A roadside memorial in Columbia, MO. Photo from flickr user Generation X-Ray.

Greater Greater Washington leads today with a slew of stories about car crashes:

“A 74-year-old woman was getting out of her car to put flowers on her daughter’s roadside memorial in Henrico, when a driver hit her pickup and killed her. … A driver killed an Arlington woman over the weekend … And a drunk Howard County teen killed his friend after veering off the road Sunday morning. (Post) … Car crashes killed 30 people in California over the weekend, including a driver who “raced through a red light” and killed a family of four.”

All in all, 40,000 people die in car crashes in the United States every year. That’s over 100 every day. We could fill a Vietnam Memorial with the names of the dead every 18 months. Because of car accidents, supposedly “family friendly” outer suburbs are actually more dangerous than inner cities.

With Congress engaged in a monumental debate about health care, it seems appropriate to ask: Why do we tolerate this? Why do we put ourselves and our loved ones in such danger, just to complete the basics of daily travel?

It is simply not true that such colossal death is the cost of doing business in a modern civilization. No other first world country has a traffic death rate as high as ours, because no other first world country has given itself over the car to the extent we have. We can build safer cities. We can build better cities. All we have to do is take them back from rule by car.