SALT LAKE CITY — A rainy Sunday didn’t stop people from taking steps towards change.
People gathered at Washington Square Park in downtown Salt Lake City to honor those who have lost their lives or who have been impacted by traffic incidents.
Organizations involved included Sweet Streets, SLC Transportation, Save Not Pave, and Vision Zero, Utah.
Save Not Pave president Micki Harris has been a speaker at the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims event before. The event is hosted by Sweet Streets.
“Someone, at some point, will know someone who has been affected by it,” Harris said. "To show up in the rain is just another layer to show: we’re not going to take this anymore.”
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Harris often shares her own story, but it’s a story that she’s seen far too often.
“It’s just, it’s unfair,” said Harris, one of the many speakers at the event.
“My grandma was in Alpine, and she grew up in a little house off of Main Street. She went to church, and she was crossing the street to go back, right in the crosswalk, was hit by a mom and her daughters on their way to shop and was killed,” Harris said.
That tragedy is just one part of the reason she does what she does now. She also shared that her sister-in-law was hit and killed while biking. She invited her husband to speak as well, to tell the story of his father, a highway patrolman who died at age 33.
Through all the grief, she’s become an advocate who hopes to spark change in local communities.
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According to Sweet Streets, there have been at least 20 people seriously injured and more than 10 lives lost this year because of traffic incidents in Salt Lake City.
“We have this culture where we accept these car crashes to happen, people are killed,” Julian Jurkoic with Sweet Streets said. "We call it an accident — 'Oh, he shouldn’t be driving like that, he shouldn’t have been walking there,' but we don’t stop to think about the environment, the street design itself, how everything around us is affecting that.”
Advocates are calling for slower speed limits and better infrastructure, road design, and policy.
“It’s not just the families it affects. It’s all the people that are on the scene of the accident. The partner that has to tell the patrolman’s wife that he was killed that day,” Harris said. "It’s the community. It affects so many people, especially the driver."
DRIVEN TO CHANGE
