Tab Combs"[The state] may recognize the need to offer social protection to reduce vulnerability, but it is normally a party to the economic and social processes that lead people to be unable to protect themselves in the first place."
Terry Cannon, 1994, Vulnerability analysis and 'natural' disasters
#VRU
^^^This is a fantastic explanation of why it feels like gaslighting when DOTs talk about the need to change behaviors of so-called 'vulnerable road users' aka #VRUs.
People who are walking, biking, waiting for transit, or simply existing near a road aren't inherently vulnerable...
They may be more vulnerable to experiencing a bad outcome if they get hit by a car than someone inside another car, sure.
But the fact that they'd be at risk of getting hit at all? That comes straight back onto the DOT (Cannon's "state").
So when a DOT refers to people outside of cars, as they so often do, as "VRUs" while simultaneously accepting their own role in creating the hazard to which ppl are vulnerable, they are 100% gaslighting.
We can actually go a step further than Cannon, who was writing more in the context of vulnerability to natural hazards (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes), where the state plays a role in determining who does and who doesn't end up in harm's way with limited protection from said harm....
...Whereas when it comes to the hazard of roadway violence, the state helps create the hazard (through building roadway infrastructure that enables high volumes of high speed motor vehicle traffic)...
...and the vulnerability (directly, through NOT building protected infrastructure for other modes, and indirectly, through longstanding practices and policies of exploitating those least empowered to fight back).
The parallels between natural hazards and roadway violence lose touch a little when it comes to how to address social vulnerabilities, however. For natural hazards, it's a no-brainer: focus not on controlling the hazard, but on mitigating the (often state-imposed) vulnerabilities. Simple in...
...concept, hard af in reality, and the state has historically preferred to try and conquer the environment (prob. because that's where all the honeypot private contracts are).
But the reverse is true for roadway violence.
Here, the state (or many states, at least) happily take the hazard (big fast roads carrying big fast cars through human settlements) as a given, ordained by god, and thus leave only addressing the manufacturered vulnerability as the only viable options....
...But addressing that vulnerability properly (i.e., providing protected infrastructure; redressing decades of social and economic exploitation; etc) would require admitting to have played some role in causing that vulnerability...
...which obviously simply will stand. So instead, the state (in the form of the DOT) finds it much easier to create road safety cartoons and hand out reflective vests to school kids. "Protect yourselves! There's a car coming, and it might hit you!!!"