No one fixed the 'curve of death.' Then it killed my brothers. |
All the cars behind us stopped and tried to help. Still in shock, I kicked out the window, climbed through, grabbed the phone of the first person I saw and dialed my mom’s number: “Mom, it’s Giovanni. We had a crash. Francesco and Matteo, your kids, are no longer with us.”
On Christmas Day of 2017, I lost both my brothers in a car crash. We were heading to my Nonna’s village for the traditional family lunch. My cousin Alessandro was driving, I sat in the passenger seat, my brothers Francesco and Matteo were in the back.
Midway through State Street 129 – a typical rural route in Sardinia, Italy – Alessandro lost control of the car and we crashed into the safety barrier of the opposite lane. Instead of absorbing the impact, the barrier pierced the back of the car, leaving my cousin permanently injured and killing Francesco and Matteo in front of my eyes.
We were all sober and were not speeding. Alessandro suffered a heart attack. It was only later I found out the barrier that failed had been banned by the European Union a decade earlier. I lost Francesco and Matteo in a spot famous for its dangerousness. Everybody knew about it. No one fixed it.
Losing them in a well-known perilous curve taught me one thing: We are thinking about roads the wrong way.
I wish my story was rare, but it’s not: In the United States alone, about 40,000 people die in vehicle crashes each year – the equivalent of a fully packed baseball stadium blowing up once a year.
We are talking about the leading cause of death globally for youth.
Beyond the human tragedy, crashes have a huge cost. Properties are damaged, legal and insurance costs arise, health care systems are stressed and productivity is lost. The estimated social cost of a fatal road crash in the United States is $11.3........