80% are at night.
33% involve a drunk pedestrian.
20% are elderly.
Contrary to these data about SF, most pedestrian deaths (73%) are not at intersections, but at non-crossings.
I try to tell friends to be more careful walking at night, and to not walk drunk (take an uber, it's safer).
https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...
80% at night - drivers should be forced to slow down at night. They can't see and avoid pedestrians as well.
33% involve a drunk pedestrian - the implication of this is that without constant vigilance, your safety is in great danger. This agrees strongly with the "20% are elderly" stat. You ability as an able-bodied person to actively avoid cars is the only thing keeping you alive.
That is true. One misstep near a busy road can easily result in death. The only way to fix this 100% is separating roads from pedestrian with a physical barrier, or remove the cars from the places where people live. Even at the lowish speed limit of 18miles/h (30km/h) there is around 25 meters/81 feet of stopping distance which can easily kill a person if the cars wheels goes over someone.
Here in Sweden there is a general rule that all roads near places where children are must be 30km/h or lower (school, sports areas, and so on). Maybe it would be useful to extend this to also cover areas where alcohol is likely to be consumed. It won't reduce it to 0 deaths, but it might reduce the number of collisions that has a lethal outcome.
That seems extremely long. I always used the rule of thumb that the braking distance from 20 mph is 20 feet and it’s a quadratic function of speed.
You would need to add a full 2 seconds of non-reaction time to get to 79 feet from 20mph.
While people stepping into traffic is a thing that sometimes happens in some parts of town, reckless driving is the sort of thing that is happening all the time, anywhere. There's an incredible amount of entitlement that many people feel when they get behind the wheel, which is not matched by their ability to operate one.
The worst problems I've had with pedestrians were in a college town, where the (housed) students crossed wherever and whenever, as if it was a park.
Which is and should be completely legal provided crossing is not close.
I'm gonna guess the "Not At Intersection" category refers solely to jaywalkers.
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
That is absurd guess. Plenty of crossings are outside of intersections.
Plus it is often completely legal to cross when there is not crossing close.
Jaywalking is an act, I don't think anyone in this thread cares about it's legality with respect to the situation. We're just discussing how to interpret the statistics.
The point here is that a majority of these accidents occur at non-intersections which are not covered by "Other".
Though not always, got burned by this as a teenager when I got hit crossing the highway in front of my trailer park. The intersection I crossed from was a private road, which stuck my family with liability on the ambulance ride (which luckily was the worst of it.)
I don't want to blame the victims, but I'll bet the number would be lower if it weren't for all the people who go ninja at night - dark clothing, and not a stitch of anything reflective. That, combined with the increased prevalence of drivers blinding others with their high beams 100% of the time, seems like a recipe for more vehicle/pedestrian collisions.
But you basically are.
You're driving a multi-ton hunk of steel around, and the onus is squarely on you to make sure you're driving it safely, which necessarily means proper lighting at night.
The city you live in is the second responsible party, because it's up to them to light streets appropriately, especially at designated crossing points. Most if the time they do it the North American way instead.
No, sometimes I'm the pedestrian. As such, regardless of whatever anyone else does, I bear some responsibility for ensuring my own safety. I owe it to my family. I owe it to other pedestrians, any of whom could become a victim if a driver avoiding me swerves into them. Drivers failing to see pedestrians in the dark at night happens even with the greatest caution. There's no excuse for being an idiot, or BTW for insisting on such a right. If you have an objection to ducking responsibility and always pointing the finger of blame outward, consider your own statements.
> it's up to them to light streets appropriately
It's not feasible or environmentally responsible to light every inch of roadway even on side/residential streets or rural areas, and I sincerely doubt that happens where you live either. Also, lights fail sometimes. If people want to enter the commons, they have a responsibility to participate in keeping it safe.
Yes, and sometimes I'm the driver. I'm talking about those other times, and the "you" was used in the general sense.
I guess we have a significant philosophical difference about how we see this problem. I approach it in much the same way as a woman would deal with the threat of being raped - sure, one should always take measures to watch out for oneself, but at no point can it be reasonably cast as "taking responsibility", because the responsibility always rests with the guilty party, the attacker (or the inattentive driver whose negligence becomes criminal if someone's hurt).
It's not good enough to say "here are some rape whistles, purrsonal responsibility gals". And it's not good enough to say "shit happens, drivers sometimes don't care, wear some reflective vests, maybe put on a blinking light and a little spinning propeller on your hat to be more noticeable". No. Instead, we should (and some of us do) demand actual accountability for drivers who kill pedestrians through inattention. We don't have that in North America, and as a direct consequence a lot more people die on our streets, and blinking lights or reflective vests don't have squat to do with that.
And we do insist on proper lighting of designated pedestrian crossings, at the very least. Pretty sure walking + more street lights is far more environmentally friendly than driving + no street lights at all.
The responsibility lies squarely with the driver. Starts with the driver, stops with the driver. Lack of proper lighting can be a contributing factor, but it's the driver's responsibility to account for that. And all this muddying the waters, with this "yeah but was your hat blinking", is unhelpful.
Yeah, if arguing in good faith or not is a philosophical difference.
> we do insist on proper lighting of designated pedestrian crossings
Really? Even when two residential streets (which I specifically mentioned) cross? Nope. Show me the statute or GTFO. Restricting this only to "designated crossings" makes it circular.
> Pretty sure walking + more street lights is far more environmentally friendly than driving + no street lights at all.
This isn't about a future/hypothetical world where more walk and fewer drive. It's about the here and now where the two mix. Another red herring. It would be nice if you or the other "let the little people drive for me" folks could write a whole paragraph without a fallacy.
> I approach it in much the same way as a woman would deal with the threat of being raped
You're seriously trying to compare auto accidents to rape? I already anticipated that bullshit, e.g. by mentioning the third-party risk. An accident is not the same as an assault. Rape is horrible and auto accidents are horrible, but they're different in many ways. That's a false analogy, appealing to emotion rather than reason, and I won't dignify it or you by engaging further.
In SF it would be preferable to reduce street width in reality or artificially with protected bike lanes, bus/muni right of way, etc on wide streets like Geary or Van Ness .
Absolutely. It seems like the best way to reduce speeds in cities is to make it uncomfortable to drive fast in them. Big wide streets make it feel like you're going "slow" at 25mph, so people go faster.
Of course, we could also slowly carve out areas of cities where cars are not allowed, but how will businesses survive if people can't park directly in front of them? /s
Is it possible that the intentional destination is the pedestrian street, to do your shopping ? Remove the heavy traffic lanes around it and people will go shopping somewhere else or go to amazon instead.
In my city that's what's happening, the pedestrian only street used to be the place to go shopping for clothes/luxuries. Now it's impossible to get there so people go to off city malls instead (which are thriving) or online (also thriving), and street stores are slowly dying.
https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/Map-of-Speed-Limits/tt...
Thing is, nobody normally goes that slow, from a point on drivers will start ignoring it and decide on a speed themselves.
Many EU cities are max 30 kph (18.5 mph) on most roads.
https://qz.com/2056530/european-cities-are-slowing-down-thei...
The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada:
They're all over the place, most of them much more minimal, but similar to this: https://previews.123rf.com/images/ruslan_kokarev/ruslan_koka...
Some of them have escalators or elevators.
This situation offers tremendous benefits to traffic police officers a bit behind on their ticket writing, but minimal benefits for pedestrian safety, because the people likely to notice the sign and slow down were already the people likely to notice pedestrians and drive defensively.
The speed limit has barely anything to do with pedestrian infrastructure. It's the interaction points between the two where the problems are (intersections, crossings, etc).
Give people (both pedestrians and drivers) the opportunities to get where they need to go without getting in each other's way and 99/100 they'll pull it off successfully.
True, but a total red herring. Speed might be the main factor affecting severity of injury, but it's not the main factor affecting probability in a left-turn scenario. Remember left turns? It's what OP is about. Very few people are going the speed limit while turning left, and that would remain true even with lower limits. Visibility is the dominant factor here - around other vehicles, around the A-pillar, etc. The least severe accident is the one that doesn't happen. "Lower speed limits" is a great hobby horse, but not one that belongs here.
I live in a city where they lowered the speed limits heavily, the result is law abiding drivers constantly almost crashing because they have eyes glued on the speedometer to keep themselves under the speed limit while on roads that "feel" faster.
And the non-law abiding drivers that will happily crash into the rear of law abiding ones, since everyone is same speed, when someone DO obey the speed limit, that person gets rear ended as the other drivers get surprised.
Instead you need better road design. (also, putting speed bumps after long wide straights is just a retarded idea, saw a bunch of times people going airborne on those, including one time where a guy managed to leave his wheel STUCK INSIDE a wall, at the exact height a person head should be...).
Please wear light colored clothes at night. One time I only saw a person because they were wearing white shoes, all of their other clothes were black.
No one exists in a modern city without indirectly taking advantage of cars and trucks. So people should be more enthusiastic about being part of the solution when it comes to pedestrian safety.
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I see people get annoyed when I imply they should proactive about their safety as a pedestrian, but at the end of the day we're all shopping at stores stocked by trucks with horrible visibility and maneuverability mostly driving at night...
The same way everyone benefits from the existence of automobiles, everyone should be part of the solution when it comes to their safety while near them.
Drivers should drive at speeds/times/lighting conditions so they don't hit people, or at least minimize the chances.
Pedestrians should care about their own safety too. There's a reason we tell children not to play in the road.
I've a very pro-pedestrian and anti-car urban dweller who walks everywhere and curses at cars flying by, but i wouldn't blindly step into the road without paying attention to cars around me, especially at night. This behavior isn't because i think drivers should get a pass, its because it'd f*king suck if i died.
Horses? Carriages? Cyclists? Scooters?
A pedestrian is safe around other pedestrians. Safety is always a shared responsibility.