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Comment by MAGZine | Hacker News Reader

I didn't care for this article.

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.

View on HN

"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)."

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.

> This is really not a top priority for politicians. I don't see them running on a traffic safety platform.

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.

For drivers, yes. For other road users, not so much. The job is nowhere near done.

Politicians probably don't run on them because they aren't very controversial and don't excite their base. Nonetheless, there have been lots of changes to car safety laws in my lifetime.

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.

That's over a lifetime. Is that really more frequent than other types of laws? Like gun control, healthcare, air travel, communications, court/legal rules, law enforcement, etc?

At least in my state, I review the register and there are many other topics more prominent than driving laws.

Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010. Clearly whatever policies politicians are pushing aren’t working. Might the regulatory capture of the car and Highway industries have anything to do about it?

Can you share a link? I wonder if it has to do with cities implementing more mixed-use roads

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.

And (if true), I wonder if it's due to the average size of cars, and safety features that prioritize the vehicle's occupants over that of squishy and brittle street users not inside steel cocoons.

Quick link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/1719...

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.

+1 on personal responsibility.

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.

Thanks for the link, For those interested, here is the source report:

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).

Re Highway fatalities there are two reasons that come to mind. Many poor people are being pushed to suburbs. Since they don’t own cars so they have to brave crossing roads that were never meant to be crossed by pedestrians. Also historically freeways were built through poorer urban communities.

Sorry but this is just so wrong. American road design is super predicated on personal responsibility. We design roads that are as wide as freeways and then put a little sign on the side that says 35mph speed limit. What we need is less focus on personal responsibility and accept that people make mistakes, we're all human after all. Our roads should be designed with human error in mind. The road design itself should make it natural for drivers to slow down near dangerous areas. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc

I’ll admit I’m coming from a biased perspective. I’ve almost been hit as a pedestrian by cars that ran a red light or tried to intimidate me from exercising my right of way. Less maliciously, I see cars that try to beat pedestrians to the cross walk or straight up don’t look when turning left on green. I’ve also seen cars in an intersection near me speed through a gas station parking lot to circumvent a red light. The police in my area do not ticket any of these infractions.

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.

Not where I live. We are at a historical minimum of dead pedestrians. We drive the same cars. The problem might be elsewhere.

Was this 50 per cent growth in fatalities uniform across the U.S.?

No, there is clear correlation between increased Smart Phone Adoption and the increase in Pedestrian Fatalities.

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

It is a certainty that larger vehicles are more likely to cause pedestrian injury and fatality, all else equal. This has approximately nothing to do with "climate change activism" - for example, nothing changes in terms of pedestrian safety if the huge SUV or truck in question is hybrid or electric, except perhaps becoming even more dangerous because it's quieter.

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.

I dont know about you, but I think a better use of time would be going into preventing pedestrian vehicle contact, then trying to ruin the vehicles people love.... (and make no mistake, adopting the changes people want to these vehicles will ruin them)

It's hard to reduce pedestrian-vehicle contact, in my opinion, when you have vehicles where the drivers are just so much more powerful than the pedestrian. Part of the reason people even buy those is to sit up higher, and be bigger than the others, and there's no way to reconcile that with pedestrian safety imo. Especially when speeding and reckless driving is so damn common in America. People feel untouchable in them, and that means there's an increase in the contact rates regardless of whether pedestrians have right-away or not.

>Especially when speeding and reckless driving is so damn common in America.

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.

>because it's quieter

Electric cars aren't quiet at speed. Other than that I agree.

"At Speed" what kind of speed are we talking, but "At Speed" chances are the type of vehicle make very little difference.

At best the augment can be made for very very very low speed accidents.

The SUV/truck reason was first discovered by the government, but received little attention. There was talks of baking in pedestrian survivability into crash tests (like EU and Japan do) but the car lobby pushed back hard on this and to date no regulations have been created. Nice straw man though

And yet, AFAIK, research largely dismisses a causal link between 'distracted walking' and pedestrian injuries.

e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822...

I dont believe anywhere did I talk about distracted walking. I was talking about distracted DRIVING

> when we should put the enforcement effort back on reckless driving the cause of which is irrelevant.

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.

Why would it need to involve talking about Highway speeds? Pedestrians are prohibited on Highways..

A lot of that is the move to bigger vehicals. Smaller vehicals are overall safer for everyone, minus sometimes the individual because of prisoners delema. That’s countered, or partially, with the ability to not get in an accident being higher due to lower mass though.

"That’s countered, or partially, with the ability to not get in an accident being higher due to lower mass though."

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.

Look at the stopping distances, it's affected by mass F = ma here. The a part is affected by the quality of the tires/breaks/suspension... but that's getting into specifics that don't really fit the generality of the fleet of vehicles getting larger and heavier and their variety in qualities will more time to avoid an accident that they may not have.

I've never seen stopping distance noted that way. Looks more like force?

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.

https://byjus.com/stopping-distance-formula/

Heavier car doesn’t mean it can’t stop well.

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.

It's kind of useless to blame drivers as there is little that can be done to resolve that problem. It would be much better to take a long hard look at road layouts. Engineer them for safety rather than traffic throughput.

"It's kind of useless to blame drivers as there is little that can be done to resolve that problem."

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?

Roads in the US are too straight and too wide to force drivers to be more deliberate in how they drive. They should have curves, speed bumps, etc. In general anything to force drivers to drive slower around pedestrians, and to reduce the number of times traffic streams cross each other perpendicularly.

"Roads in the US are too straight and too wide to force drivers to be more deliberate in how they drive."

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.

It's not about making the roads more narrow or winding per se. It's about deliberately slowing cars down where they need to, through the road design. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc

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

> In general anything to force drivers to drive slower

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.

It depends on how that limiting will work. Ideally you still want relatively fast speeds on interstate type roads while much lower speeds on city streets. So it's not as simple as using the existing limiting feature and dropping it to 20mph (unless we want that to be the max speed everywhere). We would need a different, flexible framework.

Engineering for safety has been known since the industrial revolution brought heavy objects and assembly lines to the workplace and greatly increased the monetary benefit of avoiding accidents. Nobody wants to stop a whole line because someone got turned into a pancake.

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.

Larger vehicles have larger blind spots too

Not really. It depends on the mirror size and geometry. Not to mention many are starting to use an array of video cameras.

> Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010

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

So fatality rate did increase, but not by 50%. And in fact, it's down to 1.89 in 2019 from 1.95 in 2018, to give some context as to wiggle room. Also, the rate varies wildly by state (anywhere from 0.48 to 3.96)

Ok, so it’s 35%. That’s still a fairly large number.

To put it in perspective, 6k deaths in a year are about two orders of magnitude lower than covid deaths in 2020. Heart disease similarly claims some 600k+ lives every year; its death rates swing by more than 4 deaths/100,000 YoY.

These are all preventable deaths, especially in a rich country like the US. We just need to look at similarly wealthy Western European countries and note how much lower their traffic fatalities are. This isn't some "necessary to do business" kind of thing or some debate between theory and practice; there are actual governments right now that avoid these deaths.

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.

A surprising fact: about a third of all pedestrian deaths are drunk pedestrians.

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.

What responsibility do drivers have, in your opinion?

It depends on the circumstances, no?

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.

If the drunk person is visible you shouldn’t pass them at speed. It’s always your responsibility to drive safely and that includes driving at speeds that allow you to avoid running over a not overly committed suicidal pedestrian.

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.

What if you don't see them because its the middle of the night and they're not at a crosswalk, a situation designed to have high visibility?

That's what speed limits and pedestrian crash tests are for. The US still doesn't mandate cars to be designed in ways that make hitting a pedestrian less lethal. A lot of American cars are not street-legal here for a good reason.

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.

Same responsibility. Don't drive yourself home drunk!

> Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010.

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.

I disagree, I think America in particular does like to shrug off car violence. It depends on where you live, but a consistently negligent driver can rack up 10 speeding tickets and barely get a slap on the wrist. Vehicular manslaughter charges often become minor misdemeanors if the person is "nice" enough. Regulations are lax to the point that elderly people are assumed to be competent drivers even as they descend into legal blindness. But most people are used to this status quo and shrug it off, we're addicted to car ownership at all costs.

I think people also underestimate the risk, and overestimate their ability to mitigate it with good driving skill. Also underestimating (or just not understanding) how much human physiology and physical layout of the vehicle determine what information we are able to process. (Those forward columns...)

Obesity is driven by consumption and consumption drives the US economy.

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?

> so I have been genuinely surprised that there hasn't been any push for diet and exercise over the last 20 months

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 ; )

What exactly would this push look like? A massive ad campaign encouraging people to diet and exercise? Do you really think that would make a difference? Most overweight people already want to be skinnier - the fact is that it is extremely difficult to lose weight and keep it off. The focus has been on vaccination precisely because it is both effective and easily implemented.

> What exactly would this push look like?

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.

I don't think categorizing obesity as important for economic activity is accurate. There's many more angles to promoting a healthy lifestyle than just consuming less. For example: eating healthier (more expensive*), buying a gym membership / joining a sports club, hiring a personal trainer / dietitian, purchasing exercise equipment, etc

*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

Researchers and doctors don't have a simple method to make people lose weight. They can make recommendations for diet and exercise but at the end of the day, most people won't follow them. And forcing millions to stick to a diet and exercise program would require extreme, authoritarian logistics, much more so than requiring vaccines for employees. Coordinating millions of people to get a shot in the arm is way simpler.

Any article examining this that fails to acknowledge the role that youth, alcohol or drugs play in the majority of accidents is not to be taken seriously.

Other minor factors that people constantly forget about are motorcycles and the fact that many pedestrian deaths actually happen _outside_ of a city.

> ... 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.

If you're advising us to reject the article due to lack of evidence, it might help if you included any evidence whatsoever for your own assertion. You're not helping to clarify the issue at all here.

Nearly 42% of all accidents involve alcohol or drugs. [1]

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...

This is extremely helpful, thank you.

Sometimes articles like these are an attempt to push an agenda, regardless of whether this is good or bad (reason: good; sophistry: bad). Something is problematized (whether this is justified on independent grounds or not is not the point) and once it is problematized and people accept it as a problem, you have gained the assent of the public. Solutions are proposed and propagated by those with the power to broadcast their opinions. This can be the same group that problematized the issue in the first place. In order to propose a solution (which is to say, to propose a change), they must first have problematized the issue to make the public receptive.

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.

>>-like the obesity epidemic--rather than cars.

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.

Even in the U.S., the government would be better off with a leaner population.

The government pays some fraction of healthcare (VA, Medicare, Medicaid). Also, the military would like to have a better pool of recruits.

Thank you for highlighting why I will never support government healthcare.

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

I would reply to this, but my government is monitoring my blood pressure and taking me to an intervention camp if it gets too high. (Apologies for the sarcasm.)

The is a false equivalency. Having the government acting as insurer, has nothing to do with your breakfast.

Did you read the comment I replied to, Their exact statement was that the government has a compelling interest in curbing obesity because they pay for health care..

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

Your last sentence indicates my statement was relevant.

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.

Every Western country on earth aside from the US has public healthcare, none of them monitor or regulate what you have for breakfast.

The government already regulates what you have for breakfast. Think about how many federal organizations are out there regulating every aspect of food production. The fact that you don't realize this is indicative of how unfounded your fears are about government over-reach.

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).

>> The fact that you don't realize this is indicative of how unfounded your fears are about government over-reach.

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...

Perhaps the governments of the world should stop subsidizing sugar production... It is not as if we suffer from a lack of cheap sugar, and elimination of such subsidy would not infringe on anyone's privacy or civil rights.

I don’t really agree with your first point. Obesity puts a huge strain on the healthcare system, increasing wait times and friction for people at a healthy weight who need services. It also increases health insurance premiums on healthy weight people.

It also skews whats viewed as "normal". Its a lot easier to reconcile you are overweight when you appear to be the same weight as everyone else

I'm not sure this is correct. People who avoid obesity-related health issues often just get old enough to suffer from some other, even more expensive disease.

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.

Obesity is a risk factor for many types of cancer and also risk for Alzheimer's because both are tied to the hip with blood sugar problems.

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.

I thought actually life-cutting health choices like obesity and smoking are actually less strenuous because they die earlier and faster. They're cheaper too because of this in the long run. Not to say that there aren't other reasons why we should combat obesity/smoking/addiction/any number of lifestyle-related health problems, just that using "they strain the healthcare system" nets in other issues like "what do we do with patients whose mind have gone long before their bodies?"

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.

"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

I wonder what effect obesity has on US healthcare costs. What percentage of healthcare premiums are due to serving obese members?

It is substantial;

>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...

> The key here from a government standpoint is Obesity impacts the life of the obese person only.

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.

> The key here from a government standpoint is Obesity impacts the life of the obese person only.

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.

Ironicly government is what cases your health insurance to rise due to obese people. Government prevents companies for charging more based on health conditions, except smoking. So a company is prohibited by law from taking obesity into account for premium costs

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.

>Government has the ethical mandate to protect you from other citizens, not to protect your from your own bad choices.

What about the choices of the food industry?

I was thinking along the same lines but with mobile phone usage in cars in particular. It's the fastest growing contribution to car related fatalities in the last decade and as a result laws have been passed for exactly that, in addition to a cultural shaming of distracted driving.

This feels like whataboutism to me.

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.

>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.

Huh. Good point.

There is a significant population of folks who are car-hostile here on HN. Most will tell you that they aren't actually anti-car and they don't hate them - just everything about them.

Maybe we just aren’t willing to accept 35k deaths (insert your countries count here) a year plus countless injuries to a problem that could easily be mitigated. The high human cost absolutely does not have to be the trade off of driving considering most car violence is the result of human error (breaking pre-existing laws)

> easily be mitigated

Your easy solution would be...?

Enforcing existing traffic laws with consistency and social norming good driving behavior. Banning things never works but having people face the consequences of their actions on a consistent basis can change behavior

As an example, there are no traffic-related fatalities in the pedestrian-only streets in my city. There are also no pedestrian fatalities inside our mass-transit system.

It’s all about priorities.

Ahh yes, hyper-dense populated, walkable cities with good mass transit. Meanwhile where I live, we grow the food you city dwellers eat and to get to just about any store it’s at least a 10 mile trip.

Maybe I’ll take the bus…oh wait…the nearest stop is 4 miles from my door.

... Yes and? They pay the taxes that fund the development for the miles of power lines and piping that need to be placed to support non-city dwellers. We can play this game all day. Civilization is all about paying into the common good.

Ahh yes, thank you for being so generous to locate your power plants and waste treatment facilities out here and being so gracious to let us ride on your pipes and wires, while we generate the electricity you consume and clean the water you dirty. NIMBY right?

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.

You do understand that we are talking completely different things here.

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.

You do understand that you are arguing a point I didn’t make, but rather taking issue with a sarcastic remark I made because the other commenter went off to left field.

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.

Jet packs will certainly kill fewer pedestrians in rural areas because a falling jet pack will have a much harder time finding a pedestrian to hit. Win-win scenario!

Pretty sure in most places traffic laws are enforced as consistently as law enforcement can. You can’t really enforce a traffic law that you don’t see broken and most LEOs I know do traffic stops on violations they see.

Hahah I don't know if you meant that sarcastically, but I think I fit into that description--I do like, even love, driving, etc., but I do hate most of the consequences of having cars around.

Yes, those are typically the people who know what the term negative externality means.

> There is a significant population of folks who are car-hostile here on HN

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?

I think the point is to poison the well. When people point out an issue with cars, it isn't because they're using evidence-based reasoning, it's because they're just a bunch of nasty car haters (and communists.)

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.)

I am not trying to poison the well. I just can't help but observe how often people here post things anti-car and then ascribe all sorts of societal problems under the sun to the fact that the United States is so car-centric. I've also noticed that the car-hostile folks have a tendency to assume malice whenever someone defends the automobile. I mean right now I was just accused of poisoning the well.

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.

Again: Your point being what, exactly?

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.

This comment is an illustration of what I am "triggered" about. I disagree with the article because of the tone it uses, the assumptions it makes, and what it ascribes to our 'culture'. So when I see yet another post that is so obviously biased and rhetorically underhanded (toxic individualism, implying a total lack of empathy) I can't help but point out this is a trend here on HN.

>"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.

> I disagree with the article because of the tone it uses

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.

In an ideal world people would be easily able to dismiss any aspect of an article that isn't purely rational or feelings related. I believe there is something to be said for being critical about what is being presented when the authors bias is so clearly displayed. Especially when we are talking about a subject that is so multivariate and chaotic as society and how it is impacted by cars, city design, and how it impacts the economy, etc.

You absolutely see bike-hostile people; they just couch their rhetoric in "the risk is worth the reward", while usually being a driver themselves so experiencing much more of the reward than the risk. It's a well-known phenomenon that when you encounter viewpoints that oppose your own that they will stand out to you more than viewpoints that agree with you, hence why we all see opposition to our ideas everywhere we go.

>you don't see dozens of submissions from StrongRoads about how terrible bicycles are and how they're responsible for toxic individualism.

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.

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