Hey guys, it's Kia and welcome to another episode of The Break. So maybe you've been to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. I know this seems a little random, but hang with me. It's the one with the black granite wall that's 10 feet high, 75 feet long covered in this overwhelming sea of names of people who died in a war that a lot of folks think we never should have been in the first place, right? So now imagine that at some point in history, we decided to build a similar wall, specifically to commemorate the victims of traffic violence on U.S. roads. And let's say that in real time, we went out and carved the names of every single person who lost their lives in this utterly preventable and senseless epidemic. And let's not even go too crazy here, right? Let's say we started this project around the year 2000, about 20 years ago. How many Vietnam walls would we need to accommodate that growing list of names just for the past 20 years? The answer is a little less than 14. That is a little over a thousand feet of 10 foot tall black granite in total, which is about the length of the Eiffel Tower if you laid it on its side. And if deaths continued at the pace they hit in the last year, we would need to add a new Vietnam Memorial sized panel to the length of that wall, about once every 15 months. That memorial doesn't exist, but memorials like it, at least on a more modest scale, used to. And maybe they should again. The conversation I'm bringing you today is from an interview I did a few weeks back with the historian Peter Norton, who you might know from his indispensable books, Fighting Traffic and A Tonorama. I interviewed Peter a few weeks ago for an article I did on World Day of Remembrance for Victims of Traffic Violence. I will leave a link to that one in the show notes, but he taught me a lot more during that interview than I could cram into that story, not just about why monuments to traffic violence were ever erected or why they came down, but about the role that public grieving and its absence have in shaping our view of automobility itself. Even if you read the original story, I think you're going to get a lot out of it. Peter is a fantastic interview, so I couldn't pass up an opportunity to have a person who is kind of a writing hero of mine on the show. So without further ado, here's the full thing. Here is my conversation with Peter Norton.