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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

One way to make roads safer is to make better drivers. There is a lot of training and continuing education that can be done to make better drivers. It is far too easy to drive, and once you get your license it is very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. I've never heard of someone getting a tailgating ticket even though it is rare to see someone maintain their proper following distance in traffic.

Don't take the above as excusing bad road design.

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I live in the USA. My friend Kristin is from Germany. She got her driver's license in Germany when she was 28. She trained awhile for it and then took 3 tests: city driving, highway driving, and nighttime driving. From how she described it, the training and the testing was much more rigorous than anything that has existed in the USA.

I live in Ireland, used to live in the US, and had to take the Irish driver training and test as an adult, experienced driver. (Who had been driving approx as long as my instructor had been alive).

The test was difficult, picky, and the things that they were looking for were not necessarily correlated with safe, strictly legal driving. (e.g., target speed in a 50KPH zone (urban area) was 53, not 49, and to not approach that with conviction made you a too timid driver.)

And despite the intensive tests -- drivers here are crap. On the dog walk tonight, there were 3 cases of drivers failing to yield at crosswalks.

I know nothing about the infrastructure in Ireland, but the drivers in the US kill at least twice as many people. Letting people drive cars at 50 km/h in an urban area is crazy, everyone you hit at those speeds die.

I suspect it's well more than 2x the people, Ireland is only 5.5 mil total (essentially the size of Washington State).

We've got rural roads that are slightly more than one car wide, some with grass growing down the middle, and are signposted for 80kph. We've got motorways at 120kph.

What speed in miles would you think is Apr. Because 50km/h give you pretty good relation time. The trick is not to get in a crash from the start

They just lowered it in Paris to 30km/h. Lower speed is directly correlated with less crashes. The other benefit is less noise, which is very important in an urban area. In most urban areas now the loudest most constant noise is from vehicles.

50KPH is the norm in any built up area, including in housing estates. Like a subdivision. That's 30mph, for a place where kids play in the green, cats dart out between parked cars, and there's tons of ped traffic.

Germany's training is easy compared to what would be required to make humans be good drivers.

There is only one actual practical driving test. Nighttime and Autobahn driving are just special lessons.

I think we're fine how it is in the USA. Germany's licensing system is absurd overkill and the cost and time commitment leaves out a lot of people who have a need to drive but can't afford it.

In 2019, USA rate of traffic-related deaths was 7.3 per 1 billion vehicle-km. Germany's rate was 4.2 per 1 billion vehicle-km.

If the USA had Germany's rate, 16939 lives would've been saved.

And you think that's "fine"?

Here's where I got my info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

The US is so car dependent that it's very politically fraught to make it harder to get a driver's license. Not allowing a person to drive in much of the US is a matter of equity; people that can't drive can't make it to their jobs, can't buy their groceries, etc. What that means of course is that the US usually just knowingly increases the risk of non-drivers because of its brittle dependence on cars, and thus disincentivizes people in most parts of the US from ever not-driving. Woe to you if you don't drive because the US isn't setup for transit equity.

I dunno, some of this is also the fact the US people are huge babies about certain things, like being able to walk places. For example, there was a reddit thread from an American flabbergasted that people in the UK will actually go on 30-minute-long walks down to their local shops. Is a 30 minute walk really that absurd?

It's a set of interrelated issues. Much of the US is zoned/regulated to be friendly to drivers and not pedestrians. For an egregious example, most of Downtown LA (so not the suburbs) you can walk for 30 minutes and maybe only see 5 different stores. Because of this, American culture has stopped talking about walking. As such for a lot of Americans, walking for 30 minutes to get somewhere is absurd culturally, but driving 30 minutes to go to a store is much more acceptable.

You can see the effect even more when it comes to recreational hobbies and sports. Americans don't really just walk or bike around. Walking and biking/cycling are usually specific activities, so most Americans buy special exercise clothing or exercise gear to go (by car) to specific spots friendly for walking and cycling to perform their recreational activities and come back. Walking is still a popular casual activity in urban areas but in a lot of suburban areas there aren't even the sidewalks in place to make it safe to walk around. Most Americans only really dress/prepare for the walk from their house to the car and from the car to the store/office/destination, then back if they're not specifically out to perform their recreational athletic hobbies.

People in the US have developed an aversion to walking because our built environment makes it terrible. For example, watch this video from about 4:25 on showing a typical urban pedestrian journey the US:

https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54

(One thing the narrator mentions is shade: Keep in mind that Houston is a hot city, with temperatures often above 30c during the summer.)

But that's not unusual at all. In fact, where I grew up in Pennsylvania many roads had literally no sidewalk.

Let's say I want to walk into town where my parents live. I'd be going down this road (you can follow along on street view):

https://maps.app.goo.gl/huqH4kcT3h667RZr7

That's a narrow road, but don't let it fool you. People there drive fast and they're in a hurry. They certainly do not expect to see someone trudging along the berm of the road. Or more likely in a muddy ditch beside the road, because Pennsylvania is wet and that's the safest way to not get hit by a car.

If you walk along into North Wales, PA, pay attention to the pedestrian infrastructure. Where are there sidewalks? Are there crossing signals? How would you know when it's safe to cross? Now imagine doing this in the evening (note: there are no streetlights).

A 30min walk would get me to two convenience stores and a doughnut shop. It would take me about 1hr to walk (briskly) to the nearest grocery store.

And I live in a city where the zoning can be described as "we'll rubber stamp literally anything that isn't hazmat processing we're desperate for money". And this is a ~150yo neighrborhood in a multi-hundred year old city in the northeast, not some socal dump that was built out long after the advent of cars.

> Is a 30 minute walk really that absurd?

Yes, because the number of stores in that 30 minutes is so low. Most of them are also setup for cars, including selling quantities that assume a car to get home.

Depending on region, a 30 minute walk can be dangerous to one's health due to hot, humid temperatures or smoke inhalation.

(Besides that, a 30 minute walk can be inconvenient- the stuff you're buying might not support being carried for 30 minutes. I tried to get a friend to consider giving up a car-based life and they asked me how they're going to move their stuff for LAN parties and gun hobby related activities.)

The lack of a license doesn’t necessarily prevent people from driving. Making it harder, or more severe punishments for poor driving, would not only result in fewer drivers on the road but also more “undocumented” drivers.

Indeed and this is yet another aspect of the car dependency trap. It's so hard to move around in the built environment without a car that individuals will rightfully ignore licensing requirements to tend to their own affairs. Once you force all of your infrastructure to be dependent on a single mode of transport, this mode becomes essential to functioning of the system. This is why it's so difficult to encourage multimodal transport in the US.

> The lack of a license doesn’t necessarily prevent people from driving.

OK, but you need to first decide whether the state should require a license to drive in the first place. And if it requires a license, whether this license should be required to identify you or not. Because you are going to have a hard time with a licensing system in which the license cannot identify the holder.

Maybe it shouldn't. That's a useful and honest discussion to have.

What is not a useful or honest discussion is whether we should require it but not really enforce the requirement.

If you require it, then you should enforce it, and you should not refuse to enforce it because you think that enforcing it does more harm than good. If it's really true than enforcement does more harm than good, then don't require it.

But this idea that group X should meet some standard, but group Y can meet a lower standard, is lawless and discriminatory. It violates the principle of equal treatment before the law, and it destroys the willingness of society to abide by laws. It creates a population of lawbreakers that can be the victim of selective enforcement, e.g. to punish enemies, while it rewards friends by promising to not enforce the laws. This is basically institutionalized corruption in the sense of the old machines like Tammany Hall. It's when you get to a situation where government can destroy enemies by deciding to enforce laws against them, because there are so many laws whose enforcement is arbitrary.

That goes for every aspect of controlling our borders and deciding who can come here. If you want to make an argument for open borders, go ahead. There is legit intellectual case to make for that.

But don't say, well, for one group we should enforce things but for another group we shouldn't, because then law abiding people end up waiting for years (my parents waited for 10 years to be able to come to the U.S. legally) while others just overstay their tourist visa (my mother's relatives did that).

That's discriminatory and lawless, and sets you up for a system in which those who obey the law are recognized as suckers and forced to subsidize those who do not.

I’m not sure I 100% follow. By “undocumented” I mean that their license has been revoked (and thus they have no insurance), or they never got one. They lack the document to legally drive.

> If you require it, then you should enforce it, and you should not refuse to enforce it because you think that enforcing it does more harm than good.

There’s a third situation: that enforcement is difficult. The last time I was pulled over was 19 years ago. If that situation had resulted in my license being revoked, I could have continued driving without my license for the next 19 years with no consequences (maybe registering my car under a family member’s name). But regardless, how would this be enforced on a wide scale? The authorities don’t have the resources to check that every person behind a wheel is carrying a license. So, these checks generally occur after an infraction.

My point is simply that revoking a license doesn’t necessarily take those people off the road.

My optometrist told me that when he first started his clinical practice he was shocked to discover how many people are driving around with serious visual impairment.

The amazing thing is how many of the most egregious incidents involve drivers with suspended licenses or no licenses. At the moment, in the US, due to bail reform consequences are minimal unless someone is actual killed.

That's just a reflection of the fact of how necessary cars are to a reasonable life. The state is naturally going to be reluctant to screw people out of their means to get to their obligations because the state doesn't want to create more people who are dependent on it.

> very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see.

People bring this up often. As far as I can tell such people are not heavily represented in car crash statistics.

That is because it is impossible to measure: people tend to drive less as their vision degrades, vision degrades at different rates for different people (we can't use old as a proxy), they tend to mitigate their vision problems by driving slower. Probably other factors to account for too, that I don't know how to account for. Not heavily represented is not the same as not dangerous.

This is a complicated topic. One thing I can recall is that there's more pedestrian collisions as there's been more safety technologies and larger cars and average vehicle miles travelled (can't find the study, this might be a lead: https://safetrec.berkeley.edu/news/new-release-2020-safetrec... )

> People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive.

Furthermore, we literally use the phrase, "never got so much as a speeding ticket" to suggest that speeding is the epitome of a minor, inconsequential infraction, when the reality is that we know speeding is a significant cause of and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in automobile crashes.

Predicated on having already crashed, the chances that speed was a contributing factor to the severity is very high. That's why people want lower speed limits.

Predicated on simply having been driving over the speed limit, the chances of an accident are very low. That's why people don't care about speeding.

This only captures crashes with other road users. Increased speed increases a lot of other risks, such as risk of injury to pedestrians at crosswalks or sidewalks, increased risk to hitting a building, and of course the general depressing effect that happens on non-car usage of roads (how many people will want to ride a bike on a road where all car drivers are speeding?).

(This is one of my big issues with US speed limits. All the discussion around it is always scoped only to other cars for the most part.)

I don't have these numbers, but I'm positive that the lifetime risk for having experienced a serious car accident (or any car accident for that matter) is strongly correlated with driving behavior and specifically speeding.

Second, there's the matter of just how damn uncomfortable it is to be around speeding cars when you're not also in a car yourself. People in suburbs don't really think about this because nobody walks anywhere. But I live in a walkable urban environment and the speeders here are an enormous hit to quality of life. They're louder, more aggressive -- it's just really unsettling to be around.

This can be hard to convince suburbanites of, because they conceive of themselves mostly as drivers and not as pedestrians, but even if there were no safety improvements, it would be a huge win for urban environments if we could rein in speeding.

But the reality is that it would also save ~6,000 lives a year in the U.S.

Every speeding ticket that I’ve gotten in the US was issued on a controlled access road with a speed limit of at least 55mph. None were for as much as 20 over. Most were from pack travel where deciding to travel at the posted limit would result in far more passing and aggregate risk to roadway users.

I do believe all of those are minor infractions (and of course they were inconsequential, except for the delay and expense [if convicted] of the ticket). Revenue enforcement here is mostly done on controlled access highways; it’s shooting fish in a barrel.

That's another part of this issue. Traffic enforcement in the US is more ideological than it is utilitarian. Automated enforcement tools like red light cameras and speeding sensors run into intense political pushback in the US. Speeding tickets are usually ways to boost revenue instead of actually trying to deter speeding behavior. Traffic stops are arbitrary and usually based on the political and ideological goals of the Police department and current local government party instead of actually trying to reduce traffic incidents. In fact, as far as I know, traffic incidents are mostly used to drive infrastructure changes instead of really feeding into changing traffic policing.

There's real political pushback from trying to actually decrease traffic incidents because actions to decrease these incidents result in higher overhead for current drivers, something historically lightly enforced.

>Automated enforcement tools like red light cameras and speeding sensors run into intense political pushback in the US

Of course they do. The laws they enforce with machine level reliability do not reflect the reality of how society behaves.

Nobody actually cares whether or not people obey the rarely relevant number on the sign so long as people travel a safe and reasonable speed.

The typical driver has no idea what a safe speed feels like. They routinely travel beyond the safe speed for a given environment. Charitably, they are unaware of the connection between their actions and the increased risk to pedestrians and cyclists. Uncharitably, they just don't care.

For example, did you know that the risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a moving vehicle is about 25% at 23 MPH but jumps all the way to 75% at 39 MPH. Do the people who routinely travel down my street at or near 40 MPH know this? They do not behave like they know this. They behave like they think 39 MPH is more or less the same as 23 MPH. They behave like they aren't aware of the non-linear increase in risk to everyone around them (because they aren't and they're operating climate-controlled machines that are designed to abstract away the environment outside the car).

Not to mention just how goddamn unpleasant it is to be around cars driving that fast on residential streets, even if they never hit anyone. It's loud, aggressive, and just downright uncomfortable for everyone not also in a car.

Just to add to this, though I'm obviously in agreement with you, is that most engines (gas or electric) used in US cars barely distinguish between 23 MPH and 39 MPH. You could probably just push your foot down a tad bit harder on the gas pedal and make up the speed differential. That's fine; many previous limitations on speed were based around actual deficiencies in automotive development (heavy car bodies, lack of synchros when shifting, heavy clutches, etc) but now that consumer vehicles can so effortlessly go from "0-60 mph" (the common metric used to judge acceleration of cars), it's harder than ever to educate folks on the effects of their speed.

This is a hugely important distinction. Unfortunately, speeding in urban areas — which is the kind of consequential speeding I care about — is still very common. If it were confined to the type of speeding you’re describing, then it wouldn’t matter (as much). But it’s not.

Oh please. This is the kind of comical rhetoric that gets road safety advocates ridiculed.

In practice speeding or at least the instance that resulted in getting ticketed is usually inconsequential.

Between highways signed well under the normal traffic speeds, revenue enforcement and fishing stops the overwhelming majority of speeding tickets are trivial. People engaging in the kind of speeding most people can agree is excessive are a tiny minority. If they weren't people wouldn't use a speeding ticket as the epitome of a trivial infraction.

Of course speed is a factor in death and destruction. That's tautologically true thanks to how the equations in Newtonian physics are written but you don't see anyone (who isn't getting laughed at) advocating for the return of the national speed limit for obvious reasons.

Pushing back on a banal, obvious truism like, "we know speeding is a significant cause of and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in automobile crashes" is the kind of comical rhetoric that should get drivers ridiculed. It really shows just how disconnected the typical beliefs about driving are from reality.

Trying to be charitable to both arguments:

- speed is obviously a factor, but there's a wealth of other factors. 90 on a clear highway with little traffic, and the driver is alert? Fairly safe. 90 while weaving between lanes, leaving little reaction time? Not safe. - drivers seriously overestimate their competence. Humans undervalue outlier events. This is the root of the stat about accidents occurring within a mile of home.

That's why we have generally-lax enforcement of motorway limits but "strict" enforcement of urban limits in the UK. I'm not asserting that we've got it right here, but it looks more sensible in my eyes.

Caveat: urban centres are increasingly adopting 20mph. I think there's a tacit understanding that people will drive at 27. When it was 30, they'd do 34, so that's a big increase in survivability.

Let's say all that is true. How does using a computer program to reword all traffic accident reports as being caused by drivers solve this problem? Doesn't it just make people trust accident reports less?

People reading the news aren't the only people who use traffic crash reports. They are also used (and can subtly influence) the people who make decisions about road planning. The culture we have of blaming pedestrians/cyclists and exonerating drivers (when, to be clear, the drivers are the ones creating the danger) leads directly to planning decisions that perpetuate road conditions that would be unconscionably dangerous in any other engineering field.

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