Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
We don't shrug off car accidents. Actually, I feel that driving safety is probably one of the top issues that politicans legislate on (in the form of drunk driving legislation, speed camera legislation, distracted driving, safety requirements, etc etc etc). Insurance companies even offer discounts if you put a device in your vehicle to help support that you drive cautiously.
Cars have more safety features than ever before. They have lane departure warnings, automatic breaking functionality, drowsiness detection, etc.
I'd be more curious to know why we shrug off other things that kill people--like the obesity epidemic--rather than cars.
Your easy solution would be...?
It’s all about priorities.
Maybe I’ll take the bus…oh wait…the nearest stop is 4 miles from my door.
However, since my comment was about the need for automobiles in rural areas because the distances between services are not supportive of mass transit and reasonable walkable distances. Folks that live in urban areas seem to forget that the bulk of this earth doesn’t have the luxury of a bus stop or train station a block away from their home and place of employment.
Obviously farmland is not the right place to put power plants (unless their emissions can be used to benefit crops - think reusing clean CO2 to feed crops in greenhouses) or waste treatment facilities (unless they produce fertilizers that can be used to increase crop yield).
Nobody is proposing to ban cars where they are actually needed - and there are a lot of good use cases for cars, but densely populated cities ARE NOT one of them. Also, banning cars from rural areas would probably not make a dent in avoidable pedestrian deaths, as most of them happen in more densely populated areas (such as suburbs, which are kind of in the middle between rural and urban). I'd be totally fine with banning manual driving in suburban areas as soon as self-driving cars prove safer than humans.
Furthermore, we could extend the mass-transit system with self-driving cars and trucks - no need to walk to the bus stop if you can have one pick you up by your door upon request. And, since it's per request, it doesn't even need to be a bus. Many short-term car-rental companies are looking for self-driving cars to remove the issue of having to pick up and return the car at a specified spot.
For a long time I didn't have a bus stop near my door - what I did was drive (a 15-minute drive) to the subway station parking building and use my tax-deducted park+ride year-long pass to get to my office.
My point was, originally, that arguing for solutions that might work in a high density urban environment doesn’t work in rural communities. Mass transit needs “mass”, by definition rural communities don’t provide that.
BTW, when self driving cars are an actual thing, feel free to propose them as a solution. I suspect jet packs would also be a great way to get to the bus stop as well.
And there's a significant population of folks who are bike-hostile here on HN.
In fact, there's probably a significant population of folks who are X-hostile, for any value of X you can conceive of, given the size of the HN userbase.
What's your point?
Contrary to OP's assertions, I actually do enjoy cars, but I don't think they work well at all in the city. I think there are better solutions out there (Japan is a leading example.)
The GP mentioned that people here are bike-hostile, but you don't see dozens of submissions from StrongRoads about how terrible bicycles are and how they're responsible for toxic individualism.
Does your little observation, here, have any bearing on the article? Does it make the facts less factual? Does it make the numbers less number-y?
Hell, I tried to go back to the top-level comment to figure out what might've triggered you, but your original comment is a non sequitur as far as I can tell.
>"Does your little observation, here, have any bearing on the article?"
>"what might've triggered you"
My "little observation", is pretty condescending. So does the triggering comment. Again, illustrates my experience when having a dialogue with car-hostile people. You want to engage me on facts and numbers but you're using rhetorical swipes to try and discredit me.
This is not a valid reason to disagree about the article. The feelings the tone caused may also cause you to misjudge the rest of the evidence provided and may limit your ability to form a judgement based strictly on the facts presented.
I think the reason we don't see dozens of submissions about how terrible bicycles are is because they don't kill car drivers to even remotely the same degree. I mean, come on.
Alternatively, I wonder if it is attributable to increased smartphone use by pedestrians and or drivers.
Personally, I find operating the UI on phone navigation and audio players very cognitively taxing.
If you are interested in a deeper dive “Right of Way” by Angie Schmidt is good review of the current research. The biggest issue is the increasing market share of SUVs and trucks which are both more likely to hit and kill pedestrians. Other issues are an increase of poor residents in suburban areas that were not meant for walking, and road design that only considers car efficiency (consider the implications of setting walk sign duration to the average pace of an able bodied middle age male - wheel chair users and the elderly are heavily represented in fatalities).
Mixed use roads can mean a lot of things, but narrowing streets actually reduces fatalities because it serves as a traffic easing measure (see Vision zero).
My personal take is yes part of the problem is infrastructure, and academics who study systems will hone in on that, but the other problem is the complete abdication of personal responsibility in American society. Politicians are too afraid to hold middle class voters accountable for traffic violence or anything else really. The flip side of personal freedom is having to face the consequences of your actions. In some states a DUI conviction does not automatically suspend the drivers license. So I do appreciate left leaning politicians attempting to improve infrastructure, but my concern is these measures are being used to carefully avoid blaming individuals for their actions this laundering society’s terrible driving habits (which I really do think could be changed through social norming and enforcement.
I am very biased though. I’ve almost been hit by multiple cars this year who failed to yield to pedestrians in the cross walk.
I'm also frustrated by squandered opportunities for improvement. One example: allowing red-light cameras to become a money grab by revenue sharing with the suppliers and thus subject to lobbying, influence and gaming like shortening yellow lights and buffer times to increase $$$. That crap has created political resistance to the concept. The frustrating part is that few people would oppose putting red light cameras on most major, high-traffic, >35mph intersections - as long as they were restricted to only sending an automatic warning to "orange light sliders" but triggered serious enforcement and even in-person follow-up for the rare (but deadly) people who fly through at high-speed long after other traffic is actually crossing the intersection.
Over the past decade, I've almost been broadsided twice by people barreling through a major, multi-lane intersection at high-speed while I'm turning left on an arrow. This despite other cars in the lane next to theirs already being stopped and waiting at the light. I was saved only by being super-cautious and going slow or halting when I noticed the oncoming car not slowing at all. If there had been a truck blocking my view of their approach, I would probably have been hospitalized (or worse) in the collision. It's hard to imagine the oncoming driver doing this intentionally as both times it was clearly near-suicidal.
Now that the capability to do fairly discerning automatic detection is low cost thanks to cheap imagers and processing, detecting those rare yet dangerous people (who are likely drunk, high or possibly even having brief 'waking blackouts' without knowing it) could help get them off the road before they actually kill someone. The benefit to narrowing the 'targeting' for enforcement is that instead of dozens or hundreds of revenue generating tickets per day, we'd be finding a handful of potentially deadly near-incidents. A number small enough that each could be carefully reviewed and the scary ones could get not only a ticket but a welfare check from community liaison officers.
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedest...
I was surprised to see a few things that ran counter to my intuition:
A large number of pedestrian fatalities, 16%, occurred on freeways, which include interstates.
Only about 25% of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 occurred at intersections.
76% of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 occurred after dark, and daytime fatalities have not seen the same dramatic increase.
33% of fatally injured pedestrians ages 16 and older had a BAC of 0.08 or higher and 16% of drivers had a BAC of 0.08 or higher.
Total pedestrian deaths from passenger cars has gone up more than total deaths from SUVs (but SUV deaths are increasing faster as a % of baseline).
What I’m getting at is that there’s a million instances of drivers blatantly disobeying the law and people get hurt. Recently in my city a woman lost her leg after being struck by a car when walking across the street with her kids. And in my state, if the driver wasn’t drunk or intent can’t be proven, the driver is given a slap on the wrist.
The lack of consequences trains people that these laws do not need to be followed. Look at some of the recent high profile cases. Teen strikes 6 cyclists trying to coal roll them - no charges filed yet. Man swerved into bike lane killing NFL coach - no charges. Dakota DA kills man drunk with his car and flees - no charges.
Even speeding we’ve normalized to a crazy degree. It’s insanely dangerous but people joke about it like it’s nothing. When someone gets a speeding ticket we commiserate with them instead of showing disapproval. It’s no accident our roads are so dangerous. Our society is completely complacent to the human suffering caused by car violence.
The problem with just giving people a pass is that it forces the victims to pay the full cost of the externalities. Someone’s got to pay. Yes it sucks for the driver who made a mistake, but it also sucks for the family who lost a breadwinner or caregiver or the company who lost an employee. When people have to share the cost, people will price in the cost of their actions when they decide to drive.
Was this 50 per cent growth in fatalities uniform across the U.S.?
many people want to blame the increase in SUV or worse F150's because they have a flat front, this is moronic on a number of levels and seems to mainly trace back to climate change activism hate for all large vehicles.
Reality is the focus continues to be to Drunk driving, when we should put the enforcement effort back on reckless driving the cause of which is irrelevant.
if a pedestrian is hit be a driver because they were busy texting or playing candy crush they are no less dead than if they were hit by a Drunk, but under the law these 2 events will be treated very very differently
Above all else, speed* and bad road design kill pedestrians. Speeding is ubiquitous in North America, and roads/streets are absolutely terribly designed, with an almost singular focus to facilitate speeding and reduce cognitive load on drivers.
* - though if we exchange 'momentum' for 'speed' we can tie it back to the size/weight issue.
People aren't to to take these seriously until there's a more than laughable correlation between violating the law and behaving at or beyond the limits of what people consider reasonable. As it stands now pretty much everyone who's commute involves a limited access freeway outside of heavy traffic hours violates the letter of the law for one or both of these.
Electric cars aren't quiet at speed. Other than that I agree.
At best the augment can be made for very very very low speed accidents.
e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822...
There's no political will for this because it would require some discussion about what truly constitutes reckless driving and what reasonable highways speeds are and the people supplying the political will for any road safety reforms know that those discussions would not go their way.
I'm not sure that's really true. There are tons of variables that can affect performance. Like tire size/type, center of gravity, brakes, etc.
Driver attention, knowledge, and skill are much more important. I believe 90% of driving is mental and the majority of accidents are due to poor choices, which seem from things like not understanding vehicle capability and limits, not knowing the law, or not paying attention.
If you aren't changing other characteristics, then yes increasing mass will increase stopping distance. The problem with this assumption is that things like friction coefficient usually change when you are changing mass (tire size is an obvious one).
Most new vehicles stop 60-0 between 120-140 feet. There are heavier vehicles that stop shorter than lighter vehicles. I'm just saying it's not always that vehicles are heavy. The primary variable here (in applied stopping distance) is speed due to the simple fact that reaction time is the same and you are covering distance during that lag, plus velocity is an exponential effect.
Here's a good resource.
If the larger car also has a larger tire contact patch and larger brakes, it can stop just as fast as the smaller vehicle. This shown by many performance SUVs and various other vehicles that weigh in 5000lb+ but somehow come to a stop about as fast as their 3000lb counterparts. Consider the Tesla model s plaid - it has a super fast acceleration rate yet is also stupid heavy. If it can accelerate super fast - it can also stop super fast because the tires work well in either direction.
I’ve watched enough brake tests of cars to see this pan out. It’s all about the tires and brakes. Weight doesn’t matter that much when the manufacturer accounts for it.
What makes you say that? Most accidents are driver error. The stats show that CDL drivers, who undergo more stringent testing, have a lower accident rate than others.
"Engineer them for safety rather than traffic throughput."
What would that look like? Even if you replace stop signs with roundabouts, the drivers still need knowledge of how to safely navigate them. If you're talking about reducing speed (technically the most effect if enforced systematically), how do we ensure enforcement?
I guess it depends. Most pedestrians are in cities or towns. The roads there may be straight, but not necessarily wide.
I'm also not sure how a road being straight and wide is a negative. Making them more narrow and winding is arguably less safe. Even if people reduce their speed, you present new issues of reduced line of sight, decreasing available reaction time. You also have reduced performance (braking on a turn vs straight).
Many areas do have some speed bumps. Mostly these are residential or near crosswalks.
Besides that, roads in the US are generally poorly classified. They're often trying to both function as both high throughput roads and destination serving streets. Such hybrid roads are known as "stroads" and they're bad for everyone involved. Stroads are bad for moving cars fast due to the many conflict points (driveways, intersections, etc.) that force drivers to constantly slow down. They are also bad at serving destinations because the many conflict points make stroads very dangerous, especially if you're not in a car. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM
But never, ever force the handful of car manufacturers to electronically limit the top speed of their products?
Note: for the top-end German marques, this is just a configuration file change: they are already limited to 250km/h.
The answer is basically to segregate traffic by speed, tightly control the interactions between different speeds of traffic and to generally have lighter traffic yield to heavier traffic. This is pretty much standard in every industrial workplace worldwide at this point. Look at what's going on on the tarmac next time you go to the airport.
Of course nobody wants to push for this in 2021 because it conflicts with a lot of the priors and ancillary goals that are floating around the ideological camp that most of the people who care strongly about traffic safety come from.
It's a bit misleading to say that; you're not accounting for population growth, for one thing. According to https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/states/statespedestrians.aspx, the numbers are:
year killed population fatality rate (per 100,000 people)
2010 4,302 309,322,000 1.39
2019 6,205 328,240,000 1.89
Americans pay a lot in taxes to support roads, which are taxes that Americans that don't drive see very little of (especially since most of the federal funding goes to match Interstate highway projects). If the carless need to pay into a system they receive minimal benefits from only to also experience much higher risk for injury and higher risks of death, while other wealthy developed governments do not have such problems, then it seems silly to continue on the track we're on now.
https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
I'd really like to see a campaign about how it's not safe to walk home drunk. People should Uber home after drinking if at all possible.
Another interesting fact from the CDC: most pedestrians killed are crossing city streets, at night, and not at intersections.
This is also something we can improve with education -- we should inform people of the risks of jay walking at night, just as we've informed people about wearing safety belts and not driving drunk.
If a drunk pedestrian stumbled into the street while you were driving at speed, and you struck and killed them -- I would not blame you.
If you were driving recklessly and killed someone in a crosswalk -- I would.
The speed limit on my steer is 20kph and jaywalking laws don’t seem to exist - if you see a pedestrian about to cross the street, you stop.
A recent story that made headlines was that one car maker (can't remember which) designed the front of the car to be so tall the car needs FORWARD LOOKING (!!!) cameras so that drivers can see kids (or people in wheelchairs) in front of the car. If you are designing cars and you need to add a forward camera to make it safe, you are most certainly in the wrong profession (and probably also a dangerous sadist who needs therapy or, most likely, mandatory commitment to an institution).
And, finally, IF you were driving within the speed limits, the street was inadequately lit and the pedestrian was intoxicated, you should probably get away with it if you manage to prove you are competent to drive a car (mandatory driving tests could be a thing here) and that you took all reasonable precaution not to hit the pedestrian.
2010 in the US was 11.4 death per 100 K population. 2019 is 11.9 / 100 K. So it went a bit up but overall the curve seems to be going down.
> Might the regulatory capture of the car and Highway industries
Highway deaths in, say, France aren't even 10% of the secondary roads + cities deaths. Not sure what the highway has to do with all this.
The key here from a government standpoint is Obesity impacts the life of the obese person only. Where as bad driving will kill other people, infact often does not kill the bad driver instead harms innocent people around the bad driver
Government has the ethical mandate to protect you from other citizens, not to protect your from your own bad choices. Government has no ethical position for which to control the type and quantity of food I choose to consume the only ethical control the government would have is around food safety for people selling food to others. Ice Cream is perfectly safe to eat as long as you are not eating a gallon a day.
The government pays some fraction of healthcare (VA, Medicare, Medicaid). Also, the military would like to have a better pool of recruits.
I do not wish to live in a world where the government is monitoring and regulating what I have for breakfast, "for my own good"
No thank you, I will pass on that kind of dystopia
jeez, context matter....
Further it is completely logical conclusion that if the US government became in insurer, the next step in that would be to attempt mandate health food choices in order to curb runways costs that would result from such a program
Secondly, the entire West, outside of the US, has state run health care, and in every case:
* no one is doing what you suggest
* society gets better health care
* costs are reduced via so many other means
An example? Governments negotiate as large-blocks of purchasers for medication. If corporations do not play ball, then laws can be changed to allow for a reduction in IP rights, length of patents, and so on.
Note that this is not some silly "Stop companies from making profit", but instead, "Stop companies from making insane, over the top, crazy profit at the expensive of poor people dying".
National governments also counter the above, with a restriction on development costs. For example, state run Universities being used to assist in clinical trials, grants for developing certain types of medication, the goal being to reduce risk/profit cost for drug manufacturers, which cite such high profits as necessary due to development costs.
There are so many ways to win/win, without letting people die because they lost their job.
There is also a societal balance, and much like stopping companies from dumping toxic waste, or clear cutting forests (instead of selective cuts), the needs of society must be balanced with the needs for free enterprise.
This is not anti-profit, any more than not having the lot next to your house, become a dumping ground for nuclear waste.
I know all of this seems horrifying, yet bizarrely, the rest of the West seems to handle it quite well.
You might also want to ask yourself, who benefits from scare mongering over such things? You benefits from making you think and absurd idea, that your bacon will disappear because the government pays for health care?
Who?
Oh wait, the for-profit, out of control, massive lobbying health-care providers in the US?
Yes, they want you to feel fear.
Additionally, the Free Market provides health insurance companies with the power to charge extra who smoke, don't exercise, or otherwise practice unhealthy habits. I have to upload fitness data, get annual physicals, and do a bunch of other little things not required of people on Medicaid.
Anti-government people forget that they have a lot more influence over government organizations than they do private ones. If people are pissed at the government, they have elected reps with the power to solve the issue. If they get pissed at a private org, there's not much that can be done unless what they are doing is illegal (even then, it will take years to remedy).
This is very amusing... maybe I do realize it, maybe I believe the government is already over reaching, and maybe, just maybe I oppose many of the things you are talking about.
Maybe I do not want to see government expanded even more.
>>Additionally, the Free Market provides health insurance companies with the power to charge extra who smoke, don't exercise, or otherwise practice unhealthy habits.
Ok, and...
You seem to think I would be opposed to this, I am not. I am opposed to government not voluntary exchange. To the extent the government requires insurance or the concept of insurance for healthcare to take place in the US is the core of the problem, not Freed markets.
Nothing really in healthcare is free market though, it is ironic that you claim I do not understand the number of regulations on food production,but them proclaim Healthcare and/or Health Insurance are a free market.
That is laughable....
>>Anti-government people forget that they have a lot more influence over government organizations than they do private ones.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Paige would disagree with you. Their analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. [1]
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
A cancer patient requires more expensive care than a typical diabetic or heart disease patient, and the prolonged costs of caring for someone suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's can be greater still.
I'm not saying obesity is good for society (prolonging years of healthy life is a worthwhile goal on its own), but the impact on the healthcare system itself isn't necessarily so simple.
Most of the older folks to who get cancer and age related neurodegenerative disease also seem to succumb to age related diabetes symptoms and poor insulin.
These things aren't separate-able as cleanly as you suggest.
See when I talk about threats to other, I am talking about direct, articulable threats, not second or third order events that may have an impact under some circumstances
When I say the government has an ethical mandate to protect me from others, I mean protect me from physically assaulting me, from stealing my property, etc.
Not generalized adverse effects that may happen latter down the road if enough other people also happen to do the same thing.
"The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. " -- Frédéric Bastiat
>More recently, Cawley and Meyerhoefer drew headlines with their estimate that obesity accounts for 21 percent of medical spending-$190 billion in 2005-more than double Finkelstein and colleagues’ earlier estimate from MEPS data. (1) Cawley and Meyerhoefer also used MEPS data to make their estimates. But they used a different and potentially more accurate method for calculating costs, called the “instrumental variable approach.” This method takes into account the two-way relationship between obesity and chronic disease, by using a biological child’s body mass index as a surrogate variable for the individual’s body mass index.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...
Not at all. There's a cost to society as a whole and an important cost: it blocks beds in the hospitals, it blocks doctors and an obese person, I take it, does consume more food etc. All these have a cost on society as a whole. Now I'm not saying people shouldn't have a right to smoke, drink alcohol or be obese: that some officials are so dumb they believe the cost of obesity is only to the obese person, I don't doubt it one second. But they're totally wrong.
There is an obesity epidemic both in the US and in Europe. The number of obese kids in Europe keeps going up and up. In the mediterannean countries there are up to 21% of the kids of 6 to 9 years that are already obese (Spain / Italy / Greece / Chyprus etc. When I go to Spain it really shows. It's scary. And it's scarier to see what the parents puts in their basket at the grocery store).
If you then take into account the fact that something like 92% of the obese kids stay obese their entire life, you understand why it's a very serious public health matter.
And if these kids are obese I do believe society, as a whole, has a responsibility. They're being fed junk and hardly anyone cares.
Cars are getting safer by the day. The obesity problem is getting worse by the day.
It's apple to oranges, but if priorities have to be set I know where I'd set them.
This couldn't be more wrong. Maybe you have a source for your claim? Doubtful, but maybe.
Per the Harvard School of Public Health: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...
"Excess weight harms health in many ways. It increases the risk of developing conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, osteoarthritis, and some cancers, to name just a few, and reduces the life span. Treating obesity and obesity-related conditions costs billions of dollars a year. By one estimate, the U.S. spent $190 billion on obesity-related health care expenses in 2005-double previous estimates. The enormity of this economic burden and the huge toll that excess weight takes on health and well-being are beginning to raise global political awareness that individuals, communities, states, nations, and international organizations must do more to stem the rising tide of obesity."
"Days missed from work are a cost to both employees (in lost wages) and employers (in work not completed). Obese employees miss more days from work due to short-term absences, long-term disability, and premature death than non-obese employees. They may also work at less than full capacity (also known as presenteeism)."
"Employers pay higher life insurance premiums and pay out more for workers’ compensation for employees who are obese than for employees who are not."
It sure sounds like obese folks affect more than just themselves. I'd prefer that my health insurance premiums don't rise more than they have to due to your love of ice cream.
Further I take it then you do support the concept of Limited Government?
If this is your metric for what should involve government, then my guess you do not support the idea of Limited Government at all. See when I talk about threats to other, I am talking about direct, articulable threats, not second or third order events that may have an impact under some circumstances
When I say the government has an ethical mandate to protect me from others, I mean protect me from physically assaulting me, from stealing my property, etc.
Not generalized adverse effects that may happen latter down the road if enough other people also happen to do the same thing.
What about the choices of the food industry?
We know that obesity and age are two of the biggest factors in COVID outcomes. We obviously can't make ourselves younger, so I have been genuinely surprised that there hasn't been any push for diet and exercise over the last 20 months. Instead, all we see pushed are pills and shots, sold as working "just like magic", instead of any kind of actual work on the part of each individual. But what president is going to go on TV and tell everyone to consume less when they view the economy as their ticket to reelection?
There's been no official push but there have been individuals whom, upon realizing people were dying due to their lungs clogging up and difficulties breathing, organized into online groups and started exercising a lot.
> Instead, all we see pushed are pills ...
It appeared very early on that there was a gigantic correlation between low vit-D levels and severe Covid-19 complications. Several scientific studies now confirmed this officially. I don't think it's know (yet?) if Vit-D supplementation works or not (it works to raise vit-D levels, but does it help when you then catch Covid-19?) but I don't find it crazy that people, like me, started taking Vit-D (+ K) supplementation.
> ... and shots,
ah yup, RNA shots. I was basically forced to get mines too (even if it's not totally mandatory they're pretty much rammed down your troath in the EU).
The worldwide epidemiological study as to what the consequences of this new kind of vaccine are is ongoing...
Stay tuned ; )
One way to start it would be in-school cantinas to only offer healthy food, do so for free for every student, and to educate students from the start to be healthy eaters. Remember: we shamed McDonalds into offering salads.
It’ll not solve all cases, but will reduce the health issue, save countless lives and allow us to focus on the next problem, whatever it is.
*Yes, you can eat cheap and healthy, but this often comes at a price of convenience. Healthy convenient snacks tend to be more expensive. You can also charge more for leaner/free-range/grass-fed meats, healthier cooking oils like extra virgin olive oil, etc
This is really not a top priority for politicians. I don't see them running on a traffic safety platform. There are very few updates to driving laws. Most of them have nothing to do with actual safety either. Red light cameras are mostly about revenue, for example.
The number one thing they can do to enhance safety is to make the testing more strict. The current test is a joke. I haven't noticed any candidates supporting this.
The reason this, and others, are shrugged off is that people see value in the things to be regulated (driving, soda, junk food, etc) and don't want government involvement in their lives to increase without a clearly defined benefit. They want to see that it won't negatively impact them while providing a benefit. That's hard to do for the whole population. Not to mention many of the proposals have pretty terrible value propositions.
That was Ralph Nader's whole thing in the 70s - "Unsafe at any speed". Politicians don't run on it now because driving has gotten much safer in the last 40 years.
These include regulations on drivers/passengers (seat belt laws, car seat laws, open container laws, reduced BAC limits, laws against using a phone while driving) and requirements on manufacturers (air bag requirements, eye-level 3rd brake light requirement, back-up camera requirement).
There are new regulations in the big infrastructure bill.
At least in my state, I review the register and there are many other topics more prominent than driving laws.
Ultimately cars kill more people than all other forms of transport combined.
Just because there are other things killing more people doesn’t mean cars get a free pass.
We should absolutely do something about the obesity epidemic, but in addition to, not at the expense of, doing something about cars.
Those two things aren't disconnected either.
Other minor factors that people constantly forget about are motorcycles and the fact that many pedestrian deaths actually happen _outside_ of a city.
They also forget that pedestrian deaths do actually not happen on the highway.
Motorcycles are 15% of all fatal accidents, and half of those are "single vehicle accidents." [2]
Drivers under 18 are twice as likely to have a fatal accident. [3]
Finally, everyone should know: Nearly every single fatal crash in the United States is investigated and the report is put into a federal database. This database is open and easy to access, or download and draw your own reports against. If you care about accidents and want to know more, this is the definitive source and the place to start. [4]
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_fatality_rate_in_U....
[3]: https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...
[4]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...
Given background knowledge, it is possible that this sort of article is a way of getting the ball rolling with respect to the reduction of cars or the promotion of self-driving cars or whatever. The chip shortage and general disruption of supply chains and the effect on the prices of cars is opportune.
Traffic engineers aim for speed and volume on roadways (point A to point B), but they also do the same for streets, which should be more focused on the surrounding environment and the neighborhood, a destination for some locals. Why would we want to maximize traffic volume and speed in a neighborhood where people are out and about? For safety, we should be slowing down speeds on streets. Speed is the primary factor in whether a collision will result in death or injury.
But the speed a driver will go is dependent on the how risky it is. Most people will exceed the speed limit, because roads have been designed to be safe at even higher speeds than the speed limit. Throw some obstacles near streets (trees, parked cars, sharp turns with blind spots, kids playing outside nearby), and usually people will slow down at least a bit.
If we want safer streets, we need to make it riskier to speed. An interesting statistic provided by the book was that insurance companies found that Massachusetts was the state most likely to involve car crashes per vehicle mile traveled. But another study showed that Massachusetts has the least amount of fatalities from traffic collisions. Because the roads are hard to navigate with many variables all around, increasing the risk of speeding. The states with the highest fatality percentage were mostly in the midwest where roads are long, straight, and safe to speed on.
We need to slow cars down. Drive safely everyone, or better yet, don't drive.
This doesn't negate the parent thought, but I think speaks to the risk tolerance of society.
If cars were invented today, I would hope there would be discussion as to whether or not that infrastructure should be built, and if we would have the money to support. As of now, tons of maintenance costs are associated with our sprawl, and many communities are saddled with debt that they'll struggle to repay.
We probably would limit them to niche needs, and only build out enough infrastructure to support our needs. Making every street and road accessible to cars would be a huge undertaking, as it was then.
But the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act[1] specifically excludes gun makers from being liable for their product.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_...
I'm not a fan of the reasoning the article gives behind why we have normalized them ("toxic individualism"), because I think there are a lot more obvious culprits. For example, the auto industry is extremely effective at lobbying, and has been for a very long time. The reason there are jaywalking laws on the books, for example, was in large part because the auto industry pushed for them [1][2]. Urban streets were not really built with fast-moving cars in mind, and people treated them as safe places to be. Cars were much faster than anything else using the streets, so their introduction caused a sharp uptick in fatalities. A really successful PR campaign painted the people crossing the street as the ones at fault over the drivers, and the resulting laws still exist in many places in the US.
We normalize a lot of stuff, and it's easy to argue that it's because of a stereotype about Americans (that we're all aggressively individualist, which may be true to some extent). But decades of policies that require parking in new buildings, that encourage driving for even small errands, and that rezone urban areas to accommodate car traffic make it really hard to imagine a world without them. No one thinks car crashes are good, but few people have alternatives (even in denser urban areas). Crashes feel like an unavoidable side-effect.
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497772
Anyone who rides a bike or motorcycle knows that drivers freely overlook us. And we know why. When a fool driver kills one of us, they pay absolutely no price for it. Jail time? Never. Fines? Rarely, if ever. Why then should a texting driver refrain from LOLing to their heart's delight behind the wheel, at night, in fog? There's no reason not to.
We could also improve road safety greatly if driver training and testing were improved. Every EU member nation requires more rigorous driver training and exams than the US. And we should continue that training with mandatory refresher courses to renew and develop deeper skills as we age. To reward those who put more effort into sharpening their driving skills, insurance companies could offer discounts for those who choose to take even more instruction or score higher on exams.
There’s surely a virtuous cycle in here somewhere, but only if Americans care enough to so something about driving smarter. So far, we clearly haven't.
[0] Using a mesh network in many examples at that point in time, cellular data not being what it is today and still not truly ubiquitous.
That the newspaper would be tracking this fact so prominently suggests that at the time it was news that a car crashed and injured/killed someone.
From this newspaper it seems to me that at some point we were concerned the casualties coming from automobile use. At some point I guess the news became dull to it, stopped reporting, and thus people in general stopped caring. Unsure when that happened and why.
Americans definitely care a lot about car accidents. There's an entire government organization (NHSTA) dedicated to collecting statistics on car accidents and working with manufactures to reduce car fatalities by designing crash tests that simulate the most deadly types of accidents. There's also a separate organization funded by insurance companies (IIHS) that does roughly the same thing.
I've lived here for 7 years, and the only accidents I've ever seen on this road are at that point. I've no clue why they allow it to be the way it is. There's basically no safe way to make this left turn.
But until someone dies it's likely to only be changed when they're otherwise redoing the road.
I think of myself as being a pretty alert pedestrian, but I had two “too close for comfort” calls while walking where my inability to hear what was happening around me (thanks to my amazing and much beloved 2nd generation AirPods) put me in danger that would have otherwise been easy to avoid. I wear them in transparency mode when I’m walking anywhere near traffic now.
My own counter-blasphemy: as a lifelong pedestrian, I don't care about a car owner's right to own a car.
If you want to operate a killing machine, then you either yield to people who don't operate one (yes, even to reckless idiots), or you accidentally kill them.
How many drivers go their whole lives without so much as a "fender-bender"?
In a long enough adult human lifespan, even the best driver in the world can't avoid a fender-bender with the worst driver in the world.
Any rational person would not expect to send someone to the hospital, based simply on the numbers.
The pedestrian fatality rate is like 2/100k per year. If you are an average (bad) driver, you are unlikely to kill anyone. Add a huge fudge factor for hospitalization vs death, and you are still very unlikely to send someone to the hospital.
Why would avoiding non-injury fender benders be the goal post? People expect to have a number of them in my life and that is why drivers have insurance.
How can I take this seriously?
>"either yield to people who don't operate one"
And I do, where appropriate.
I mean sure it's hyperbolic, but is it wrong in the context of the US? Cars are dangerous, there's no doubt about it. There are lots of wealthy, developed countries that put safeguards around cars in the forms of pedestrian safety standards, low speed limits, strict licensing restrictions, strict road enforcement, and effective road design. It's not like the US is the only wealthy country in the world with cars. It's a well-known joke to get a license in the US, and teens and adults in the US joke about hitting parked cars, stop signs, trees, and mailboxes all the time. America has a non-existent safety culture surrounding the _outside_ of a car; cars are only meant to be safe for their inhabitants.
A car is a car no matter which nation it is in. A car does not transfigure into a killing machine because it is in America. I understand what you are saying about road design in other nations. That tells me the car shouldn't be labeled as a killing machine since the road design bears the responsibility in this perspective.
>"cars are only meant to be safe for their inhabitants" This is untrue, there exist safety features that benefit occupants and non-occupants alike.
I hear you. This is why most mature traffic safety and transit advocacy is about encouraging infrastructure changes, encouraging even traffic enforcement, and trying to add sensible legislation around vehicular responsibility (like alcohol rules and the like).
The problem is, car culture is a thing that exists in America (and many parts of the world of course), and that culture often actively embraces reckless acts like speeding, unsafe hauling, coal-rolling, or unsafe vehicle lifting. Car culture also often actively pushes back against efforts to make the roads safer like automated traffic enforcement or stricter licensing requirements, and leads to negative things like catcalling from cars. You don't have to take my word for it, just check out https://reddit.com/r/cars and look at the jokes and memes they say. I'm also willing to bet that the average subscriber of r/cars is a _safer_ driver than the average American driver because of their enthusiasm.
> This is untrue, there exist safety features that benefit occupants and non-occupants alike.
In theory. In practice, the numbers show that these safety features aren't enough.
Where are the goalposts and what would be enough? That is not to say they aren't dangerous, but it seems the discussion would greatly benefit from some definitions and goals.
Driving and walking both carry risks and both could be safer. Last year, 6,700 pedestrians were killed by vehicles, and pedestrian fatality rate was around 2 per billion miles driven.
At what point are the deaths acceptable?
https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians21#:~:text=The%20r....
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
It's practically impossible for most people, especially in North America, to imagine a world without 2-ton metal things traveling meters away from people at 40 ~ 100 kph. It's literally a piece of the landscape.
Almost everybody you ask is a better-than-average driver, and it's the other idiots on the road who are causing the problems.
But fundamentally, the problem is that when primates design 100 kph 2-ton metal things to zoom around in the millions, controlled by other primates, we're really bad at it.
It's how you make an inevitable killing machine that has the convenient side effect of being good at transporting people safely 299 times out of 300.
Sony-Ericsson probably caused a non-trivial number of fatalities by bundling such a great audiophile gadget with a phone.
And yes, I'm looking at you, oblivious jogger who can't hear my bell as I pass on a dual-use path.
Get yourself a set of bone conducting headphones if you want to be out and active and listening to music or whatever. The technology is amazing and it's infinitely safer.
The economic benefit exceeds the human loss of life.
Of course no economist SAYS that because one of the big lies economics runs away from is that the value/cost of a random human death is about the same as the value of, say, paving over a swamp estuary or, say, the ocean becoming acidic to the point we lose photoplankton and will kill off all aerobic creatures in the world.
If economics can't properly value something that doesn't impact the budget/spreadsheet within a couple months, it pretends it doesn't exist and has zero cost.
Heck, proper economics will happily assign negative value to humans. Old? Sick? Debilitated? It's GOOD that person died! But economists don't talk about those things, and don't even study them, well, not publicly. Because it would destroy economics as a serious discipline.
Some of the infrastructure changes aren’t even political but merely engrained in how cities and services are built Example: it’s not uncommon see restaurants in the US that you have to drive to. I don’t think Americans understand how weird a (non fast food) restaurant with a parking lot outside looks to people from elsewhere.
If cars were introduced as a new product today, they would be rejected as unsafe. But cars are not being introduced today, they were introduced in the horse and buggy era. Cars should be safer. People work on making them safer over time. Public infrastructure should be built for humans. We are not good at this.
If you use miles travelled as a metric, cars are in the top 5 safest ways to travel [0]. People were killed by horses, being thrown, trampled, etc. Horses were expensive, in maintenance terms. Horses caused pollution - poop. Horse poop in small amounts is very manageable and useful as fertilizer etc. In large amounts it is a real pain.
I ride a bicycle, walk, and drive a car. I've had more injuries on the bike (on paved paths, not due to cars) than I have had in a car. I've had more injuries walking than I have had in the car.
Anyway my big point here is that you have to consider things and solve things in human terms.
0. You have to be careful and deliberate with how you measure this. Depending on what you exclude and how you group things you can many anything the safest or the most dangerous. If someone says something like top 5, or most dangerous, or safest, they have made choices to include or exclude or to bucket or to add weight. In human terms, people want to get to an end destination (Last Mile). Airplanes don't take you to an end destination. Trains don't generally get you to the last mile. Cars do. Bikes do. Motorcycles do. Buses do. Some light rail/subway systems do (depends on the city), but you have to get people to agree to pay for these.
You’re missing the point: Cars are mostly safe for the people inside them, but awfully unsafe for people near the cars.
Toxic individualism? Yes, I often do blame individual drivers. I blame those who text and drive, the lead-foots, the people who don't use their turn signals, et cetera. There are certainly poorly designed roadways and interchanges but let's not pretend the vast majority of our roads are literal deathtraps.
>“It’s usually not reckless driving that causes accidents,” Davis says, “but everyday driving that we all do.”
Citation needed, big time. Pretty sure a lot of "everyday driving" can be categorized as "reckless". The insinuation is that driving at all is dangerous.
Taking out systematic issues that cause bad driving is proving the point. Just like how the spike in pedestrian deaths is caused by an individualistic arms race between drivers as to who can have the biggest, heaviest vehicle.
I don't think everyday driving is reckless. I just see a lot of drivers doing things they should not be doing - and this is not the fault of the civil engineers. These drivers are breaking the law by texting and driving, speeding, not using turn signals, and changing lanes when they shouldn't. I'm challenging the categorization that everyday driving is worse than reckless driving, as the article implies.
Our roadways are designed for safety and for various degrees of safety. You could say a particular stretch of road is not safe enough, but it would be wrong to say civil engineers are blasé about safety. There is no way to make a totally safe road because there is no way to engineer a totally safe anything.
They are designed for the safety of the cars that use them. There is often nothing safe about how they are designed with respect to pedestrians (who are frequently ignored completely).
There are many things we could do to minimize accidents in specific circumstances. In residential zones, narrower, tree-lined roads tend to reduce average speed. Continuous sidewalks change the dynamic from "pedestrian crossing road" to "car crossing sidewalk".
Just like a huge student debt load is the responsibility of one person, but a national student debt load of $1.7t is a systemic failure.
If one outcome is occurring across a large data set, it means the cause can be both systemic and individualistic.
> So you are faced with a human error problem. What do you do?
* You can see human error as the cause of a mishap. In this case, "human error" is the end of your investigation and understanding.
* You can see human error as the symptom of deeper troubles. You will look into how human error is systematically connected to people's tools, tasks, and environment.
You're working under the former, the "old view" of human error. This article, and most of people working in safety nowadays, try to work in the latter, "new view" by understanding the entire systems that lead to human error.
One day I took the effort to just check who sat in the car. It was 95% one person in a 5 seater car. The few vehicles with more than one person were Vans with 2-3 workers in front.
Driving alone with 2x5 meters into a city with limited space is — ultimately — a very egoistic act.
Not much of a choice being made here!
Opinion: American society is both violent and selfish.
I can already hear your reply rejecting each and every benefit, and just know that I will not agree. They are absolutely benefits me and those like be enjoy
Also, the biggest dodge I see "studies" take in trying to discount defensive gun usage is to require a bullet to have been shot for it to count. This is very rarely the case for it to be effective at stopping a situation.
Actually no.
The research generally points towards defensive gun use being rare and, when it does happen, are associated with escalated arguments, and are both socially undesirable and illegal. "A majority of the reported self defense gun uses were rated as probably illegal by a majority of judges. This was so even under the assumption that the respondent had a permit to own and carry the gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly. Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self defense. Most self reported self defense gun uses may well be illegal and against the interests of society." [1][2]
1. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-thr...
2. https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/injuryprev/6/4/263....
See also
Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1144020
The epidemiology of self-defense gun use: evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007-2011 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25910555/
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm...
"A majority of the reported self defense gun uses were rated as probably illegal by a majority of judges. This was so even under the assumption that the respondent had a permit to own and carry the gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly. Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self defense. Most self reported self defense gun uses may well be illegal and against the interests of society."[2]
"The canard of the armed civilian mass-shooting hero is perpetuated by exaggerations and half-truths" [3]
The study that gun-rights activists keep citing but completely misunderstand [4]
1. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/debunking-john-lott-5456e8...
2. https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/injuryprev/6/4/263....
3. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/oregon-shoot...
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/01/16/the-s...
A premise like this just proves you're not interested in any sort of truth discovery, nor discussing this issue in good faith.
Guns are excellent tools for self defense.
Not really. The research generally points towards defensive gun use being rare and, when it does happen, are associated with escalated arguments, and are both socially undesirable and illegal
Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1144020
The epidemiology of self-defense gun use: evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007-2011 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25910555/
Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-thr...
I wish these people would just have the guts to make their agenda plain, rather than these ceaslessy tedious covert behaviour modification tactics.
Now zero is the only acceptable answer to many
I'm sure it sucks more for people with conditions that compromise their immune system or people who live with such conditions. And I wish more people would vaccinate and mask up like me so they don't have to worry about its spread. But its political now, so our most vulnerable suffer.
By the way you put it your 'not affected' is actually more strict than Oregon state (which is known for having had more severe lockdowns than others).
Shows you how far the definition of 'not affected' has come. If you had told us four years ago you needed to provide medical information to enter a store, most people would have rightly been horrified. Thankfully the united states is not there yet.
Because the next step for covid is to settle into endemic status. Influenza is instructive because it serves as an indicator of the level of risk society is willing to tolerate from a virus.
Additionally, I’d wager most reasonable people are willing to accept the unavoidable risks of driving. However, many car collisions involve people taking risks that are not necessary to transport themselves from A to B (speeding, drinking, texting, failing to indicate turn). Breaking traffic laws aren’t crimes of necessity, or borne of poverty, it just people refusing to think about how their shitty actions effect others.
Society is completely complacent to bad driving behavior. The whole zero risk thing is a straw intended to shit down the conversation
Are these not already against the law? BY no means am I asking to repeal these sensible laws.
Also, I dunno what I'd wager any more. I used to think that people would not accept being forced to hand over personal medical information to enter a location to prevent a disease with an incredibly low deathrate for most of the population and with an incredibly low deathrate for the remainder of the population with a freely available drug, but everybody else seems to think this is normal.
Or like, after 9/11, I thought having your nudes photographed by the government to enter an airplane would be considered a gross violation of privacy, but now having a pornographic photoshoot / assault is considered totally normal at the airport.
It seems to me people are increasingly willing to trade freedom for 'security'.
There's also the question of tax burden. Non-drivers receive almost none [1] of the benefits that road taxes, but in most of the US things like public transit are expected to be largely funded through fares and not taxes. Then there's the even murkier territory that roads in lower income areas are mostly used as thoroughfares by wealthier folks who don't live in these areas, and their through usage ends up putting a higher tax burden on the roads in these areas despite these lower income folks not actually accounting for most of the usage of their own roads.
I'm not going to talk about COVID at all.
[1]: There is indirect benefit here through the truck logistics network and probably meeting friends and family over interstates that makes this more murky.
US traffic fatality rate is 1.24 deaths per 10,000 people per year. This is a more than acceptable level of risk; I’m perfectly happy to shave off 1% of 1% of my life expectancy to be able to have near-absolute freedom of movement.
As a society, 10-15% of household spending goes towards transportation costs (largely vehicle payments, fuel, and maintenance).
When I visited New York City for a few days some years ago, I could feel the ground shaking the entire time, and it was absolutely miserable. Large buildings were the worst. I was anxious and nauseous the entire time, like a constant earthquake was going on. Elevators are really bad, I break out into a sweat, so a place where I could bike everywhere would likely involve elevators on both sides of the journey. Subways are also awful, bus isn’t much better, but at least I can sit up front, all of it. I’m effectively “allergic” to public transportation. I can barely sit in the front seat when someone else is driving.
It’d be weird if one day restrictive laws are passed limiting the use of personal vehicles, as I feel I’d have to apply for some sort of disability. I’m worried about self driving cars because I wouldn’t be able to do the sync up between my brain and the car without directly controlling the vehicle.
Talk about hyperbole - Having a car in America does in fact you can get to pretty much anywhere else in the country within a couple days. That's facts. Most of that time will be crusing too - not traffic.
What gives you the right to do it? Presumably you interact with people at least occasionally; how dare you expose them to pathogenic risk like that?
> It gives you hours of your day siting in traffic
No it doesn’t. I don’t sit in traffic for more than 15 minutes a day. Actually, the only time my commute is bad is when I occasionally have to take the train.
> what about those of us who don't own a car
You should probably live in a city or something. I don’t really have any input on your choices here. But I would appreciate if people who didn’t own a car wouldn’t take out their frustration on people who do own cars.
Canada has half the rate of the USA, Netherlands around third, and they have the same "near-absolute" freedoms.
(Canada vs. USA vs. NL rates) https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
The risk to myself is at least as high as the risk to anyone else. And yes, I am willing to impose negative externalities on people if I think it’s still utilitarian. You impose the same kind of externalities, even if you aren’t aware of it.
At some point, if we want to stop all needless deaths, instead of "toxic individuality" we won't have any individuality at all, because pretty much any decision at all will be limited to the collective's approved single option.
Edit: i am not trying to dismiss the dangers inherent in cars. I am, however, saying that I absolutely hate the term "toxic X" because it fundamentally trivializes the other side of the argument.
In fact, there are signs that suggest the "bad monetary policy" is beneficial, since we've opted to keep it that way.
But I have no argument against the car slamming into a bus.