Collateral Damage: Theresa’s Story

The War on Cars

The War on Cars, LLC

Cars, Society & Culture, Culture, Bicycling, Politics, Urbanism, Walking, Transportation, Cities, Transit, News Commentary, News

4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2019

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2002, Theresa Sareo, an up-and-coming singer, had her life changed forever when a reckless driver hit her as she stood on a Manhattan sidewalk waiting to cross the street. She lost her leg and nearly died, making her one of the millions of people injured by automobiles in the United States every year. In New York City alone, the toll was more than 59,000 people in 2018. Theresa tells her story of recovery and resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.

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Show notes:

Visit Theresa Sareo’s personal website to find out more about her story and her music.

Read the New York magazine article about the crash and its aftermath.

Find data about auto-related injuries and fatalities on New York City’s crash data map.

Follow us on Twitter: @TheWarOnCars. Sarah Goodyear @buttermilk1, Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke, and Aaron Naparstek @Naparstek. This episode was produced and edited by Sarah Goodyear.

Do you have an issue you want to discuss with us on the show? Send a voice memo to: [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're going to see. I often say that because I don't remember any of it, the accident doesn't belong to me,
0:40.7	it belongs to the people who are on the corner with me and they really were my angels. A lot of them. A lot of them ran away I think because it was so horrific and a lot of them stayed to help me and the ones that helped me literally saved my life.
1:07.9	Welcome to the War on Cars. So today's episode is going to be a little different. We're going to focus on the story of one person.
1:10.5	Yeah, we're going to hear from a survivor of traffic violence, Theresa Sorayo.
1:14.7	She's going to tell us from a personal perspective what it's like to be injured by a driver,
1:20.0	the way that more than 59,000 people in New York City were last year.
1:24.4	And that was up 6% from the previous year.
1:27.3	Around the country, the number is about 4.5 million people injured by cars each year.
1:33.2	Yeah, which is incredible.
1:34.8	And it's a crazy number.
1:36.0	It's a crazy number and we don't think about it a lot because we tend to
1:40.1	always look at the number of fatalities,
1:42.2	which is obviously really important, but that just completely glosses over this enormous much larger number of people who are injured and you might think of those people as
1:55.4	collateral damage in the war on cars. So here in New York about 4,000 people a
2:01.0	month are injured a quarter of those are pedestrians and people on bikes.
2:06.8	And a lot of times when you hear about these crashes, these injuries, they are described as life
2:12.0	altering.
2:12.8	And what happened to Teresa was certainly life altering.
2:17.0	So in this episode, we're going to hear her story.
2:20.2	We're going to hear her tell her story.
2:22.1	But first, as usual, let's get some business out of the way.
2:25.0	We need your support to keep the war on cars going.
	...

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