Yesterday morning a friend who is a well-known journalist got off the bus in front of the press club in Dhaka and, as he started to cross the street, was hit by another bus. His left foot was severed; people tied the tourniquet too tightly, so he may lose the whole leg. Given his status, the incident is gaining much media attention, which is the only unusual thing about what happened to him. Within a few days he too will mostly be forgotten and the promises to address road safety will fade away. Each such event is taken as a single episode, with its villains and victims, and the suggested solutions will often be irrelevant; people have trouble understanding that vehicles weighing a ton or more inevitably will, when driven at high speed, regularly cause injury and death. We build our cities in such a way as to create dependency on motorized vehicles, then quietly watch the carnage happen, always failing to blame the design of our cities and our acceptance of the inevitability of the automobile. But I’m an optimist; I believe that we can turn this senseless destruction into good and finally engage our policymakers, planners, and the public in seeking better urban design that will facilitate and reward convenient, safe, and mainly active transport. I can’t give our friend his leg back, but I can do my part to try to reduce such senseless tragedies in the future.