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Last September, John H. Corcoran ’84 was killed while cycling on Memorial Drive, close to Boston University’s DeWolfe Boathouse. Since then, many road safety advocates have mourned his death by calling for justice. That demand is now partially materializing as prosecutors prepare charges against the driver involved in the crash.

However, while accountability is necessary — drivers must be held responsible when their actions lead to harm — it is not the same as justice. Corcoran’s death was a moment for mourning, but it also signified the importance of transformation.

We need a paradigm shift in our approach to street safety and a “just culture” allowing everyone to move with dignity.

Memorial Drive, overseen by the Department of Conservation and Recreation, is a road with a deadly record. Between 2014 and 2024, at least 1,200 crashes have occurred, resulting in hundreds of injuries and four fatalities, per Massachusetts Department of Transportation records. After Corcoran’s death, DCR began spending over $1 million to enforce a 25 mph speed limit and renovate existing wheelchair and bike ramps.

The proposed charges against the driver and DCR’s commitments are a step forward. Yet, progress has been slow and inadequate. More than piecemeal reform, we deserve a paradigm shift in our approach to road safety.

How do we do it? We can start by seeing how other sectors, like aviation, respond to preventable loss of life — and why our roads haven’t caught up.

One of the keys to the aviation industry’s 21st-century success is the emergence of what experts call a “just culture.” In this environment, safety is a shared responsibility; human error is expected and accounted for, and crisis-response systems are designed to minimize harm when it happens. After a plane crash, there is not a hyperfocus on punishing the pilot. We investigate the entire chain of failures. We change protocols. We update infrastructure. We learn fast because flying is too important to be dangerous.

This culture helped create a near-flawless commercial aviation safety record in the U.S., with only six fatalities involving large aircraft between 2015 and 2024. By contrast, almost 40,000 people died in traffic fatalities in 2024 alone, according to an estimate from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Without shifting responsibility away from individual errors and toward design systems, we leave blind spots in our analysis of road crashes. But by applying a just culture to our roads, we can look beyond one person’s culpability in a crash and target the surrounding infrastructure.

First, a just culture is measurable. Implementing design changes like slowing speeds, reducing the number of car lanes, improving visibility, and separating bike lanes can be done in stages. Responding to the conditions of the road, robust audits and studies are useful to diagnose and re-diagnose the effectiveness of those changes.

Second, a just culture supports a just outcome. We’ll know we’ve succeeded at improving the road when it welcomes more ways of using it. That means designing for those who have been excluded from safe access: low-income residents, young people, seniors, and others who are often the most vulnerable. Additionally, people would begin seeing the street as a place not only for moving people but for building community — for example, through pedestrianization and summer programming.

Mobility justice enables this just culture. It asserts that everyone, regardless of background or mode of transportation, has the right to move safely and with dignity. It reimagines our streets as places for people, not just cars. It invests in design that sustains human life, challenging our leaders to confront the root causes of danger, not just the symptoms.

In recent years, this vision has grown into a paradigmatic social movement and policy agenda. For example, the Safe System approach sets five principles that account for vulnerability, focus on infrastructure, and reinforce protection for pedestrians and cyclists. There is also Vision Zero, the goal of eliminating all traffic deaths, which has been achieved in cities like Hoboken, New Jersey, and Oslo, Norway.

So we have important emblematic policies that help reduce speeds and design for error. But they are only one part of the solution. The other part is political: We need more urgency, moral courage, and follow through from our leaders in Cambridge.

Almost seven months have passed since Corcoran’s death, and I recently biked that same stretch of Memorial Drive. It does not feel significantly safer. I struggled to understand which lane was for bikes and which was for cars. Not to mention that driving there is still dangerous: In February, a car crashed, caught on fire, and destroyed a guardrail.

At a recent Cambridgeport community meeting I attended, state officials reiterated that changes are underway. But underway is not enough. Even though leaders commit to improvements and align themselves with safety goals, they still lack a just culture that incorporates a key ingredient: timeliness.

That is a mistake. These crashes are not tragic anomalies, but indicators that something preventable failed — and crucially, can be fixed. Through measurable and outcome-based transformations, we can reshape the streets themselves and create mobility justice.

With an eye toward a just culture, I realize that we must funnel our inertia into moral momentum. Accountability alone should not be the sole end goal in these tragic crashes. It is a tool. Justice is the goal, and it requires the courage to change.

Not only in memory of the cyclists who have tragically lost their lives, but for all of Cambridge.

Clyve Lawrence ’25-27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Adams House.