Making Sense of the Vancouver Vehicle-Ramming Attack
// Last week, a black Audi plowed into a crowd of people at a street festival in Vancouver. Over the course of the day, one hundred thousand people had gathered at the Lapu-Lapu Block Party, held to celebrate the achievements of the Filipino-Canadian community. As the party was winding down, the S.U.V. was driven at full speed into the crowd. Eleven people were killed, two dozen injured; the dead ranged in age from a five-year-old girl to a 65-year-old man.
The festival took place on the grounds of John Oliver High School, at Fraser Street and East 43rd. I grew up in Vancouver, and at one point lived in a house just off Fraser; I know the site well. Police were quick to issue a statement saying that terrorism wasn't the motive; it was later revealed that the driver, 30-year-old Kai-Ji Adam Lo, had "a significant history of interactions with police and healthcare professionals related to mental health."
This terrible incident is another manifestation of a form of homicide known as the "vehicle-ramming attack." In 2025 alone, there have been at least a dozen around the world, including another, even deadlier, incident in which 14 people—mostly students—were killed by a driver who accelerated into a crowd outside an elementary school in Jinhua, China.
The automobile's potential as an instrument of mass murder, in the name of soi-disant ideology, was demonstrated in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a 20-year-old Ohio man with reported ties to white nationalists was accused of driving a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of antiracist protesters on a pedestrian mall, leading to a crash that injured 19 and killed a 32-year-old woman. In the same year, there was a horrific attack in Barcelona, Spain, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility, in which the driver of a Fiat van raced down a popular pedestrian promenade, Las Ramblas, killing 14 people.
Trucks and vans have been driven into crowds on the waterfront promenade in Nice, France, and bridges over the Thames in London, in Berlin’s Christmas market and Stockholm’s shopping district, and outside a North London mosque. Sometimes the attacks are carried out by hate-filled extremists; just as often, the drivers are in the grips of a mental health crisis, as when a mentally disturbed man behind the wheel of a stolen car was charged with the murders of six people on a mall in Melbourne, Australia, or when a man who was high on PCP careened onto a busy sidewalk in Times Square in New York, injuring 20 people and killing an 18-year-old tourist.
As a pedestrian, a lifelong urban cyclist, and the father of two school-age children who get to school on foot and by bike, I'm acutely aware of the danger represented by the automobiles that surround me and my family. I live in a neighbourhood that is riven by vehicle-rich streets, and raising my kids has been a long process of training them to stop at street corners, not run past blind alleys, and leave a buffer zone near car doors when cycling on the street. The last dozen years have involved a series of mini-heart attacks, as I've watched my kids come close—sometimes too close—to being sideswiped by the driver of a mini-van or doored by a time-challenged delivery driver.
