Hacker News Reader

Comment by unicornfinder | Hacker News Reader

To be fair I think the problem isn't just the people but how the roads and infrastructure is designed in the US. It's very anti-pedestrian.

View on HN

Since pedestrian deaths are 'surging', its gotta be down to something that's changed, not a factor that's been constant all along, right?

Transport cost are too high forcing people to use alternatives like walking.

Why do you need to look for such far fetched explanations when you can clearly see massive amounts of people texting while driving? I drive quite a lot (for European standards) and I've seen the amount of people holding phones increase massively. I can recognize it from a mile away by the way people are driving.

And for that matter, people texting while they're walking across the street with earphones in.

I honestly don't even feel comfortable wearing earphones when I'm walking in the woods much less on a city street.

One thing mentioned in the article that rings very true is that vehicles are getting bigger. It’s not unusual to see trucks where the front grill is too high to see a child, or even some adults. We have the statistics to know that these vehicles are disproportionately likely to kill pedestrians, but vehicles sell based on the safety of people inside the vehicle, not people outside of it.

It’s a vicious circle, too. If everyone else has an SUV, you also want an SUV so you’re not crushed by one in a crash.

Maybe. Again, there have been ginormous trucks and SUVs around the rounds since the 90s, why would we see a sudden spike and not a gradual increase since then?

Narcissism is at an all-time high.

i was gonna say something similar, entitlement

One change could be people are spending more time outdoors walking. I am not sure how to back that up with data, but anecdotally it seems to be true.

My personal opinion is blaming a spike on a things that have not changed recently (car sizes, pedestrian friendliness of cities, human nature) is not logical:

The most likely candidates (again, in my opinion) are:

changes to driver psychology somehow due to the pandemic (empty roads, then full roads again, greater anxiety or stress related to traveling back and forth to work, or something like that)

changes in enforcement of driving laws (the protests of 2020 caused changes in police budget allocations or how police enforce minor laws like traffic laws OR staffing issues due to the pandemic with law enforcement agencies, or both)

A near universal change in how drivers are certified / licensed (could be due to changes in the pandemic or some other factor?)

OR this is a statistical fluke someone hooked onto and we are all drawing far-reaching conclusions from.

Cars are bigger and faster but with the same fundamental reliance on humans not to speed or be dicks as when Model T was on the road.

Fwiw, many groups are attempting to build self-driving cars it would be easy to produce cars that drove at sensible speeds as an intermediate step. That this hasn't happened says something about how a society values drivers', and drivers rights to break the law versus those of the innocents they routinely kill or maim as result.

No, it's people. Everyone is so fucking angry now. The only (convenient) road out of my neighborhood is through two school zones. People will PASS me in a school zone. Not the normal pass, but the floor it I'm angry pass. It's happened multiple times. They're so fucking selfish they would endanger CHILDREN just to not have to wake their sloppy ass up 10 minutes earlier so they can get to work on time.

> No, it's people.

It really is not just that. The netherlands didn’t fix their traffic by telling people to drive better (in fact they did relatively little of that), but by redesigning the entire driving conditions around the results they wanted.

Properly incentivising, and taking advantage of human psychology for other reasons than exploitation, is much more reliable than scolding people.

Getting stuck on “it’s people!” will be largely ineffective, because it’s not how people work. Though if your only goal is to have something to moan about, carry on, that’ll certainly keep.

To reconcile this with the parent comment... yes. Crosswalk markings, however bold and bright, alone are insufficient to make an intersection safe for pedestrians.

That is cultural. In Germany, crosswalks are very much adhered to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com