Early-motorized jurisdictions have their own stories about their first pedestrian death, first passenger death, first driver’s death, and first car ‘accident’.  In the United States, Henry Hale Bliss is remembered as the first person killed in a motor vehicle accident.  On September 13, 1899 while he was getting off a streetcar at West 74th Street and Central Park West in New York City, he was struck by an electric-powered taxicab (Automobile No. 43).  He died the next morning from the injuries to his head and chest.  The taxi driver, Arthur Smith was acquitted of manslaughter charges, on the grounds that his actions were unintentional.  History also records that Mr. Smith’s passenger at the time was Dr. David Edson, the son of former New York City mayor Franklin Edson.  A commemorative plaque dedicated at the site on September 13, 1999 reads as follows:

Here at West 74th Street and Central Park West, Henry H. Bliss dismounted from a streetcar and was struck and knocked unconscious by an automobile on the evening of September 13, 1899. When Mr. Bliss, a New York real estate man, died the next morning from his injuries, he became the first recorded motor vehicle fatality in the Western Hemisphere.  This sign was erected to remember Mr. Bliss on the centennial of his untimely death and to promote safety on our streets and highways.

There’s a quaintness now to the memorializing of these long- ago ‘firsts’.  Today, with over a hundred years of motor history behind us, there may not be enough room around many major intersections, to record the accidents that had taken place at those locations.

Despite the sympathetic remembrance of the tragedy of Mr. Bliss, New York City has in recent years seen an average of around 15,000 pedestrians per year struck and injured by motor vehicles.  Fatalities have remained at over 100 per year.  Energetic efforts at superior intersection design by the city’s engineering department have produced remarkable, steady improvements year by year, but the problem, in broad dimensions, remains.

Fatality and injury caused by automobile crashes—has happened again… and again… and again.  Indeed, the frequency and regularity of fatality and injury from car crashes, has made them, as tragic, destructive, and wasteful as they are, a commonplace of modern life.  A list of the tragedies of the twentieth century:—two world wars, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, the ‘Cold War’, the ‘Cultural Revolution’, the unnecessary suffering from famine and disease, disease epidemics — seldom includes ‘road carnage’.

Yet road carnage is and has been throughout the last century and now into the 21^st Century the number one cause, worldwide, of preventable death and injury.  Fatality and injury from car crashes are so commonplace that unless a victim of road carnage is a celebrity or unless the particulars somehow manage to be unique, car crash stories, when told at all, have been reduced to a few sentences in local newspaper side bars all over the world.  And, ironically enough, when such stories are elevated to more than this the celebration and memorializing of the particular victim somehow acts to shore up our resilience.