We traveled east today to Sanford, Maine (pop. 18,000) where I met with Alan Lawrence, 20. Some four years ago, just a week after he got his driver’s license, his car hit a soft shoulder, spun and hit a tree at 40 mph. The accident caused massive brain injury, he was in a coma for six months and half of his body was paralyzed. With intensive rehabilitation, he is able to walk, ride a three wheel bicycle and is now in college trying to get a degree in Digital Media. He still has limited mobility and as we talked I noticed his speech was a bit halting, and so on. Prior to the accident, Alan had been a competitive inland skater. He said the accident has not only caused physical trauma to him, but financial hardship for his family. Just a few days prior, I had told a reporter from the Berlin (NH) Daily Sun (as I’ve told reporters across the country) that our platform promotes “Walkable Communities.” Several years ago, we interviewed Dan Burden in High Springs, Florida. Burden, who Time Magazine recently called one of the top environmentalists in the country, travels America showing towns how to become much more walking and bicycle friendly with lower speed limits, diagonal paths to town, wider berm lanes for walkers and bicyclists… With the traffic speeds considerably lower, with more alternative vehicles (electric, solar powered…), with more people walking and bicycling… wouldn’t the amount of deblitating accidents be diminished in kind? Not to mention pollution. –We will be in Sanford the next couple days to conduct a whistle-stop event at the town square Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We traveled east today to Sanford, Maine (pop. 18,000) where I met with Alan Lawrence, 20. Some four years ago, just a week after he got his driver’s license, his car hit a soft shoulder, spun and hit a tree …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}