Death on the Highway

The Chronicle’s front-page story on Sunday about pedestrian fatalities offered few great insights – except that sometimes people walking along Houston’s highways and access roads get hit by cars and die, and that the people who accidentally hit and kill them tend to feel not-so-great about it later.

But the story, by top-shelf investigative reporters Dane Schiller and Lise Olsen, attached a few faces to the numbers, which can be interesting. Even more interesting, though, was a little factoid attributed to a UH physics professor that “being hit head-on by a vehicle traveling 65 mph unleashes the same force on a human body as plunging from a 14-story building.”

It’s crass, I know, but it makes me wonder what else getting struck by a speeding vehicle can be compared to. –Todd Spivak