I saw it all the time when I was commuting out to the burbs from the city on 90. Every day when I was coming home, I always got a little excited when I saw it h

I saw it all the time when I was commuting out to the burbs from the city on 90. Every day when I was coming home, I always got a little excited when I saw it had finally incremented! Then I would feel sad about it because of what that meant. It was strange, I had some weird desire to see the number continue to go up, apart from the clearly tragic context. In a way, quantifying it like that kind of abstracted away the human element. As the cliche goes, those who lost their lives became just another statistic. If they had put the name of the last person killed, that might have driven the point home more effectively, privacy issues aside.