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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do <something positive> in such a small place - the US is just too big for <something positive> to happen!"

I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area.

US road fatalities per 1m population in 2013: 104 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...) EU road fatalities per 1m population in 2013: 51 (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...)

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I've never understood that argument either, on any issue. Most states are smaller than countries, and if on the federal level there aren't any economies of scale or mind-share synergy, then something else is very wrong.

If a small country can do it, a large country should be able to do it much better, either per state if there's gain in small scale solutions, or on a federal level where you only have to solve the problem once for 30 times the population size.

Not to detract from your point but the US Federal government, shockingly, is incapable of passing necessary regulations and the Constitution forbids a State from passing their own versions. For instance, vehicle inspections, licensing standards, safety equipment, etc are all set at the Federal level. Cities can't forbid oversized trucking, require truck side guards, etc.

Likewise, stupendous amounts of Federal and State taxes are forcefully siphoned off into wasteful, money-losing highway programs. Money that could go towards safer transit, pedestrian, or biking initiatives.

Vehicle inspections, at least, differ between states; AL doesn't currently require one annually. California has long had much stronger environmental regulations.

>California has long had much stronger environmental regulations.

But not safety which is the issue here.

Boston and Cambridge, MA have passed truck side rail laws. "Trucks over x height prohibited" and "Trucks over x weight prohibited" are common.

States and cities can do a lot, and in fact can do a lot more then the federal government because they don't have a 10th amendment restricting them.

https://www.volpe.dot.gov/our-work/truck-side-guards-resourc...

Boston and Cambridge have required municipal trucks to have side rails. They can't compel anyone else to follow through. That's a tiny fraction of trucking that we see.

The answer was: (1) speed limits, and (2) infrastructure

Are you saying local governments can't do those things?

When I look around San Francisco I see lots of space to build dedicated bike lanes, etc. In the Americans I see:

A) A lack of faith that anything can get better.

B) A willful disregard for other people (lack of empathy).

The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU.

As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year.

In the EU it's half that.

You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.

The relevant statistic is fatalities per billion vehicle-kilometers, which attempts to even out that discrepancy, and leads to the same conclusion. Using this metric, the US still has twice the fatality rate than the UK.

> In the EU it's half that.

I'd like to see a source on that. I think the average American drives about 30% more.

The link/pdf below says 13,000km per driver in the EU. Other sources indicate 11,000km or 12,000km. Any of those work reasonably for this comparison.

https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_f...

The US figure is around 22,000km per person for 2017.

In Sweden for example it's closer to 12,000km per person.

There's a dramatic gulf between the distance driven in the US and most everywhere else.

The passenger vehicles per capita are also reasonably over twice that in the US as in the EU (driving is far more distributed and common per capita). Around 263m passenger vehicles in the US, and 250m in the EU, with the EU having ~743 million people.

If you double or nearly double the distance driven per year, and significantly increase the share of the population that drives, it's not far off to expect a doubling of fatalities vs what you see in the whole of the EU. In fact, I might expect worse than that, as if you're pulling so many km driving, you're probably likely to be driving more often under increased stress and inclimate weather circumstances, driving at times when you perhaps should not be etc. (due to no alternatives). The risk of a bad driving outcome likely accelerates with such substantial increases in km per capita. If you take the US figure on up to 50,000km per capita, I would expect to see an even greater acceleration of fatalities per capita.

I agree that fatalities can be expected to rise as miles driven rise, however these two data points are not so closely linked. For example, driving ten miles in western Kansas on I-70 at midday is not the same as driving ten miles in a metropolitan area filled with shopping centers, with the sun low on the horizon ahead of you and a dirty windshield.

There are many, many variables which complicate the study of traffic safety and my hat is off to any traffic engineers able to deliver meaningful results. It does happen, but it's far more complicated than tracking per capita miles driven (not that you were making this specific argument, just pointing out the obvious).

>but it's far more complicated than tracking per capita miles driven (not that you were making this specific argument, just pointing out the obvious).

x2. A drunk driver going off a cliff is uninteresting since it's a known problem with known solutions (regardless of your personal opinion on how adequate the implementation of those solutions is).

Stuff where no party did much that was unreasonable is what's interesting because those tell you what edge cases cause the system to fail.

I read years ago that outside of inexperience and illness, (being very young or very old), your likelihood of an accident scales linearly with miles driven. So, unlike flying, distance increases risk in statistically meaningful ways.

That's correct. In the US, in part due to poor public transportation, people often drive when they basically should not. That includes everything from really bad weather, to while intoxicated. Just alcohol-impaired driving crashes alone account for 1/3 of all US traffic deaths each year.

Part of it is also due to the lack of decent public transit opportunities. I would love drive less to work if a decent transit option is open.

That points towards (part of) the solution - yes, a key part of reducing fatalities would be restructuring infrastructure, society norms and zoning so that people drive significantly less. And that's why it's anathema in USA and not likely to happen.

The US is certainly too big for some things. But it's definitely not a good argument when we're talking about urban & suburban street design. How big the US is or isn't, means nothing when we're talking about how best to lay out a 5 mile by 5 mile plot of land for a town.

Have you spent any time living/driving in places like Houston or Atlanta or the suburbs of Chicago or Los Angeles? How about the bay area outside of SF?

Because if you have, I can't imagine how you'd think it's a solvable problem.

The US is too big... at least a lot of cities are, in terms of distance covered. EU benefits from population growth pre car-era. Density necessitates lower speeds and smaller roads, and good luck regulating US cities into that state.

> Density necessitates lower speeds and smaller roads, and good luck regulating US cities into that state.

Most European cities dream of having the same amount of road space US cities have.

Yet, many European cities build dedicated bike lanes... It takes serious political will-power to close of roads from cars.

It's lack of "will" do something, nothing more.

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