ON A COLD MONDAY NIGHT IN
November, a group of cyclists held a vigil outside London’s City Hall, on the south bank of the Thames. They had gathered to mourn Filippo Corsini, a 21-year-old Italian who had been struck and killed by a truck while cycling to class a week earlier. He was the 53rd cyclist or pedestrian killed in London this year. Two Italian flags fluttered in the stiff, icy breeze. Tower Bridge glowed in the distance. One cyclist took up the microphone to read a poem: But you promised to come home … You’d just called to tell me, ‘Sorry I’m late, I’ll be home to put the kids to bed,’ but the police called … and we put you to sleep instead. The poem’s author, a 51-year-old named Tom Kearney, was in the crowd, filming the scene with his mobile phone. When the poem was finished, the cyclists clapped, their applause muffled by winter gloves. “Thank you, Tom,” one of the vigil’s organizers said. “Your poems always really get me.” Kearney was still staring at his phone, firing off a string of tweets. Kearney is an American-born former mining executive who has lived in London for nearly 20 years. He’s not a cyclist, but he shares a common cause with the activists gathered that night. The poem was partly autobiographical: Seven years ago, Kearney was nearly killed and knocked into a coma by a bus near his office on Oxford Street, in London’s busiest retail area. Since then, he’s been on a mission to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured on London streets. While the cyclists present were focused on trucks, Kearney’s target is the city’s buses. In an alternative universe, Kearney, a Harvard graduate who has worked for the World Bank and Enron, would still be putting in long hours pulling together energy and commodities deals in the former Soviet Union and Africa. Instead, his main occupation these days is providing the London transport authority with a splitting headache. Most people who have lived in or visited London have witnessed buses driving too fast or aggressively. Kearney’s accident awakened him to what he describes as a flawed system that kills and hospitalizes people unnecessarily, costing hundreds of millions of pounds a year. To the blunt-spoken businessman, a descendant of proud Irish-American campaigners with a long history in Democratic Party politics, his adopted country’s complacency when it comes
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PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW RENNEISEN FOR POLITICO