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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.