Unpreventable tragedy

Re: How to stop vehicles from being weapons, April 25

All this talk of bollards and concrete blocks and other barriers to prevent attacks by a speeding vehicle is nonsense. According to Graeme Hamilton’s article, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration reported 17 such attacks from 2014 to April 2017 resulting in 173 deaths and 667 injuries. To put these numbers in perspective, for 2016 for all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, the U.S. Department of Transportation reported 37,461 lives were lost on U.S. roads — just over 100 deaths per day.

While every death is a tragedy, we should not spend millions of dollars trying to prevent attacks by vehicles. Quite clearly, we cannot protect every mile of sidewalk in our cities. A determined driver, intent on killing pedestrians, will avoid protected areas and simply go to an unprotected street.

Expenditures proposed for sidewalk barriers to prevent vehicular attacks should be diverted to mental-health care instead. Colin MacCallum, West Vancouver