Six pedestrians have lost their lives to vehicles on Maine roads so far this year. By early March 2024, that count was zero.

Confronted by such a harrowing statistic, there’s an unfortunate tendency to look for distantly reassuring variable factors, accident to accident.

It was very dark that night. There was a snowbank blocking the sidewalk. The pedestrian was somewhere they shouldn’t have been. There might have been a loose dog involved.

This type of coping gets us exactly nowhere.

Thinking of the blood spilled on Maine roads so far this year — by people out walking — as some kind of “streak of bad luck,” to borrow the words of Andrew Zarro, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition of Maine (who was urging the public against this kind of conclusion), is faulty — and it’s ignorant.

The limp official and unofficial response to this recent spate of deaths should outrage and terrify Mainers. Where are the ashen-faced commitments to improved safety by the towns, the cities, the state Department of Transportation? Where are the deafening PSAs, the improved lighting, the urgent road projects, the urgent upgrade of infrastructure?

It’s very hard not to feel as if it falls only to Zarro’s nonprofit and others like it to try to ring the alarm, to issue the condemnatory press release. And then? We wait for the cycle to repeat itself.

This editorial board was aghast at the response last week to a Press Herald reporter by a highway safety coordinator for the Maine Bureau of Highway Safety. “If this trend continues,” the official said, “we’re looking to have another very high year when it comes to traffic fatalities.”

No kidding. This trend continues if we continue to sit back and let it.

We’re all living in car towns in a car state. If we’re participating in our communities, we’re on the streets and in the crosswalks. We’re watching the lights change. We’re watching the roads. We care about the very obvious dangers and heart-stopping close shaves we so often see.

Or do we?