On Valentines Day, Chicago musician Chris Saathoff was the victim of a hit-and-run after leaving The Empty Bottle, a club on Chicago’s Northwest side. About 26 hours after Chris, and about a half mile to the north, a man in his 50s was killed. Across town, a woman, age 44, was killed by a vehicle in the parking lot. One local listserv dubbed the sequence of pedestrian killings St. Valentine’s Massacre 2004.” The deaths have helped to rally local pedestrian advocates who are planning a protest/memorial styled after the widely popular bicycle ride, Critical Mass, and similar pedestrian protests in California. I plan to attend the memorial because I believe pedestrian rights are the bedrock to mobility and absolutely essential to a healthy community. Some laugh at the idea of pedestrian rights. How could something so mundane need to be defended? But it is its banality that is its strength. If any group needs to be radicalized, it is pedestrians.  

625 Illinois Compiled Statues 5/11-1002. Pedestrians’ right-of-way at crosswalks. (a) … the driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way, slowing down or stopping if need be to so yield, to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within a crosswalk…

Here’s a description of the pedestrian protest in California from the Menlo Park Almanac, Feb. 11, 2004:

Tempers flared Friday on Santa Cruz Avenue near the Menlo Commons retirement community as angry drivers clashed with a group of protesting pedestrians exercising their right to cross the street — and re-cross it at what they said was a decent interval.

From about 11 a.m. Friday, February 6, until sometime after 1 p.m., about 30 friends and relatives met to commemorate the one-month anniversary of the death of Atefeh “Amy” Bijan, a 75-year-old Menlo Commons resident who, on January 9, was struck by a car and killed in the crosswalk midway between the intersections of Alameda de las Pulgas and Sand Hill Road.

Benjamin Helphand