow, incremental changes have not added up to a safe city.

In my professional work as a writer and editor, I mostly cover literature, economics, art, architecture and urban planning. I try to write from a place of measured reflection. I am no war correspondent reporting from the trenches, but I have come to the realization that my daily commute is like a war zone and, despite my misgivings, I have to bear witness.

BRUTAL REALITY: Houston is hell on cyclists and pedestrians.

A few hours before I wrote this, Rice University notified its staff that a person on a bicycle had been killed at the Sunset and Main intersection. I walked to the "ghost bike" memorializing Marjorie Corcoran. From there I could see police, a large truck and, in the distance, the covered body of the victim. I saw a person whom I believe was her grieving spouse. He was not allowed to identify the body physically, so he kept calling her phone.

Houston has experts who know how to design safer streets. They know how to draw curb extensions, road diets and other clever design moves that safely accommodate everyone — people walking, rolling wheelchairs, pedaling bikes and driving vehicles. We have the expertise to pursue a "Vision Zero" strategy. We even have a mayor calling for a paradigm shift, but why isn't this crisis addressed with the level of urgency we have for mitigating floods? Where is the collective will? Where is the outrage? Where is the commitment to life, to ourselves, to make our city safe right now?

Raj Mankad (@mankad) is Editor of Cite: The Architecture + Design Review of Houston, a publication of the Rice Design Alliance.

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