Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life.
When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again. But each individual death from car accidents is not enough to trigger the same response in cities, planners, and civil engineers.
It is not the same with air or train travel. Those are useful, but not necessary for almost all people.
if a taxi driver crashes, youve got a bad taxi driver somewhere you will probably never interact with. If a self-driving car crashes, you've got possibly hundred of thousands of potential accidents waiting to happen from the same "bad driver"
the regular car accident conversations have all been had. what else is there to say?
I think most of them are probably caused by deferred maintenance, which may either be the result of the owner making poor decisions, or a circumstance forced on them by poverty. In cases where the car is defective as manufactured, I have no sympathy for the company that made it. If that happens, I want the car company to pay for it. Which I believe generally happens. Car airbags blow up in your face because of a detective design? The car company has to pay to fix that. So your question has a false premise; we don't ignore deaths caused by faulty manufacturing. Usually anyway, some car companies seem to get away with more than others..
I think a lot of the deaths are put in the realm of "personal responsibility" - we don't pursue safer options, even for cars, because it's always someone's fault something bad happened, rather than intrinsic to the design of the road.
We create roads where people would feel safe going 65mph down them, then slap a 35-45mph speed limit on it, and call it a day.
Related, Americans encountering a traffic circle, presumably for the first time and with their brains turned off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM
Per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand and just above Poland.
Yet this is upteenth time I read that US is "designed" around cars as if dependance on cars was some unique property of US.
And the relevant metrics would probably be something like miles driven and average speed, not the number of cars per capita. Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld may have 1,000 cars each but they can only die in a car accident once. Every in San Marino owning a car doesn't mean anything if they only drive it 15 mph through their city streets which were mostly all designed before the advent of cars.
Americans drive far far more than most other industrialized nations.
https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-americans-...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90771003/american-roads-are-desi...
Amount of active insurance policies is slightly below 27 million: https://piu.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ubezpieczenia-...
That would rate us below Canada but before France.
What's also interesting is that Poland is absolutely not designed around cars. Most communist blocks were designed for few times less cars. The main cities are still not fully connected by highways. We have perfect size country for high speed trains.
It doesn't really matter when US has 56 times the cars of the first 6 countries combined.
You're comparing San Marino (a small city) with the entirety the US. It's just noise.
Consider also that San Marino, Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein and Malta are all very small and rich countries. It is normal for the wealthy to own more cars than necessary. Not so normal for tens of millions of americans who live currently under the threshold of poverty.
I suspect the other countries could do with way less cars, americans would still need more than they have (given the lacking public infrastructure) but can't afford them.
I disagree on "possibilities cars open up".
If it is optional to use a car basically everywhere, then sure, those are freedom. In the majority of the US you are locked to HAVING to have a car.
They are both a blessing and a curse. Cars let us commute 25 miles to work in any random direction easily, but a lot of times, that also means we are required to commute 25 miles to work in a random direction.
What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on that is, sadly, minimal.
A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way more than just Covid.
UV bulbs are expensive (and invisible unless you get to poke around a buildings mechanical room.), they need to be replaced typically ~annually (they won't be). If they get dust on them, they don't work as well. Etc. etc.
And here's the issue: To actually deal with high concentration infectious aerosols you need to get that air out of the room ASAP. (i.e. negative pressure rooms) If you can sterilize the return air that's great, but frankly I suspect dilution and air movement is going to be the dominant effect in reducing infection chains.
I was in a gym that required everyone to wear a mask (yes, while working out / on a treadmill / etc), but all the large windows were shut, and nobody seemed to care or notice. No staff, no patrons, nobody. So I walked around and opened all the windows. And this wasn't March 2020. This was like end of 2021.
I'm not claiming to be some pandemic savant, nor getting into a mask debate, but what shocked me was the "group psychosis" on masking at the expense of proven and incredibly easy mitigation efforts like opening windows!
Even as it is, the medical staff have been overworked and extremely stressed. They've been quitting the medical field in very high numbers:
https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-se...
Yes, because of the lockdown, we have paid a high price, but don't just dismiss the higher price we would have paid if no mitigations had been attempted.
Otherwise if anyone else gives a counterexample you can easily move goalposts on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
Sweden deaths per million: 1834
U.S. deaths per million: 3043
However you can also choose various European countries that avoided masking children and minimized school disruption. France and UK for starters, but also all the Nordic countries. Sweden being quite different from the other Nordic countries, but all of them being consistent in avoiding school disruption or masking children.
Most of Europe does not recommend vaccinating young children either.
France deaths per million: 2242
Denmark deaths per million: 1122
Paris proper is 2mln people squeezed into a 100km^2 city. Greater Paris is 10mln at a definitely urban density. It's no wonder they had larger death rates and this is a apples to oranges comparison.
[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
Lockdowns have devasted education:
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-lea...
The cost to lifetime earnings is estimated to be $17 trillion:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...
Which will massively exacerbate poverty and all of its associated illnesses.
The education losses have been worst for the poor:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/remote-learni...
Social distancing and other COVID control measures, which became mandatory with lockdowns, have been associated with a surge in childhood obesity:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
And a decline in children's IQ:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34401887/
97 million more people are estimated to be poverty due to the social reaction to COVID, the most drastic and disruptive of which were lockdowns:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...
It turns out following the lead of an authoritarian communist state on the COVID response, by totally abrogating civil liberties with community quarantines, i.e. lockdowns, wasn't a great idea.
As for voluntary social distancing, it has been found to impose more measurable costs for 89% of the population than it reduces through mitigating risks of contracting COVID.
Truly the "it is what it is" method of governance.
How much more? And how would that increase compare to the drug overdoses and other mental health related deaths that lockdowns caused?
What's the control group you're using to make your claim?
California and Florida couldn't have been further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet the age-adjusted mortalities weren't that far apart [1].
[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
Ahem.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing...
https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/01/06/desantis-admits-roughl...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/19/rebekah-jon...
By the way, despite the rhetoric, states were getting money from the federal government for reporting a COVID death. There was literally a per-death payment. If that is not an incentive to over-report (despite the usual bloviating from Republicans), I don't know what is.
https://www.cms.gov/files/document/se20015.pdf
> Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Hospitals - Section 3710 of the CARES Act directs the Secretary to increase the weighting factor of the assigned Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) by 20 percent for an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 discharged during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) period.
Hospitals get to charge Medicare/Medicaid a 20% surcharge for COVID patients and COVID deaths.
Note that this is deaths and patients who test positive for COVID while at the hospital, not deaths/patients whose reason for being in the hospital is COVID. At one point, those were all counted as "COVID hospitalizations/deaths" respectively by the CDC.
Given that COVID tests are tuned to have high sensitivity and (comparatively) low specificity, all a hospital needs to do to get their hands on that money is just give out a lot of COVID tests, and avoid re-testing the false positives. COVID tests are cheap, and to patients, it looks like the hospital being extra careful about keeping them safe from COVID.
I don't expect anyone who has swallowed the pandemic conspiracy theories to change their mind. Perhaps someone who is reading along will gain insights into how misinformation starts and is spread.
It sounds a lot like you were presented with evidence that people, particularly hospital administrators, were incentivized to pump the numbers of COVID cases in the US, and dismissed it as a "conspiracy theory."
---
The fact of the matter is that people respond to incentives. Whether consciously or not. When you pay people to hand out COVID diagnoses, you are going to get a lot of COVID diagnoses. Particularly, you are going to get people who accept false positives as true positives.
Note that this doesn't mean that they over-counted cases in total: the US likely still under-counted cases due to all the people who never took a test when they were sick. They just under-counted a lot less than many other countries, thanks in part to the incentives being in favor of producing positive test results. Past epidemics have had reporting rates well under 10% in countries with good surveillance.
In China, the incentives are different. Chinese administrators are heavily incentivized to have fewer COVID diagnoses. This means much more draconian lockdown policies (which reduce the number of true positives for COVID), but it also means that they will accept negative test results (true and false negatives) without much question and try very hard to eliminate false positives.
---
IMO the most likely story ("conspiracy theory") is:
1. The US and Western Europe, which had similar disease management policies and similar levels of contact between people, likely had very similar true positive rates of cases.
2. China probably had a lower true positive rate due to using more serious procedures to reduce R.
3. Due to co-morbidities (Americans being fat), cases in the US were on average more serious than cases in the EU, meaning more infected people going to the hospital and more people taking tests. On its own, this raised the reporting rate in the US.
4. Hospital systems and doctors in the US followed their incentives and over-reported cases (still under-counting the actual number of total cases by a factor of at least 2). What could have been "you have a mild cold, go home and get some rest" turned into "better take a COVID test just to be safe," and if that test was positive, it was reported as a case.
5. Hospital systems and doctors in China followed their incentives and under-reported cases (under-counting total cases by a factor of 50+). Things that could be COVID cases, but were unlikely, would get swept under the rug without a test.
6. Hospital systems in the EU ended up somewhere in between the US and China in terms of their surveillance rate.
This logically explains the variance in the reported case numbers between countries that did the same things, and also explains why a rational person could be skeptical of official numbers in certain countries. But sure, offering a narrative that lines up better with reality than the official narrative is a "conspiracy theory." As we all know, the official narrative is always correct, even when it is "there are WMDs in Iraq" or "smoking has no adverse heath effects."
Upon challenge, dialed back to "over-reported cases" or even "under-counted a lot less than many other countries" or "[didn't] try very hard to eliminate false positives" (which is a very strange accusation for different reasons?), still sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here.
New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. Australia 1500. The vaccines didn't keep people from dying, they postponed them to the next flu season.
The old and sick will catch covid and die. There is nothing you can do about it. Putting your head in the sand and hoping for a magic bullet to save us - vaccines, masks, lockdowns - just means that the rest of the health system will collapse too. We need to be realistic and prepare for a world in which life expectancy is 10 years lower and we need a lot more hospital beds.
+ New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday.
+ Australia 1500
+ The vaccines didn't keep people from dying
Were wrong? Because a 100% false rate is a pretty high bar, especially since you already admitted 3 was true.
The covid vaccines are shit and don't work.
End of story.
The mental gymnastics needed to claim they do fall apart when you compare them to vaccines for any other deadly disease. We don't still have small pox running rampant in countries with 90%+ vaccination rates. No one walks around telling you that having only your face paralyzed by polio is a great out come and a reason why we should vaccinate toddlers. If you get the MMR vaccine you're not told to be happy that you only got one of the three.
We need to move people's minds to the real world where everyone gets covid during flu season, rename it covid season while we're at it, and build a hospital system to solve that problem.
The vaccines are unreasonably effective given how radically the virus has mutated.
The argument that things had to go this way, that we should just lay down our arms from the outset, throw immunocompromised, children and old folks under the bus, and treat it like "flu season" (which has a vaccine for f's sake!) has bequeathed our massive world-wide (or at least west-wide) gain-of-function laboratory that is bringing powerful new mutations to a geo near you.
Track-and-trace and countless bog-standard public health responses (like requiring masks on planes for f's sake), and yes the occasional lockdown, PLUS the fact that we got lucky on how fast we got vaccines delivering measurable improvement in outcomes, would have been a powerful combo. But it wouldn't have made any money.
When we tried the same thing a second time it didn't work, but that was due to people not following the rules.
It's your fault for not following orders, not our fault.
So if I understand correctly NZ had a short hard lockdown to reduce cases to zero and then maintained it by severely restricting and controlling arrivals from abroad. I live in a Central European country that simply cannot seal itself off from the world like NZ did, we have open borders within the EU via Schengen (a good thing IMO) but there's very little chance of every country in the Schengen area agreeing to follow this model. This means virus carriers would inevitably enter the country, cause an outbreak of cases, necessitating repeated lockdowns and the public would quickly rebel against the measures.
If you could just lock everybody in the world for a month you could basically get rid of all the infectious diseases. However you can't. So lock down only helps to win time.
After you win your time you really need to know what to do with it - e.g. effective vaccine is created in this time.
Otherwise you just delay inevitable and that is it.
Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally).
The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0].
[0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200...
…who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone.
People want to prevent violence not punish it more.
I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.
Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter
Also, we’ve already been incarcerating people at an alarming rate.* It seems like there’s something more fundamental being neglected — that’s compelling Americans to use our (abundance of) weapons more readily.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...
What % of the population do you think needs to be imprisoned before we recognize that maybe its guns that are the problem?
But my point was more that we only ever talk about gun violence when a very specific type of gun violence occurs, and pointing out the incidents that constitute the bulk of the aggregate number usually gets you called a racist.
There were 18,361 total homicides in the US in 2007, 10,129 of which were committed with firearms.
There were 1,975 gang homicides in 2007, or ~10.8% of all homicides [1] I can't find anything contemporaneous, but a 1995 study said that 94%-96% of gang homicides used a firearm. Using the lower number, that would mean 1,857 of those were firearm homicides, or 18.3% of all firearm homicides.
There were 2,340 domestic murders in 2007 [2] (the header says female victims of domestic violence, but that stat is for both genders). [4] says that in 2002 54% of domestic violence homicides were carried out with a firearm, so that would be about 1,264 or ~12.4% of all firearm homicides.
Neither of those numbers is isolated to firearms; I couldn't find any studies specifically scoped to firearms. I also didn't dig very hard into how they get those numbers.
Estimates on accidental deaths put them at ~400 a year. [3]
CDC data for 2007 says there were ~17k suicides with firearms in 2007 (these aren't counted in the homicide numbers above).
Gang violence does seem like it has more firearm homicides than domestic violence, but not by a staggering margin, and it may have flipped since 2007.
1: https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/survey-analysis/measuring... (scroll to the bottom, couldn't get a direct link)
2: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvv.pdf
3: https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...
4: https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/userfiles/file/Childr...
However the gun lobby has been generally ineffective and uncaring when it comes to protecting Americans' right to import guns from other countries. Collectors like importing guns, but American gun manufacturers have little interest in that. For instance, the NRA doesn't seem very upset about the Norinco ban, even 20+ years ago when the political/strategic situation between America and China was not on the minds of many. Another example is 922(r) compliance concerning domestic/foreign part counts; notorious among gun collectors as inane, arbitrary and pointless. Yet there doesn't seem to be much drive from the American gun lobby to get this fixed.
But guess what is always in the news, and talked about by politicians on both sides, until their constituents are whipped in a frenzy, donating to their campaign, and can no longer see the other side as humans anymore...
[0] https://www.criminalattorneycolumbus.com/which-weapons-are-m...
[1] https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
Pistols and other Guns aren’t very effective at stopping deaths, but they’re perceived to be good defense, so banning them en mass is less palatable.
NYC banned pistols once because it was often the source of gang violence - and violence went down. Smart legislation used to address statistic use not headlines. But any ban will save lives and make people safer (and feel safer) so that’s why politicians today are clawing for whatever legislation they can pass.
People who think this should have a grizzly bear run at them at least once.
Having seen it from a car I became pro-minigun instantly.
Friends were traveling to the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfăgărășan just for kicks and halfway through they got SMS alerts "Bears in the vicinity" even though they were visiting foreigners. They actually saw the bears on the road itself, but a quickly dispatched van with park rangers arrived at the scene, mostly to control the traffic and protect the bears from all the people in the death machines, as well as tourists "making selfies with the bears" ... after some minutes the bears tired of the situation and left the road.
I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.
Like in tech sometimes its worth it to implement a big refactor that would enable faster / better code, even though it might lead to some edge cases that need to be addressed. Its tricky of course but such a _massive_ win as gun laws just can't be ignored I think.
It's like complaining that if you change your lead pipes to copper / plastic is too much work, and who cares if some people die of lead poisoning now and again, but leaks are much easier to fix with lead ... and you already have so much stock of pipes just not worth it ...
P.S. I'm truly sorry if this leads to a flame work and I know its a sensitive topic, but from a European perspective the threat of violent uprising has always been such a weird thing to put as a "benefit" having rifles around. Like if your system is designed in such a way that violence is a "check" on something ... is it really a good system? Like sure governors feel a bit scared of loonies with rifles killing them for their transgressions, but wouldn't it be better that people actually rely on safer and more gentle political transitions rather than coup d'état? And I don't think gun laws ever prevented disgruntled constituents to kill government officials - e.g. Abe in Japan.
European brown bears are cuddly lovable puppies by comparison, grizzlies are murder machines with an attitude which can outrun and out climb you.
>I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.
This is a prime example of being confidently wrong and making moral judgments from ignorance. It's easy to put down "those people" living in the mountains when you've never been there. It's even easier to make laws that kill them since they are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them and you'll never have to see them.
Federalism is a good thing, and not just when you can smoke weed.
How are things in Ukraine? 20 years ago do you think anyone in Ukraine would have imagined Russia would be bombing their cities?
You never know when a situation changes and you need an armed population.
You do not need assault rifles, this sounds silly and over the top. You just need to be aware of your surroundings, follow the rules and have a bear spray : https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm
It’s such a small portion of the population that would have such a need for a gun that it can be handled as a special case in laws. No reason the rest of society can’t be safe.
An assault rifle is a normal rifle that because of a few cosmetic features looks like a military gun. None of those features make it more deadly than any other gun.
Actually, I'm not sure why I get sucked into these discussions time after time. Nothing will ever change without a constitutional amendment. The left needs to make its peace with that.
Any other gun is still plenty deadly that my point stands.
But a lot of headlines talk about banning assault rifles so I used that term.
There’s a somewhat valid claim that pistols are good for self defense because they’re easy to carry. Will anyone use it for self defense? Statistically no. But the perception is there. Rifles, cosmetically altered or not do not have such a feature.
Also, it’s funny that when people actually fight back against government abuse (George Floyd protests) the gun owning demographic seems to find it wrong to be violent despite claiming guns are meant to be used against the government.
It's possible to want to ability to defend yourself while also thinking violence for the sake of violence isn't right. The issue most people had with the protests were that so many innocent people got caught in the cross hairs.
There is something poignant that nuclear apocalypse is better for the environment than human civilization as it normally functions.
Are you sure you're not discounting that figure because it's contrary to your conclusion? Very few people have ever died as the indirect long-term result (let alone by direct immediate result) of nuclear energy accidents, even according the highest estimates from histrionic ideologues like Greenpeace.
The relative risk of nuclear to coal is unbelievably low yet there is still this irrational ability to weigh risk/reward benefits correctly.
That's how coal plants operate.
As far as I can tell the single most deadly power plant disaster in history was the 1975 Banquiao Dam failure[0] that killed 26000 to 240000 people. Yet when you try to google "most deadly power plant disasters" you'll mostly get Chernobyl with 100 attributed deaths.
About 19 people in the US have been killed by Takata airbags in the years since 2008, and we've spent $24 billion recalling vehicles for repair, because that's a risk that we don't tolerate.
100 people will die today in cars - probably more than 19 people in the next hour, it's going on rush hour and people will be tired and in a hurry - and it's just another Thursday. Also, close to 19 veterans will commit suicide today. We accept that as normal, and I feel strongly that we shouldn't; consideration of that outcome should enter into the public consciousness as we consider the ethics and justifications of military recruitment and our involvement in conflicts across the globe.
Where the deaths happen doesn't really matter. I think it's more about a human ability to name and blame an antagonist: Takata. 9-11. Firestone. Putin. Covid-19. Katrina. Comparatively, 'car culture', senelescence, social and cultural reintegration, and other issues are diffuse to the point of being pervasive and and human brains have a hard time running the numbers on the risk analysis.
Putin's War shows what happens when you don't have a strong military.
If Ukraine had a large military in 2014, I very much doubt Putin would have invaded Crimea nor would there be Russian troops in the Donbas.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...
Every fatal accident is documented. Often in incredible detail. I'm annoyed that this is often overlooked. Particularly in this case.
And yes, drivers get blamed a lot, because drivers are most often at fault. Drugs or alcohol and/or speeding are factors in the majority of fatal accidents. This is already known.
For an article that's attempting to so strenuously walk the high road, the omission of these facts is bizarre to me. How serious can they be?
it's obviously a biased source, but "the war on cars" podcast has an interesting episode with Jessie Singer where she recounts her interviews with traffic engineers. A municipal traffic engineer's only goal is to shield the jurisdiction they work from from liability. as long as the industry standard best practices are implemented faithfully, you probably can't be sued. any attempt to do something different from the status quo opens you up to liability.
My summary is different: if thousands of people die because the government specifically puts them in harm's way but doesn't give them the best available protection against harm, particularly when, in retrospect, the government's reasons for putting them in harm's way were, to say the least, somewhat contrived, we take it very seriously and we demand that the government do better.
But if thousands of people die because they individually made serious enough errors of judgment that it ended up killing them, we consider it a fact of life--because it is. No amount of social engineering is going to be able to always protect people from the consequences of their own poor choices. You can't design perfect roads that will magically prevent all accidents.
What we can do as a society is to at least give people the proper incentives. Many people routinely ignore traffic laws (the most common is probably speed limits). Why? Because they can plainly see that many traffic laws are not there to actually improve traffic safety, they are there to give governments additional revenue sources (again speed limits are the most common example). And that means people lose respect for all laws, including those that actually are there to improve safety (such as seat belt laws).
The way to fix all that is, first, to stop penalizing people that haven't caused harm. If I'm speeding, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court. (Not to mention that, during the time the cop has me pulled over just for being X mph over the speed limit, event though I haven't caused harm or even been driving outside the normal flow of traffic, how many other drivers that were doing the same thing have gone whizzing by? Obviously enforcement of such laws is going to be random, which just makes the incentive problem worse.) Even if I'm driving recklessly, or under the influence, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court.
A cop should be able to stop someone who, in their judgment, is driving in a way that endangers other drivers. "Stop" here means pull them over, just as they would now, and, if in the cop's judgment that person is, at that time, not capable of driving safely (for example, if they fail a breathalyzer), don't allow them to drive. Ask them if there is someone they know who can come pick them up. If necessary, lock their car and take them to the police station and let them contact someone from there. But don't force them to pay a fine or go to court if they haven't caused harm.
Second, many of the proper incentives can be better enforced by private entities. For example, I mentioned seat belt laws (and another poster, a former cop, mentioned them also). What if, instead of having seat belt laws, your car insurance policy had a rider that, if you were in an accident and were found to not be wearing your seat belt, either your deductible becomes much higher (say $10,000 instead of $1,000), or your coverage is denied altogether? What if, instead of DUI laws, there were a similar rider for having an accident if you were found to be under the influence? That would give exactly the right incentive, for people to not cause harm due to those kinds of errors of judgment. Even the law itself could be written the same way: no penalty for simply not wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, but if you cause an accident and you are found to not be wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, you are presumed to be at fault and you can suffer increased penalties.
In short: put the responsibility for individual accidents where it belongs: on the individuals that actually cause harm.
Design of separation can dramatically help. Isolate pedestrians and low-barrier low mass slow motor devices from higher mass, higher speed, vehicles.
Dense cities should have an (or many) isolated vehicles only layer(s), completely separated from pedestrians.
Supposing at least some drunk drivers are aware they are drunk but fully convinced they will not harm anyone, this improves their worst case scenario substantially. Before, losing their license; now, getting even closer to home before calling a ride. Does this incentivize drunk driving among people unable to evaluate the danger they present to others (e.g., drunks)?
Obviously, this falls apart somewhat because those same people probably drive drunk today thinking they won't get caught. Nonetheless, the common consensus is that certainty of punishment is the primary deterrent against criminal activity. Certain non-punishment will change some of the calculus.
There is no such thing as "certainty of punishment". There isn't even "certainty of punishment if you get caught", since our society is not a sane society in this respect and lets people who do cause harm, up to and including murder, off the hook for all manner of insane ideological reasons.
That said, I didn't say we shouldn't punish people who actually cause harm. The scenario I was describing was a person who is, for example, driving drunk, but hasn't caused harm, and gets stopped by a cop. Should the cop be able to ticket them? Or just prevent them from driving until they are sober? If they haven't caused harm, I would say the latter.
My little thought experiment supposes a person who is drunk evaluates, before deciding to get in the car, the potential outcomes of drunk drive, while entirely convinced they won't harm someone. (I suspect most drunk drives are entirely convinced they won't harm someone, although it is obvious to anybody else there is at least a _chance_ they will.) Today, getting caught with whatever nonzero probability results in a punishment of some severity. By the model we're assuming above, this produces a nonzero amount of deterrence. If we shift away from punishing drunk drivers, the severity drops to zero. If a drunk's options are to call for a ride from the bar or try to drive home, and getting caught at the latter only mean they'll have to call for a ride from some location between the bar and home, driving is the rational choice after all, _so long as they are convinced they won't hurt anybody_.
I was being too circumspect. The point of my scenario is to highlight that decriminalizing drunk driving will likely increase the amount of drunk driving, at least among the population of drunk drivers who are overconfident in their abilities. That in turn will increase the danger drunk drivers present to the rest of us.
I gather you think reaction is morally preferable to prevention in such cases. Is that a fair assertion? In general, I bet we agree there is some amount of risk to myself that I must tolerate to afford others their freedoms, and have just landed at different risk tolerances. I try to take need into account when drawing my line in the sand. "Does anybody _need_ to drive drunk?". Since it's a situation drunk drivers make for themselves I'm happy to punish it. How do you draw your line?
And just that last clause makes it clear that, at least at that time and place, that person is not going to be deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior, because their judgment is impaired.
Basically, your solution (which is also, as you point out, the solution in place in our current society), is to put unreasonable incentives in place--unreasonable from the point of view of the person, because, in your hypothetical, they're 100% convinced they won't harm anyone, so to them this whole "don't drive drunk" thing seems like an unreasonable restriction. It might be reasonable from the point of view of society, but that very view of "society" is not really compatible with a free society of free and responsible adults. More on that below.
> I gather you think reaction is morally preferable to prevention in such cases. Is that a fair assertion?
The only moral principle I have stated is that one should not impose punishments on people who have not caused actual harm. But I did imply a corresponding moral responsibility for the people themselves: that they should exercise reasonable judgment when making choices. People who either will not or cannot take on that responsibility are not going to be deterrable by the kinds of reasonable incentives I am proposing.
Your position seems to be, basically, that in our current society, most people fall into the latter category: they either will not or cannot take responsibility for exercising reasonable judgment--for example, by making it an ironclad rule for themselves that if they are going to go someplace where they might get drunk, they have a plan in place in advance to get home without having to drive. If most citizens of our supposedly free society can't meet that standard, we have a much worse problem than drunk driving.
> Since it's a situation drunk drivers make for themselves I'm happy to punish it.
I don't disagree that being in a situation where you "need" to drive drunk is self-inflicted; I basically said the same thing just above. My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.
But isn't the risk of death a harm? That's what I'm driving at here. It's about where the line is drawn.
Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss? Drunk driving is the tip of an iceberg here.
> My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.
This bit about a doomed society interests me. Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function? If society needs those to function and it makes them (society produces its own laws, after all), isn't that the look of a society that is succeeding? A society that regulation and fails to self-regulate is doomed, for sure.
Now then, the bit about 'most' adults needing such help doesn't come from anywhere. I agree it's a few. But if most adults don't need government incentive to drive sober, regulation preventing drunk driving abrogates a 'right' _they won't exercise_. Are their freedoms limited in that case? Or are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?
No. It's a risk. Death itself is a harm, but risk of harm is not the same as actual harm.
> Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss?
If they're taking shots at you with the intent of harming you, that's already a crime; in most jurisdictions it's called assault with a deadly weapon or something similar. The basis for such laws is that having someone intentionally shoot at you, even if they miss, is a harm in and of itself. But that theory does not generalize to any action that carries a risk of causing harm.
If they don't realize you're in the path of the shots and they miss, there is no crime, but there is certainly a very good reason to keep that person as far away from you as possible. And if everyone did that with people who do obviously reckless and dangerous things, those people would find it impossible to survive and would pay the price of their recklessness. I'd be fine with that.
> Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function?
Because if it actually needs nanny state laws to function, that means its citizens are not responsible adults. And a society whose citizens are not responsible adults is doomed.
> I agree it's a few.
If it's only a few, why is it a serious problem that requires nanny state laws to fix? Why can't all of us who are responsible adults just, as I said above, refuse to associate with the few who are not responsible adults? Oh, you want a drink at my bar (or my private party, or just hanging out with me)? Are you going to drive? Sorry, I can't give you a drink if you're going to drive. And so on.
In other words, a society in which all but a few people are responsible adults does not need nanny state laws for the few who are not, because everyone else, as responsible adults, will regulate the behavior of the non-responsible few anyway. Nanny state laws are only needed if many citizens are not responsible adults. But you've said you don't think that's the case. So why don't you, as (presumably) a responsible adult, just do what responsible adults are supposed to do when dealing with the few who aren't responsible?
> are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?
I already described a scenario in which a cop does exactly this with a drunk driver who doesn't cause harm, without imposing any punishment. So your implicit assumption that the only way to get drunk drivers off the roads is to punish them for violating a nanny state law is incorrect. In other words, in my proposed scenario, the cop, a responsible adult, regulates the behavior of one of the few who is not responsible. He can do that without needing any nanny-state laws to justify it. His simple duty to keep the roads safe is enough. That duty already empowers him to get drunk drivers off the road. He can do that just fine without imposing any punishments.
> regulation preventing drunk driving abrogates a 'right' _they won't exercise_
In this particular case, perhaps. But giving the government power to enact such nanny state regulations will abrogate other rights that responsible adults will want to exercise. There is no such thing as a government that only imposes just those nanny state laws that are needed to restrain the irresponsible few and never imposes any that unjustifiably restrain the responsible many. I already gave one counterexample: speed limit laws. There are many others.
You can't lean on the argument that the harmless act of shooting and missing is a already a crime while simultaneously arguing that drunk driving should not be a crime unless the driver connects. You really need to decide what amount of reckless disregard for another life constitutes a 'harm' and should be criminalized.
The risk of dying in a car accident isn’t enough to stop some people from driving recklessly. Why would a penalty that only applies to the rare occasion when someone causes harm be any better of an incentive for people who seem to already assume they’re not going to cause harm by their behavior?
Uninsured drivers who can pay compensation if they cause harm aren't the problem. The problem is uninsured drivers who are judgment proof, i.e., who have no significant assets with which to pay compensation. The way that problem is currently handled for driving is for auto insurance policies to include coverage if you get hit by an uninsured driver who can't pay compensation.
But, you say, what if I get killed by that uninsured driver? The answer is that you're already at risk from that today, because someone that reckless isn't going to be deterred by anything, since they're not reasonable people to begin with. In other words, the basic problem you point out, that some people aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless actions, is a valid problem, but can't be solved by social engineering. Your only defense against drivers like that is to drive defensively so that you aren't the one that ends up being their victim. And more generally, your only defense against people who genuinely aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior is to avoid them.
You lost me at the part where this was supposed to not be describing every roadway funded in whole or part by state or federal governments, contingent upon following lethal design standards required by the same.
What are you referring to?
Sure you can. They are called cycle roads, for bikes. Cars kill people, bikes don't. If American cities were designed with bicycle and train transport in mind, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The nature of aviation, where unplanned problems result in unplanned non-optional landings in random locations (instead of just pulling off the side of the road), would rapidly turn aviation into the most dangerous transport mode. Aviation would soon become unsustainable, and available to no one.
How does making it less safe help anything? (note that I'm not discussing the FAA's massive inefficiencies, many of which I'm sure could be improved without compromising safety)
We do though. In America you can build/buy and fly your own airplane with no license, regulation or certification at all. The catch is that it must be a very small airplane; single seat, under 115kg empty, max 5 gallons of fuel, etc, etc. You can buy or build many of them for about the price of a motorcycle or used car.
They're fairly dangerous to the pilot, but are so small and light they probably don't pose much risk to others. Of course if one crashed straight into you, you'd probably die, but that doesn't happen very often.
These are almost entirely for recreation and not for transportation.
The basic rules limit use to VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so daytime only on nice days, limited range, etc. Wonderful for getting up and enjoying the sky, but highly impractical for transportation. We don't see grocery stores ir office/industrial parks installing short airstrip fields for the shoppers or commuters arriving in Ultralights, but they do install bicycle racks. I'd say a bicycle is far more useful in any practical sense.
So yes, in using aircraft for transportation, we're almost entirely in the regime of high regulation and expense.
I didn't argue for no regulation. I argued for less regulation.
There is regulation that provides almost no safety benefit (because there is already plenty of regulation), while increasing cost noticeably.
a gasoline car fire? not a peep.
an electric car fire? the media goes crazy.
also nuclear power. Fukushima got a lot of attention, but radiation deaths linked to burning coal are significantly higher but not touched by the media.
This is reminiscent of the Galaxy Notes that were exploding in people's pockets some years ago.
I've owned multiple cars which have had some kind of recall which resulted in a fire risk. Zero of them have been EVs.
Sure, those aren't all starting in the passenger compartment, but a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either.
> a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either
A lot of EVs have batteries under the car which I think was the point. Though I can't see it being a huge issue or I would've heard a lot of stories of people being cooked by now.
Of course they catch fire. what's surprising is that they don't do it more, but that's the result of ~150 years of evolution.
But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause, where the massacre of a thousand people in one place obviously has a single common cause. So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because there's no obvious connection between them. Of course, if you can prove that those have a single common cause that can be tackled, then it makes sense to tie them all together.
Be a passenger in a car with a driver you're unfamiliar with. Lots of people struggle with that and way overestimate the speeds the driver is going at.
That said, I think people should be reasonably safety-conscious about vehicle maintenance, avoiding risky situations, and avoiding things that could sabotage the automatic-driving part of their brain, like doing other things at the same time that require their attention and their hands and eyes.
1. Total US population, and total deaths per year
2. Amount of miles traveled yearly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Measure butt-in-seat hours.
If we aren't then you're just measuring the fraction of the population that drives (which is largely a reflection of wealth and demographics) which isn't really a measurement of the safeness of the roads and driving.
Specifically in the US the limit is 26,000 lbs GVWR without a CDL. That is the gross vehicle rating cannot be over 26,000 lbs, even if it actually weighs less when driven.
I've always assumed that exceeding the GVWR is illegal but searches show conflicting results.
I don't think a common cause is what makes the difference, and you see it with lung cancer due to smoking.
The shock factor of plane crashes is brought on by them being so rare, killing a lot of people at once, and almost guaranteeing those fatalities. This makes them shocking and unforgettable, they get a reputation.
On the other hand most people have been in a car crash of some sort (a fender bender) and not only survived but walked away without a scratch. Plus the stream of news about individual crashes just desensitizes people even further.
Honestly it’s like a lot of problems where it’s easier to solve when it’s one big thing as opposed to 1000 little things. Imagine cutting one big expense out of your budget versus having to cut 1% out of 500 things. One of those is vastly easier.
You don't need to fix 500 individual incidents but just a bit. You should fix one root cause. If your car won't drive faster than the speed limit for the area or the weather, if it won't drive at all if the driver is inebriated, sleepy, doesn't wear the seat belt properly, etc. then you prevent most of the accidents and fatalities.
So you don't cut 1% from 500 things, you cut all payments for a certain something you don't want.
However, overeating (and the consequences) are extremely common and utterly unshocking.
People engage in the risky behavior 3 or more times a day, and have normalized the deaths they see resulting from it.
If we regulated automobiles the same way we regulate aircraft, every single automobile would have a speed governor installed.
We also know that size is a significant factor. This is especially true anytime an accident involves a pedestrian or cyclist. And here again, despite clear, common sense evidence, cars are getting larger and heavier over time, not smaller and safer. (Cars have of course gotten safer, but mostly not through commonsense measures like, “make them smaller” or “make them go slower.” And so safety features inside the car are always fighting against our intransigence on those two fronts.)
Size and speed. This is really obvious stuff, if anybody cared.
With regards to airplane speed limits in FAR 91.117, the responsibility is entirely on the pilot. There are no speed governors to prevent the pilot from busting this reg and it’s somewhat common for pilots to struggle with this in their first jet transition.
Even a street dead ending in a cul-de-sac and no legal steeet parking is often in excess of 30 feet wide. All that width encourages speeding.
Not only that, but in the case of a plane or train crash, the passengers were completely powerless to do anything about it. So it's a death that's imposed on them by the event.
In a car, the driver has nearly all the agency to do something about it and not be part of a crash. Car crashes don't just suddenly happen to people on a random distribution.
Many of them are directly the fault of the driver, so you can opt of those (don't drive drunk, sleepy, etc). Many are the fault of other drivers but you could often opt out by paying attention (go watch youtube dashcam car crash videos, it's astonishing the number of crashes where the victim could've avoided it but doesn't do anything). Many are also due to lack of skill (e.g. car slides on an oil slick and driver doesn't know how to control it) which you can opt out by taking car control training. Some are from equipment malfunction which you can also opt out (maintain your car).
Whilst pedestrians should avoid risky behaviour, we're still largely powerless; e.g. I recently had an encounter with a motorist reversing out of their driveway without looking, and I've twice had motorists drive down the pavement (sidewalk) towards me (once when the road was water-logged, the other time they were trying to bypass traffic).
In such a world (where cars disappeared) would we be having this thread about a need to now ban all bicycles?
To some extent there will always be some risk, just need to find ways to minimize it while balancing utility.
As for a hypothetical bicycle ban in a counterfactual universe, I find the premise too uninteresting to form an opinion about.
I'm far more interested in this world; and don't much care for vacuous syllogisms like 'killing is bad; X kills; therefore X is bad', when there's more to be gleaned from measurement, comparison and statistics. For example, off the top of my head:
- How many are killed by cars compared to bicycles (say, per person-km)?
- How likely is a car crash to kill someone compare to a bicycle crash?
- What is the impact on life-expectancy from driving versus cycling (e.g. sedentary activity versus exercise)?
- How does the throughput of bicycles compare to that of cars?
- How does the infrastructure cost of bicycles compare to that of cars?
- How does the environmental impact of bicycles compare to that of cars?
- etc.
I find these to be far more interesting questions than trivial binaries like 'do cars kill?' (yes; so what?), or 'do bicycles kill?' (yes; so what?).
Similarly, the statistics above can inform a whole spectrum of decisions and interventions that can be made; again, off the top of my head:
- The setting of speed limits
- The setting of road-worthiness criteria
- The setting of test and license requirements
- The layout and features of infrastructure (sight-lines, speed bumps, roundabouts, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and their sequencing, etc.)
- The classification and permitted uses of roads (e.g. one-way systems, bus lanes, segregated or integrated cycle lanes, etc.)
- etc.
Again, these are seem far more interesting than strawman cliches like "should we ban X?" (which, as far as I can see, you're the one bringing up? I certainly never mentioned it)
This is obviously incorrect reasoning for the United States. If countries around the world had statistically similar collision rates, then you would have a point, but this isn't some sort of power law or random distribution. The fact that our fatality rate are so significantly higher than other developed countries, means that there is a reason. It's not random, it's statistically showing us we're doing something very, very wrong
It’s a recipe for people getting killed.
It's become the cynic's take to point out how quickly an unprotected pedestrian crossing gets a traffic light after a fatal accident there.
The media makes the thousand deaths at once -- and its response -- more salient than a thousand individual deaths.
There is a decent bit of literature around the role of the human and his/her purported error in a plane or train crash, compared with the culpability of a negligent operator (i.e., driving drunk) of a motor vehicle. Also, the FAA and NTSB have a very broad mandate when it comes to regulating planes and trains, while the NHTSA has traditionally not been willing to impinge on individual rights, perceived or otherwise, in the name of safety.
The US has a whole lot more miles of road, and a lot more miles traveled, but I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't areas that prove to be far more dangerous than any other mile of road, and where some efforts couldn't minimize the problem. The way we look at traffic is so much different though: In Spain most roads where cars travel fast tend to be outside of cities. In the US, we have a wide variety of streets rated at 30-40mph, With width and sight lines like roads where you could do 60, but that are really suburban streets where people might actually attempt to cross the street. Who is going to want to track, and fix, the fact that there are a lot of accidents near a high school, in a place where people do 45mph, and teenagers are trying to cross the street to get to the only nearby convenience store?
We build more dangerously, and organize our government in ways where it's far less likely accountability will happen.
[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...
I mean, I want to know when I'm on a road that's got problems, so it's useful for that much I guess, but we kind of have that already in form of the roadside memorial (Descansos) trend that crept north from Mexico and Texas, If a road merits a "safety corridor" sign changes should be being made, otherwise you risk an incentive to build dangerous roads or to do nothing more about them in order to make more money on traffic tickets.
This relates to a general issue with society(in the US, and to varying extents in other industrialized countries) that has gradually crept up over time: in the post-war period, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy was normalized across many institutions. The rules were necessarily kept simple and strict, using a small amount of data, so that they could be followed accurately. When an exception was needed you talked to an appropriate contact and hoped you were listened to. It was under this system that you got things like the interstates, redlining and urban renewal projects, because there was arbitrary power to decide what was built where and all you had to pass to get a shovel-ready project was a routine checklist.
Then computerization took over and every bureaucracy started adding more complex data models and rulesets. More choices appeared, forms got bigger, more rounds of approvals were added and everyone lost track of who to talk to when things went wrong. You are more likely to be addressed as a categorical minority(e.g. gender or ethnicity) but aren't allowed to be singularly exceptional because there's too much automation in the way.
And when we look at the state of road infrastructure now there's absolutely a case of that phenomenon: The design premise remains locked in "first design for cars at speed" and then other modes are the exceptions that are harder to access: you have to make exceptions to have less parking space, exceptions to add bike paths, exceptions to try a different intersection design and so forth. Major cities are undergoing reform to a lot of these rules, but at varying rates and levels of pessimization. Once you have an established rule, it's not a career-ender to follow it blindly, so you have to take a risk to not follow it.
The most dangerous roadways are what Strong Towns (article source) refers to as a stroad, which are characterized by many, wide lanes, with frequent turnoffs and other points of conflict. They make drivers feel safe, and so they go fast (regardless of speed limit) and kill people. There is a lot more nuance there that is valuable to learn about, but at the moment, it is really difficult to build safe streets, and even fix unsafe streets, in North America.
For safety, the crosses should probably be placed far ahead of the dangerous corner, not distracting drivers at the precise point they most need to pay attention.
Perhaps they could install some sort of blinking warning light on top of the hill and maybe joyriding teenagers would heed that warning, or maybe not. Otherwise I think you'd have to cut through the hill or move the roads completely, either of which there probably isn't much money for.
On the side of a hill? That's a ton of earthwork.
Country lanes don't get roundabouts. There's no money for that.
This also seems to be farm country. Converting productive fields to non-productive traffic calming structures would be about as popular as banning pickup trucks.
The vast majority of rural roads get plowed. Everyone who lives in a rural area has at least one plowed route from their driveway to the rest of the world.
A example of this (here done for laugh) is [0], where a single lane muddy curvy hillside road has a speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph).
The point I would like to make here is that on a street like this is it impossible to joyride and even with low visibility intersections the risk of a T-bone or a fatal crash is minuscule.
This particular example is a strawman of the problem: there are many reasons why most roads cannot be like this, it is just an example of "If the drivers have to pay attention they will pay attention"
Wary = cautious about
This long lecture is making me weary.
He was wary of drunk people with an attitude.
I can't find a source for it, but they are definitely rarer than most other places, and I feel like they are taken more serious because of it.
It's true however that some countries are more prone to what I call "traffic restrictions overshoot" then others - e.g. in Italy there are many stretches of highway limited to 50 km/h, apparently in hopes that drivers will at least reduce their speed to 70-80 km/h, and many STOP signs hoping that drivers will at least slow down at the intersection.
But I'd think a Give Way sign should suffice in practice even if the intersection has poor visibility. Only if the intersection proves to cheat drivers in to thinking the visibility is not so bad (and hence drivers won't slow down enough) is a Stop sign needed?
It's the old "if it looks safe but isn't".
I'd just love it if roundabout signs posted before the entrance showed: * The lane starting from the left, that you need to be in to get to a certain exit * Number of lanes/exit
Atm it's a bunch of guesswork involving: * Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because THEY'RE COVERED BY CARS OH HOW DID WE NOT THINK OF THIS * Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because they're so faded because they haven't been painted in 5-10 years
It's several orders of magnitudes different amounts of effort. Putting up a cross can be done one person in an hour. Fixing a road or intersection is months of work for tens of people,several machines, tonnes of material. Source: I've worked on making several dangerous intersection less dangerous
Economics/value of human lives at play, I guess...
Basically the city I lived in is going anti-car, which would be cool... if it weren't for ALSO de-prioritizing bicycling, busses, and sidewalks. Basically, it's anti-car and laggard to non-caring about alternate choices.
note: i am a leftist. Cars need reduced, significantly. But that also means converting roads to trails, making friendlier bicycling/walking areas, better and free public transit. Basically it'd be improving society at all levels upward - from a pollution, transit, AND poverty position. Which, in the case of the US neoliberal "you will suffer", well, won't really happen except in actual leftist enclaves.
There is a very good reason:
> Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve...
And this understates the difference, because at lower speed those collisions are also much less likely to occur at all.
If you could systematically reduce the speed on all urban/suburban streets to no more than 20 mph (actual driving speed, not posted limit), it would be a huge safety win for humans living in those places.
It would also make the environment much calmer, quieter, and less stressful.
What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?
Furthermore, is safety the highest priority, or is it balanced with other concerns, including road efficiency?
If safety trumps all other priorities, why don’t we just eliminate roads altogether. We can mandate that everyone wear inflatable sumo suits, assign a personal “safety monitor” to every individual, responsible for ensuring they do not make unsafe choices, and then monitor the safety monitors to make sure they’re correctly monitoring everyone else.
Or, we can accept that life has risks and that “accidental” death isn’t actually the worst thing on a societal level.
What does "attrition" mean? People killed in car crashes? How could that not be a net loss? Your second sentence says "furthermore" to introduce the idea of the cost of safety measures, so that seems to imply the first sentence isn't considering the cost of safety measures.
Yes
> How could that not be a net loss?
Is every human a net-positive to society? Obviously an objective measure is impossible to establish, but I doubt everyone is a net-gain.
How random are car-related deaths? Is this actually a problem?
So, if you don't care much about Bob one way or another, but Bob and his family care about Bob, on net society cares about keeping Bob alive.
Yes, the US does today in fact actively kill some people with the death penalty. Though it does have a lot of checks in the process to avoid making the determination wrongly. It's a very expensive and thorough process. I'm against the death penalty because it goes against the idea of the inherent value of human life. If you live in a society where jails are very primitive and can't stop determined prisoners from escaping, then the death penalty could make sense to prevent prisoners escaping and then hurting others. We have jails that can hold people though.
We’d be much better off if we re-planned the whole society to switch as many trips as possible to other methods of transportation. This would require changes in land-use laws, a shift in investment toward mass transit and pedestrian/bicycle infrastructure, etc.
Making the roads we already have safer would be a good start though.
What kind of lunacy is that.
Modern metro areas or developed suburbs not so much.
When we drive in a different country we know that the driving rules are slightly different. We suspect that the conventions for driving are not quite the same. But the differences in rules and conventions of road design are mostly invisible. We may notice the most glaring differences like preferring roundabouts vs preferring crossings, but the large majority of those design principle differences, they are so close to invisible that we expect our expectations to still work. But they don't. Everything just feels subtly off, and sometimes there's a large difference standing out and we just declare that badly planned. Even when it's in fact perfectly in line with local expectationsand usage patterns, and works just fine (except for the confused foreigner). We notice a few standout differences and then blame every bit of traffic badness we encounter nonetheless on the few differences we consciously notice. The parts that work well are usually completely invisible, because traffic, in our perception, only exists when it's bad.
Rules/conventions on the design side exist for and can differ in just about every aspect, down to draining angle of road surface (do you drain symmetrically or to one side? Do you switch to draining to the inside in a curve? What about softer curves, sharper curves? A consistent threshold is very valuable, but if one country has a different consistent threshold than the other it feels "wrong" to everybody cross-driving even if no side is objectively better). Or the general shape of curves, some places have strict rules for keeping the second derivative of direction as flat as possible, with few, definitive jumps, others prefer a gentleness above all approach.
We got all around Europe (Slovakia to Switzerland to Italy to Austria and back) all without a car. As a US citizen this priority can be frustrating at times because some cities even have no admittance for non-local cars, so you gotta park out of the city and transit in if you don’t have a local plate. But as a US citizen I am incredibly envious of the rail network and the downtown areas which are pedestrian only and entirely devoid of cars.
But also fundamentally we found that just as in states within the US, country to country things were vastly different with road quality. Many Eastern European countries are still weeding out corruption in their political systems and funds allocated for infrastructure are finally making it into public projects, so they often had worse roads and rail systems.
The most dangerous situation I can think of would still be where cars cross a bicycle road after doing a left or right turn in a crossing and not checking for trafic on the bicycle road.
More often than not EU designs will put main roads apart from the activity centers, and have shared ways or slower ways inside dense areas. From a car POV it is subobtimal and ill thought out, while from people's point of view it's pretty great in general.
What is lacking is any learning. Despite widespread knowledge of what is wrong nobody does anything about it for the future. We keep designing new roads with all the known bad features. We keep allowing people to get and keep their drivers license with minimal training. I'm sure traffic engineers who study this stuff have a better list than me, but the above two (or variations thereof) will be near the top of theirs. So long as we don't act on what we already know nothing will change.
They do that because planes and trains are expensive and owned by big corps/government.
There have been 20 commercial aviation incidents in the last 20 years in the US of any type and size that included any fatalities by any means. 7 of those included jets, with 1 being a 777, one a 767, and everything else 737 or smaller. A 767 costs about 100 million (list price 200, but the internet says you always get discounts..?)
So we'll ridiculously overestimate the per year cost of airplanes at 100 million, assuming fallaciously that these airplanes are always totaled (they're not) and that they're always 767s (they're not).
On the other hand, let's assume (optimistically) that fatal car crashes always total two people per car, and that they all occur in affordable $10,000 cars (the average new car last year cost almost 5x that at 47K). That gets you 10,000*20,000, or 200 million per year in auto costs.
When a scheduled aviation passenger plane crashes.
GA (General Aviation, "private pilots") flights crash all the time, people in them even die most days. If it happened in their catchment it'd probably make your local TV news, but it won't be their main story and it won't be a national headline unless somebody "important" died. A few hundred people die this way, in the US, in a normal year.
The reasons are much the same as for private car ownership:
- The private pilot cuts corners. They cut corners on maintenance and fuel, they cut corners on training, they cut corners on procedures. So their plane may fail more often than it should, or when one thing goes wrong there's less slack left than there should be.
- The private pilot is subject to very relaxed medical requirements, especially in the US. So too often these pilots will become disabled in flight, and they're usually alone or with a non-pilot so if this happens they're probably dead.
- The private pilot's skills are poor, they're subject to minimal day-to-day oversight and few of them seek real development of their skills once qualified. This means when things go wrong the pilot is less likely to successfully recover from a situation which was salvageable.
- "Mission mindset" easily creeps in for private pilots. Particularly for weather, but also for loss of daylight, private pilots often have a purpose (e.g. "Get back in time for Sarah's wedding on Saturday" or "Fit in one more trip to the lake before winter") which causes them to make unwise decisions to press on into poor weather, deteriorating daylight, etc.
There was a train crash less than a month ago that killed 4 people and injured 150, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Missouri_train_derailment.
It was at a crossing that didn't have warning lights or crossing gates. Which is a known issue and has been for many decades.
We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much. Even if saving lives and preventing injuries was the only priority, there are better ways to spend money than improving railroad crossings in rural areas.
The current mileage death rate for motor vehicles is around 1.5 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Marginal improvements in that have to be cheap to be cost-effective, there are many ways to save lives and prevent injuries in America if you have money to spend.
The fact that we as a society have raised a few generations that cannot have adult discussions about "how much is too much" except in small groups, behind closed doors and off the record (and when such discussions leak the conclusions are always vilified no matter what they were) is going to hamper us for at least the next 70yr at least.
I used to think this was very dumb and irrational. but eventually I came to think that the statistical death toll doesn't capture the full impact of a problem. how people feel about it is just as important, if not moreso.
yes, driving is pretty high on list of dangerous things we do. but in my whole life I've only known two people that died in crashes and one who was lucky to survive. I take appropriate precautions, of course, but it isn't something that I think about every time I get in a car. on the other hand, if a few guys flew another plane into a skyscraper, I'd be thinking about that every time I got on a plane for a while, even though I'd still be way more likely to die on my way to the airport. doesn't really make sense, but that's how humans are.
the things that make us happy, sad, or fearful are pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. it's not unreasonable to optimize for the things people actually care about. or at least it's not less reasonable than a more "scientific" approach. either way, your goal is to improve the lives of a bunch of intelligent apes.
Makes one think, is it just how humans are or is it actually an example of how powerful is professional media?
At any given institution rates are usually quite low, and infections a rarity. But when you project that up to every ICU or hospital in the country, you suddenly get something that causes more deaths than drunk driving.
As for why we find the crashes surprising it’s probably because they’re rare, ie we think of these as safe in this respect, so are surprised when a death occurs. If anything a feather in the cap of public transit.
> In Sweden, we have made a fantastic sustainability journey; in the 70's over 1000 people died in traffic every year, now there are a few hundred, but still far too many.
https://www.saferresearch.com/index.php/news/210-people-were...
And this is with a very large increase in car use. In Sweden in the ‘30s-40s we had 200-300 deaths/year/100k cars. Today it is 5 deaths/year/100k cars. Cars are safer, newer, better road infrastructure, etc.
In the US there where 42k deaths in road accidents in 2020, with 290 M vehicles. So about 15 deaths/year/vehicle. 200% more. [1]
[1] https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/motor-vehicle-deaths-2020-estim...
Going back to the beginning, a long term policy is needed. The question in my mind is if such a thing can be implemented without it getting talked about like some conspiracy against the right wing voter who loves their car?
Here is at least a plan for it.
https://www.nsc.org/road/resources/road-to-zero/call-on-pres...
In economics, this is called catastrophe aversion: as a society, do we prefer accidental deaths to be "clumped together" or not (the total number of people killed being equal). Though the question is very important in regulating certain industries that can produce major accidents, we don't really know much about social preferences in this regard (the limited studies undertaken so far suggest that Americans and Europeans do not want regulators to adopt catastrophe-averse policies for safety risks). For an approachable introduction to this question, see [1].
[1] https://www.foncsi.org/en/publications/collections/industria...
seatbelts, car seats, antilock brakes, medians in dangerous intersections, speedbumps, drunk driving laws etc. Are all to reduce one off deaths.
You are right in that car accidents don't elicit quite the same reaction as a single mass death, but they aren't being ignored and aren't quite considered a fact of life.
Pet peeve: while I really like the general point of the article, I wish the author had actually provided statistics that support the claim they are making here. 30k suicides sounds like a lot, but what's the base rate in the general population? The numbers provided don't actually tell you whether the rate of military suicides is higher than civilian ones, and that kind of undermines the point. To be concrete I'm looking for something like "the base rate of suicide is X% chance per year, whereas amongst soldiers it's Y% chance per year, suggesting a risk factor of (Y-X)% caused by military service."
A quick search finds some research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_veteran....) that suggests the rate of suicide among veterans is 1.5x the base rate, which is substantial. Using those numbers suggests that 10k of those suicides quoted above were specifically attributable to military service (and 20k would be "baseline civilian risk of suicide").
This would be the case if probability of joining the military was independent of the risk factors for suicide, which I seriously doubt.
Not disagreeing with the point at large, just that the statistical analysis would be even more complicated, at least finding similar demographics between the two populations
Putting that aside, it’s not our role to forcibly limit the choices of healthy, responsible people just because some unhealthy, unresponsible people might make the wrong choices when given the freedom to do so.
It’s not a societal-level tragedy if someone chooses to eliminate themselves. While it’s abhorrent to even consider, the fact is, there’s very likely a net economic/social gain.
We don’t need to be protected from our own choices. We need to be protected from the authoritarian impulses of people who don’t think we’re equipped to make choices in the first place.
I see your point, but I strongly disagree. Providing a suicidal person with the right resources to help them avoid suicide will (imo) yield a net gain over the rest of that persons life, as opposed to the gain from selling a gun and a bullet and giving him a quick out.
One example that comes to might right away is Alan Turing. Whose contributions to modern society can hardly be overstated. And I know he didn't use a gun, I'm making a point about helping people out of depression, to oppose your opinion about it being beneficial to let them kill themselves.
> Live as they see fit
So in your opinion that includes killing oneself, even in cases that could be avoided if access to appropriate help could be provided? (Not enforced, provided as an alternative option to suicide)
Following that logic, should we lock everyone in a cell under 24/7 suicide watch because it would prevent some people from committing suicide?
Your fallacious argument aside though, you are correct, you can provide support resources without taking rights of others away, and in the US that is the case. Congrats. I will stay in a country where, if I am ever depressed, the support structures have a higher chance of saving me, because it will take more than moving my finger by 2mm to literally explode my head.
If you didn't want to be around guns, you can simply ... not own one. Many Americans don't, it's not like it's required.
But yes, I absolutely do appreciate there being a control structure that prevents psychopaths from going to walmarts artillery section and shooting up a school every other week.
Following the same fallacy you used previously, should we abolish all laws because everyone should be able to excercise their free will completely unrestricted?
Where in this sentence do you read anything about enforcing anything?
I think your statement is missing the impact that the actions of the "unhealthy" have in others. Otherwise, there would be no reason to stop anyone from driving drunk, buying a couple kgs of uranium, or procuring flasks of Ebola.
The same for gun ownership.
The same for people facing major changes in lifestyle and income.
The same for people suddenly removed from their social circles.
It's sort of amazing it isn't MUCH MUCH Higher among veterans...
Thankfully we havnt been hurt but we got lucky. When the car was totaled it was in heavy traffic going 40+ mph and caused a 4 car pile up. I know people who have died in accidents or had their kids die. My immediate family was incredible lucky to not be killed by a drunk driver in a very bad accident early on in my life.
Driving sucks.
In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away, 2 minor accidents like that for a total of ~8 weeks driving motorbikes (minor since I knew there was gravel/water and was going really slow).
Not a motobiker, but I find this part strange - I see people who commute daily on scooters, sports bikes and choppers too and they don't mind mild rain and wet roads much. They do drive slightly slower through city (and on highways too), but not more than 10kmh less.
If its anything similar to bicycle then you just take care on bends/intersections but thats just about it.
In my country if I want to drive a car it has to have this insurance so if I crash into someone all of the damage I do to them is covered.
I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance and then if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you. (The insurance is tied to the car, not to the driver.)
> if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you
How so? Said cop would have to stop you and check you have insurance. In almost 18 years of driving in France, some of I which I would drive twice a day, I've only been stopped for a police control a whopping 1 time.
Sure, I drive fairly conservatively, but basically I could've driven without license or insurance for all these years.
Also, I'm not sure dealerships have some obligation to check on these. When I bought my first motorcycle, the dealer only ever wanted to see the bank check.
According to [0], it would seem that driving without insurance is quite widespread. They say "over 30000 people have had a crash with an uninsured or runaway driver". Since I'd expect that not everyone without insurance crashes, the number must be higher than that.
Note that in France, the insurance is tied to the car, so if I drive your car, your insurance applies, even if I don't have any insurance of my own.
[0] https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2019/qSEQ190309675.html
> I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance
I guess the insurance/traffic inspectorate can mark your plate as stolen-like if you stop paying without giving it back
So either the first cop that sees you without a place or the first time your plate is checked by any automated system.
Also, France is a mess in quite a few aspects so not surprising when some bureaucracy doesn't work as intended (ie colleague who moved from Belgium ended up in dead-end process when migrating his driving license, literally the law covering his situation was so badly written it didn't make it possible at all to migrate his driving license to French one).
In Switzerland, no car dealer would give you keys to the car before having mandatory 3rd party damage insurance. Once you stop paying, all sorts of automated plate scanners would mark you and you would receive a massive fine, and probably a visit to court that would take your license for some time on top of that. I mean they take license for driving more than 20kmh over limit in certain situations.
Doesn't France keep the registry of all cars and whether they have an insurance or not?
I've just realized I'm not completely safe though, because — if what you are saying is true — someone from France can drive their non-insured car to my country and crash into me :)
This of course requires the government to have central database of vehicles, insurance contracts and citizens.
If you're complaining about the driver not leaving a note, that implies no one you know was there with your car to witness your crash. How do you expect the cops to even try to find out who did it? Go full CSI?
I don't know - I'm not a cop but there are certainly many possible avenues of investigation if people were willing to try.
Realistically, for a property damage case, you're not going to get ten cops scanning hours of grainy security camera footage (that may not exist) from different angles and running all over town for weeks checking every auto body shop in the city looking for paint matches. Even if they did that, there's a good chance they'd fail (e.g. no video, no legible shot of the plates, culprit doesn't take his care into a shop), so they're not going to try.
Ignoring, and tacitly permitting, crime results in more crime which in turn results in greater demand for effort. Thoroughly investigating and resolving crime may be more expensive than ignoring crime in the short term, but long term it pays off.
I've been driving for 21 years in the UK. I've been dinked in a car park while I was shopping, 20 years ago. That's it.
Your description sounds like a solid reason to up and move to somewhere with better road safety.
I like driving.
You can argue that this cost is worth bearing, but you can't dismiss it as "just" .01% or whatever. Over a period of years this is almost every family touched by unnecessary death: people growing up without a parent, careers ended because of disability, spiraling into depression or addiction because of losing a child, all the second and third order effects of grief and loss and suffering.
Again, maybe it's worth it. Make a point for why it is though, if you find it to be. Pointing at the numbers isn't enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
https://www.ssb.no/transport-og-reiseliv/landtransport/stati... (car fatalities)
https://www.ssb.no/befolkning/folketall/statistikk/befolknin... (population)
Note this applies to OP posted above you as well.
Based on data from the NCSA[1] for the US and SSB[2] for Norway, I get the following for 2019 (before COVID-19 hit):
USA: 36096 fatalities and 3.262e12 miles[3] driven = 1.1 fatalities per 100 million miles driven.
Norway: 108 fatalities and 45.562e9 km driven = 0.38 fatalities per 100 million miles driven.
Might be I did my math wrong. If not, that's still 3x higher than Norway.
[1]: https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Trends/TrendsGeneral.aspx
[2]: https://www.ssb.no/transport-og-reiseliv/landtransport/stati... (using 2019 data)
[3]: I'm assuming they use Billion to mean long scale (1e12), otherwise I can't get their table to make sense.
I think you also failed to control for race and income, including the vast (per capita) oil production (which Norway taxes the shit out of) that is used towards the benefit of the average Norwegian (Norways is all the way up next to the Emirates in per capita oil production). One study in Chicago, found that those with 'low' economic hardship had nearly ONE THIRD the rate of fatalities [0]. Compound that with those who the study classified 'white' like the relatively homogeneous Norwegians, and you get several percentage points of correction as well. In short, there's a decent argument to be made that a Norwegian dropped into America is almost or just as safe on American roads as they would be in Norway. That is, roads likely aren't 3x safer in Norway, in fact they may be just as safe, so long as you are demographically like a Norwegian.
In short I would say it's probably not the Norwegian road laws or road system that are largely to thank, but rather the fact that Norwegians sit under a gold mine of which is rivaled only by places like the Emirates. And that gold mine is a source of the single greatest improvement in traffic fatality rate in demographic fatality rate, low economic hardship. So yeah, just be born over a gold mine with a silver spoon in your mouth like the Norwegians, why are Americans so lazy?
[0] https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/An%20Analys...
While I'm not entirely convinced our more restrictive traffic laws aren't part of the equation, I'll agree that socioeconomic factors are probably important.
Thankfully, both countries have a vision for zero traffic fatalities by 2050. Lets hope they make it.
Personally 99.9% of driving I do is for pleasure, the lever I have to adjust is miles I drive not the miles the average person drives. On an individual level, each person can directly move their "miles I drive" lever but only barely move the "average miles a person drives" lever. Deaths/capita is a societal measurement that only has limited usefulness to the individual human, who is determining his own behavior. Deaths/mile is more useful as it actually allows me to examine how dangerous the roads are and plan how far I want to commute or pleasure drive accordingly.
Deaths / capita also allows the twisted viewpoint that someone driving a million miles for pleasure gives a very wrong view to the person driving a few miles for necessity. You claim to care about the amount of driving 'necessary' but then use a figure that includes deaths from people driving to the cinema or bar or a road trip to Vegas, which are not necessary. If you only include deaths per capita based on 'necessary' driving it would be a hell of a lot smaller, especially in comparison to the change in deaths per mile.
To OP: Sorry for your loss. I can't imagine what it's like.
In the USA, this is NHSTA - National Highway Safety & Transportation Administration. They maintain an information system of traffic fatality statistics in the USA, called FARS (fatality analysis reporting system). This system is used to determine new safety devices and standards for vehicles and to test their effectiveness.
And they are a powerful organization. A car cannot be sold in the USA without NHSTA approval. At the tap of a keyboard, they can cost a company billions of dollars. They power reaches far beyond the USA as well. Not too long ago, the NHSTA issued a recall that bankrupted the largest producer of airbags in the world.
I'd say the USA focuses a lot on reducing automotive fatalities.
And in particular the NHSTA doesn't give a damn about those outside of the car.
The very greatest threat to the life of my children is cars. It would be easy, trivial almost, to fix this by legalizing building for houses and businesses that don't allow cars, but are served only by public transit. Yet this very simple, very desirable concept is illegal in the US except for a few tiny islands.
We prioritize cars over life in nearly every single aspect of law. We modified law to make drivers not culpable for the death they inflict on others, because if drivers had to pay for the damage they caused, we would not be driving at all.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
> the growing crash fatality rates are a direct challenge—even a rebuke—to their theory of traffic safety, which relies on applying highway buffering standards to local streets. They need to open up the design process, inviting more voices in—not just to comment, but to share insights into what the design needs to accomplish. And they need to stop attacking dissidents (i.e., those who challenge the status quo), and instead embrace the engineering mindset of problem solvers.
The author is also a much bigger fan of decentralization than I am, as a general political philosophy, though I would be pretty happy if governance was decentralized to the point where I was allowed to build a neighborhood with friends and colleagues like I want.
Is that all? Just move everyone in the country? What do you consider non-trivial?
You've misunderstood.
No need to move everyone in the country. People buying these new houses would be moving. As you're probably aware, people that buy new houses already regularly move into them. And it certainly wouldn't be everyone.
But my preferred lifestyle has been banned. And it is often because people are afraid that if I'm allowed to live the way I prefer, I'm going to make them live the way I prefer, which just speaks to their basic inability to acknowledge human freedom, or the possibility that people should even be allowed to make their own choice.
By all means, continue to advocate, but the idea that "we" ignore car crashes is risible.
Claiming that there are ineffective government agencies that pay attention to a few tiny aspects of safety but ignore the vast majority of them-better city designs-, is not a thug except window dressing to enable the neglect of these deaths.
You might find it risible to suggest that we are ignoring car deaths, but given the rise in car deaths and the lack of effective action against them, I find it far more risible to suggest that "we" are paying attention to them.
I've been paying attention to them since high school, when 0.5% of my high school died because of cars. Nobody did anything. Nobody suggested we enable life without cars. Nobody changed an intersection. Nobody suggested new technology. It was completely ignored. Sure, the kids were mourned, but we all ignored any action.
There is almost no way for a sober driver to kill a person and be deemed for their death. Police and highway patrol will just escort the driver off the scene. Kill a person crossing in a crosswalk with flashing lights? You'll walk away from the scene.
What other sort of danger do we allow around us? Much less mandate that a person must be exposed to cars if they want to be around other people? It's a preposterous situation that we have chosen and enforce by law. Until we realize what we are doing and acknowledge the car dependency to our legally required city planning, we will continue to ignore the costs that the law imposes on us.
This negates both your point about anything reducing deaths being outside of the Overton window and your point about pedestrians not being considered.
There is one place that has solved this, Oslo: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/16/best-practices-how-os...
Lots of other cities in the US adopted "Vision Zero" policies after seeing how Osls was drastically reducing death. But US cities refuse to make any of the changes that are actually successful at reducing death.
Because what needs to change isn't just the design of the car, what really needs to happen is a change in the design of the road.
We must start designing cities with the assumption that drivers will make mistakes, as all people always do. The design of roads and intersections must minimize the change for a deadly mistake.
And perhaps, and here's the part that's really outside the Overton window, Pepe who want to travel by non-car means should have just as much access and safety as those inside cars. We force everyone in the US to get around by car if they are going to be the median participant in society. What if we had a world where the median person, with a job, was not expected to drive?
More than one factor affecting a phenomenon can exist. They can be making changes to make things safer, while other things can be working against them. It's like saying "I don't believe harm reduction is helping: people still die from ODs"
I don't see how it can be illegal?
HOAs have extreme power and already impose all kinds of overbearing rules on people subject to them. So you could surely get together with a few hundred likeminded people and build a neighborhood where the HOA prohibits cars.
You might be able to build a tiny little enclosed block, but you couldn't also have business there too because of zoning.
Interestingly, places that are dense and friendly to walking and bicycling are actually extremely popular with home buyers and renters. These places have seen prices and demand skyrocket, yet building more of them is often against zoning or other planning guidelines.
It's starting to change, many places are starting to convert to denser and mixed-used zoning and remove minimum parking requirements, but it seems to be happening slower than market demand.
I still think it'd be possible to build a neighborhood where the HOA bans driving cars. Yes, it'll still need roads for emergency access (which you'd want anyway, fire trucks and ambulances do need to get in when needed).
If there are minimum parking space rules in the area that's a bit annoying but shouldn't be a showstopper. Just because the parking needs to be present doesn't mean it needs to be used for that purpose, so the HOA can still ban cars. You can then use that driveway for projects, play space, etc.
If so, good news. Those have been going down. Since 1975 pedestrian deaths of under 13 year olds have steadily declined by more than an order of magnitude. For 13-19 year olds the decline hasn't been as big, but is still over a factor of 3 [1].
[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
Fortunately, I'm able to live my life without being forced to own a gun, and am allowed to keep my children out of homes that have guns in them.
But Im not allowed to build a life that isn't centered around transporting my child by car, or subjecting them to car violence while on bike or foot. There's no escaping it, especially in places like the Bay Area that have completely fetishized transporting kids by car. There are better lives possible, and my partner and I are just trying to figure out the two-body problem of moving to a better part of the world without one of us sacrificing a career.
Under teenage years, your kid is much more likely to die by assault by firearm than by suicide/accident by firearm [1]. It is not easier to fight off an assault while you are unarmed.
Under age 5, by your rationale you probably also never went to a house or anywhere else with a swimming pool, which at that age is as likely to kill your child as a gun. Operating based on this, a good case could be made a household without teenagers may be safer with a gun (assuming you are the owner and you don't assault children, and you either store the firearm on your person or secured in a safe) for protection against assault, while those with teenagers have to counter the risk of suicide by either not owning a gun or putting it in a secure safe. But then again, teenagers are still yet more likely to die by (firearm) assault than (firearm) suicide, so perhaps even they are better off if their guardian can defend them against armed assailants.
As a final note, assuming you do actually take your children places: your hosts probably lied. Not all of them did, but a few probably did, especially if you left the Bay area. Even the ones that are 'honest.' They knew that you would be uncomfortable about firearms in the house, and they themselves would be uncomfortable if their friend found out, so they simply locked them up somewhere in their house where they would never be found or could be accessed and then told you there weren't any there. I don't have the study off hand, but a well researched study I came across showed only ~30% of people truthfully inform guests with children about guns in their house.
[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMc2201761/suppl_fi...
[1]https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
Deaths per miles driven have never been lower (2nd table). You can't just add up the negative impacts (deaths) without adjusting for positive impacts (miles traveled).
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
If the amount driven is increasing, it's likely because the system is failing more.
And unless people deriving zero benefit, every mile driven is a positive outcome.
To ignore that is to look at the problem incorrectly.
The way we design our society impacts how much we are forced to drive. Our current plans force people to drive more and more.
Even without increasing miles, deaths by cars are somewhat decreasing, especially compared to decades ago, and I've posted those graphs elsewhere in this thread.
The real way to decrease car deaths isn't to decrease deaths per mile, it's to allow people to avoid the risk at all in the first place.
Because a lot of these deaths stents even from people in the cars, it's from cars ramming into those who haven't gotten in cars but still must risk exposure to them in order to live in the world.
Imagine if Superman was real. There he is standing on a street corner. Vastly powerful. Invincible to everything except kryptonite. Cape flowing majestically. Someone robs a bank right there across the street. He sees it. He hears it. And he stands there and watches, doing nothing. That's the NHSTA.
Define rarely? They issued over a thousand recalls in 2021.
How many recalls would it take to stop the deaths? I would argue that every single car death is proof of a defect worthy of recalling that car, but Im not sure if the recall could replace the car with a piece of equipment that would have prevented the death.
However, this is quite difficult when nearly all planning in the US puts its top priority as maximum traffic capacity and speed.
If there's a dangerous intersection that needs to be fixed, but that fix reduces car speeds, traffic engineers will demand that they need to see a certain amount of death or injury before they will act. They won't phrase it that way, buts it's equivalent. As long as the intersection fits the numbers that are in a book somewhere it's A-OK until the book has been proven wrong, which it is again and again, as shown in our traffic deaths.
Maybe the reason it could seem to someone like "we" do is exactly because it is so pervasive. It's second nature to get used to all the safety measures that surround us on the road. It's not that we ignore the danger of road accidents or their consequences: it's that the attention we pay to it is so constant it becomes background noise--humans notice novelty, not stuff we're used to.
They also have explicit tradeoffs between the changes they make and deaths, proving the article's point.
Plus the guidelines often prioritise speed as an end goal rather than caring about throughput, or the fact that it should be a quiet residential street.
Plus the destruction of transit.
Spending just as much as safe, accessible transport would cost on road widening projects and barely keeping deaths under a high self-declared threshold isn't prioritising safety.
Bureaucracies are really good at data driven improvements, once they are tasked and empowered to do so.
Here's a list of measures that I know of that I would say are somewhat unique to the Netherlands compared to Germany where I currently live.
- two lane 100km roads now have colored green lines in the middle with white dashed lines on both sides of that green line. This creates a relatively wide area in the middle that is a bit of a neutral zone. This discourages cars from crossing that divider and doing things like driving close to or slightly across the line with half a tire. Reason: these roads are dangerous. Head on collisions at high way speed are usually bad news.
- Generally, overtaking on two lane roads is discouraged and limited to zones that are very clearly marked. You can expect traffic cameras near these zones too. Reason: people are stupid and overtaking cars on two lane roads at high speeds is a recipe for lethal accidents.
- more colored asphalt is used to separate bike lanes from normal lanes. Wherever bike and car traffic mixes, you'll find clearly marked parts of the road for bikes to use. As well as typically, reduced speeds. Reason, when bikes are involved with traffic accidents, the fatalities are significant. So, reduced speed and better separation, reduces the accident rate.
- A lot of country side roads have reduced speed limits. a lot of 80km (default max speed outside of cities) roads have been downgraded to 60km. Reason, narrow roads and high speeds cause lots of accidents. Speeds are clearly indicated both with signs and lettering on the road.
- Traffic cameras are used on all types of roads to enforce speeds in addition to moving speed checks. They are absolutely merciless. 1 km above the limit will cost you. People still speed but a lot less and compared to Germany where people will casually drive 70-80km/hour in places where you are supposed to drive 50km/hour,the difference is huge. The net result is that by and large, traffic seems to stick to the limits. Locals usually know where the cameras are and might risk going a few km over. But most chicken out and drive 45-49 km/hour. Better 2 km under than 1 km over. Those fines are not fun.
- Lots of roads in cities and villages are limited to 30 km/hour. Basically anywhere bikes and cars mix on the road. The default is 50 km/hour.
- Lots of crossings have been replaced with roundabouts. Remaining ones will have traffic lights or at least clearly marked right of way.
You get the point here. This is just a short list. This is a bureaucracy being systematic about rolling out measures that work just working the numbers and statistics. Every accident is analyzed and reported. Hotspots for accidents are prioritized for fixing. Traffic deaths are down by double digit percentages since 2006. And they were relatively low to begin with.
btw: I just picked the car crash fatalities (per million) and it is indeed better in Netherlands: 35 vs 38.5. The numbers for Netherlands seemed a bit high to me at first, but very likely it is not that easy to compare these numbers and one has to consider other things like the population density, which is only 232/km² vs 423/km² in Netherlands.
When you believe car centric development is harmful to its core, it's poor consolation that we're spending even more ineffectual resources on top of that to try to curtail the harms.
And btw: I already find the fatality numbers from Germany more than concerning (~3000/year) but in the US you have 13x more although only 4x more people live there. So there is a huge potential for improvement I guess ...
not to mention the whole front end parking over any pavements.
If you ask the wrong questions and the optimize to fix the answers to those questions then there is not necessary an improvement.
Car designs is just one aspect of overall road network safety.
And of course even there, the US is also often holding safety back. For example advanced tracking headlights are still illegal for example. And other backwards regulations.
If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the seatbelt to be engaged to work, we'd cut our fatality rate in half.
Most nations' DUI laws consider a 0.05 BAC as illegal. In most US states 0.08 is presumed under the influence, 0.06 - 0.079 is considered no presumption either way, and under .06 is considered not under the influence. My alcohol tolerance is fairly average, but after some off the cuff experiments with whiskey and a preliminary breathalyzer, I shouldn't drive at a .055. My wife shouldn't drive at a .03
Something like 80% of fatal crashes involve either alcohol, no seatbelt, or excessive speed, but not wearing a seatbelt is like a 50 dollar ticket, and a secondary offense, in many jurisdictions.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/751015/number-of-police-...
So, assuming every fatality is wearing a seat belt and is handled by a cop ('optimistic' assumption for it to be 'obviously false'), it would still be around a 7% chance per year for a cop to "unbuckle a dead man." So this isn't obviously false, depending on the career length. For example, after 10 years, assuming independent probability of such an encounter per year, .93^10 ~= .48.
Cutting fatalities by 50% is a good start, but the other 50% aren't walking away from car accidents trouble-free, with or without seatbelts in play.
This is my point: we pick and choose, and we're subject to the whims of society, when it comes to what we deem unacceptable. Citing a collective norm that potentially could have been influenced by societal ebbs and flows is not an objective argument, ever.
I'd say bicycling should be outlawed before driving without a seatbelt is (although I'd prefer both be legal).
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS1901....
That also allows us to repurpose some of that road space that’s not needed anymore, for separate bike and bus infrastructure that will also be more convenient and safer for everyone.
I don’t want to live in a world where you have to own a giant dangerous $20k machine just to move around, when there are cheaper, safer, healthier, and better-for-the-environment ways to accomplish the same thing.
And I drive too, a lot! I just don’t want to be forced to anymore, but we’ve kinda built society so that you only have one option, and it creates all sorts of problems.
Average 2 ton car pays 4¢ per mile, or $400/year at 10k miles.
Drive a big unnecessary truck, might be 10¢ per mile in road maintenance.
Since road damage is exponential relative to vehicle weight, bikes and pedestrians are basically negligible and we could just round that to $0. Motorcycles under 300 lbs could be small flat rate.
> I'd assume having a seatbelt on as a driver significantly increases your ability to maintain at least some control of a vehicle in a collision
Not a chance. The g forces are tremendous, and you're just along for the ride in a collision. In my major accident, I had a lap belt on, but my arms and legs and torso flung about totally out of my control.
I'm not arguing it never happened. I'm suggesting it doesn't happen often enough to be a major factor in seatbelt laws. Laws addressing highly unlikely events often don't take into account other effects.
For example, when seatbelt laws were proposed, many people reported that they were saved from certain death by being thrown from their car. For example, if the car caught fire. Or the car went off a steep embankment. I don't recall any anecdotes about thrown people causing other accidents.
After the law passed, I heard many people say they wouldn't wear the belt out of fear of being trapped in a burning car.
It's just that these discussions have been completely forgotten since, and the assumption is that seatbelts are always better.
I wear a seatbelt because the odds are better. I'm aware there are cases where it isn't.
Do you? I’ve not seen hide nor hair of that right defined anywhere.
It isn't respected as it should be but I would consider it a natural right to do what you will with your own body. If you don't own that, what do you own? Bodily autonomy is the core of all human rights if you think about it.
They don't keep you in control after you slam into something head on or flip the car.
They keep you in control after you clip a deer, or hit a rock, or someone rear-ends you, or you swerve hard to avoid something, and that can be the difference between a good story and killing yourself or others.
If you've got enough side forces to pull you out of your seat, you've lost control anyway.
BTW, race car drivers know to take their hands off the wheel just before impact, as the front wheels hit they can jerk the steering wheel hard enough to break your arms.
It's true that if you're going to do performance driving, tightly belting yourself in will enable you to feel the car better, and enable you to concentrate on driving rather than trying to stay seated. But hitting something is a whole 'nuther story. If you haven't been hit hard in a car (I have), you're not in control. Belt or not. You're just along for the ride.
The driver would most likely have regained control had he left his seatbelt on. SFW.
I'm sorry, this is not an argument for seatbelts. It's an argument for keeping your eyes on the road.
If someone else happens to be in that car with you. Then it very likely you’re gonna kill them. If multiple people are not wearing a seatbelt, then the problems only escalates from there.
Sitting in the back doesn’t changes the dynamics much either. Car seats aren’t designed to withstand a 60+kg mass hitting them from behind at 80mph. They fold flat, and anyone still sitting in them gets folded flat at well, and that’s all before you start worrying about what happens when two skulls collide at 30-100mph.
To _be_ stupid, sure.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/14/new-report-ame...
Second, part of the purpose of the seatbelt is to keep you in the driving position for the entire duration of the crash so that you can maintain as much control of your vehicle as possible until it comes to a complete stop. If the first impact of a crash throws you out of the position required to drive the car, you're no longer capable of controlling the vehicle in such a way that reduces the severity of or prevents further impacts. As some of these further impacts stand to involve persons not involved in the initial impact, it follows that wearing a seatbelt stands to protect them as well as you.
Third, We are in absolute agreement that DUI should be treated more seriously.
I largely agree with this sentiment, however, practically speaking I doubt it matters much. Any impact hard enough to significantly displace you would likely render you useless at operating the vehicle if you are wearing a seatbelt. The forces at work during crashes are stronger that most people realize.
I read hundreds of traffic accident reports every day. If you must traverse the roads, wear your seatbelt, don't ride a motorcycle, and avoid excessive speeds. A large portion of the reports I see with deaths are single vehicle excessive speed loss of control, with a significant portion of those not wearing their seatbelts.
Driving is dangerous. Stay safe.
so wear your damn seatbelt
She had a lot of friends, I'm sure they cared about her. My wife cared about her. My wife's other coworkers also cared.
Its incredible how selfish so many people are on this site. Is there nobody you care about?
P.S. Growing up, my dad had the dealer install seatbelts in the family wagon before he picked it up. We never moved an inch unless everyone was buckled up. Nobody else, and I mean nobody else, had seatbelts in their car at the time.
P.P.S. Seatbelts also saved my life.
I don't think a single one of the many countries with socialized health care for all does this.
They may pay for education and awareness of the risks of smoking, and they may highly tax cigarettes to dissuade you. But they don't force you.
anyway, spending on carless infrastructure to provide alternative transport modalities to people is what works, whereas trying to force people to just "do the healthy things" doesn't really
plus there's nothing stopping the US from coming up with "free healthcare 2.0" that also solves this with clever incentives (eg. via a voucher system, people who opt out of the hazardous things get a voucher, for example people without a car get a "free" monthly public transit ticket, etc.)
In the other case, a violent roll over accident will happily eject you from a side window and off on a happy trajectory towards whatever might be in that direction.
Forward through the windshield is hardly the only way to be ejected.
You’re out of your element here, stick to compilers for once.
A butterfly flaps its wings in China causing ok_dad to speculate wildly about the deadly consequences of car fired human projectiles.
We definitely need to ban butterflies.
What about when people were saved because they were flung from a car? Like when the car catches fire, falls off a bridge, goes into the river, goes into another lane to be smacked by a truck?
I hope you do wear your seatbelt, or at least never get into an accident if not.
https://www.cleveland19.com/story/26647201/neighbrs-watch-a-...
I always wear my seatbelt. Longer than anyone else, probably, because I was doing it more than a decade before the law required it.
I did a course on compiler internals once. It wasn't well received, I'm still not sure what went wrong. I don't really want to bore anyone :-)
This is an incredibly stupid way to engage people. He has a degree in aerospace engineering from Caltech and IIRC worked for Boeing on the 757 before getting into compilers.
You’re argument is “you are an expert in one thing and thus can’t know other things.” Take a moment to reflect on why that ends up just making you look really dumb.
Dealing with a dead body isnt a big deal. Your mind kinda puts it in the pile of "just evidence". Working the fatality is easy. The hard part is the death notification. Having to find the family member, either waking them up at 2 am or knocking on the door in the middle of an otherwise normal afternoon. Its not like brain surgery gone bad. There was 0 warning of this happening. Noones prepaered for it.
Death notification is a full day of training in our academy. Noone deserves to learn their loved one died on the news or thru a rumor or over the phone. You have to tell them in person.
And you have to be blunt. Anything less just makes it harder to cope. "There was a crash, he didn't make it" leaves their mind to fabricate a weak lie, like maybe he didn't make avoiding the crash, and he's just hurt. This just makes the pain last that much longer
"Sir, I'm sorry to tell you that your son was killed in a motor vehicle crash".
If you want to make dumb decisions, that's fine, but don't try to justify it with this isolated "well it's my choice" nonsense. Your choice effects others, and I can still remember the reaction of every single death notification I've done. The viet nam vet trying to pass a tractor trailer on his motorcycle, and the way his wife screamed. Having to tell a Dad who's son was touring a college, that his sone was the only one in the car not in a seat belt. Having to wake a mother up at 2 in the morning to tell her her son is dead, and not having an answer to "How do I tell his little sister"
Individual choices generally effect more than the individual
I somehow suspect that we should just call them "freedom belts" and enshrine them in the constitution.
However, people still have a right to be stupid with their own life. It's not nonsense.
For example, Wilbur and Orville Wright were quite aware that they stood a high chance of dying in their airplane experiments. Neil Armstrong figured that he had a 1:3 (or something like that) chance of dying going to the moon. The people who free climb have a very high death rate.
They all have the right to decide for themselves what is worth doing and what isn't. If you've got family depending on you, you should think about them before taking stupid risks. It's your right and your responsibility and your decision.
But sudden random death is a different story. Car crashes or stray bullets can suddenly kill people uninvolved in and not seeking any risk. An unbuckled driver is primarily a danger to themselves, but also highly incentivized to drive differently - eg swerving to avoid an unsurvivable collision, but causing someone else to have a more serious accident.
I'm not sure where you'd start a statistical analysis, but the worst outcomes in the many traffic accidents I've seen always seem to involve 2 cars that have a minor collision causing a third car to have a major one, like hitting a structure or rolling.
In these examples, these people aren't posing a threat to other people around them in their risky behavior.
One of the fundamental principles of this country is that individual choices are up to the individual unless they present onerous effects on others. Simply, any choice can be construed to have externalities, much like anything can be considered interstate commerce if you squint at it strongly enough. To say nothing of the logical incongruity of allowing people to ride motorcycles.
Of course if you don't wear your seatbelt you're an idiot, but this doesn't feel like an epidemic reaching a reasonable threshold, e.g. being deleterious to national security.
And a cursory search says:
> threat-based road safety communications that target affective (fear) and cognitive (perceived efficacy) mechanisms can positively affect driving behaviours
A family that refuses to wear seatbelts and doesn't buckle in their children is an individual choice as well in your world, but the end result can be killing someone that didn't have a choice in the first place. And your argument around seatbelt laws seems to assume that the driver is the one at fault, not the one being rear ended or involved in an accident outside of their control resulting in them being ejected from their vehicle.
Wait, wearing a seatbelt is not mandatory?
I don't think it is mandatory, but it counts in the EuroNCAP score, and since it is one of the easiest safety feature to implement, they all have it.
My first car didn't have a seatbelt reminder, and it needed a bit of time to warm up, so I got in the habit of starting it and then buckling, and 20 years of driving with seatbelt reminders hasn't trained me to switch the order.
On the other hand, a mandatory breathalyzer for ignition would be useful to prevent a lone driver from driving drunk. We already have them for people with DUIs, so we should make them mandatory for all cars.
Yes, because the idea that every single person should now start doing what historically only a reprehensible convicted drunk driver was required to do will go over so well.
People who frequently drive under the influence tend to have a strong habit. Those would just keep driving an old car if such a device is introduced in new cars.
For most other people, such a device would be seen as a very annoying.
For it to have the desired impact,it needs to be fitted in all old cars, and then we're adding a significant expense on top of the annoyance.
Now, MAYBE if the device can be used to reduce insurance fees, it might be doable, but only in countries without public healthcare.
What would piss people off is coming into contact with the fact that they're driving illegally. I think many drivers are unaware of being above legal limits and would probably be angry when confronted with it.
I guess playing devil's advocate... There's probably some odd scenario where driving above the limit for an emergency circumstance could be justifiable. So perhaps the car should not be disabled in this way.
I don't drink often, and I have never and would never drink and drive, but please no. Mandatory breathalyzers for everyone is an immense expense and a huge inconvenience and I suspect would be easily bypassed by those who choose to drink and drive. And I don't want to live with the consequences of making it hard to bypass such a device, because it likely makes working on a vehicle nearly impossible.
That would do nothing accept waste countless man hours of productivity, consume a great deal of money, and ensure that the next generation of politicians would be Libertarians.
Get caught in a DUI? You simply never. drive. again... Ever. No 2nd chance. Hurt or kill someone as a DUI? Mandatory minimum jail time.
The difference is that this encourages personal responsibility and has personal consequences, rather than attempting to police the entire population for the bad deeds of the few.
Every jackboot says this but in reality it does nothing because everyone thinks they're good and won't get caught.
Personally I'd rather live in a world with consequences than live in the lowest-common-denominator big-brother world.
The top result is also a bottle opener... https://www.amazon.com/seat-belt-buckle-alarm-stopper/s?k=se...
Not in New Hampshire.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has published this document I have found with some statistics from 2018. I'm not sure if there's newer stuff published. It might be interesting to look at.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
This is the crux of the issue on why we as a society ignore car crashes and panic about train/plane crashes.
I'd wager it mostly comes down to filtering out things we feel we have control over stressing about those we don't.
I'd double-down on that same wager …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.#Death
Needless to say we should wear seatbelts even in the backseat of an automobile.
One I found especially interesting is specifically about how improving safety features may not reduce accidents as much as it could, because when people feel safer, they tend to take greater risks [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Peltzman_eff...
Are you a good enough driver to save yourself in this situation?
Do I have absolute complete control over it? No. Do I have a whole lot of control over it? You betcha. The control is not an illusion.
Are you a good enough pedestrian to dodge a drunk that jumps the curb?
That's a rhetorical question. My point here is that the standard you're trying to apply is an asinine one. Unless you live beside the train station you have some exposure to drunk drivers.
> https://litter.catbox.moe/ed5an4.webm
No. Nothing the camera car driver could've done to see or avoid that one.
But surely you realize that's not a very common scenario crash. Watch the endless youtube dashcam videos of crashes, the vast majority are simple scenarios where the driver could've done something smarter than what they did.
It is not an illusion that the car driver is in control of the car and their decisions.
It is an euphemism to call car crashes "accidents" because the vast majority were not an accident that simply randomly happened, it was an event the driver could have avoided by making better choices (e.g. call that cab instead of driving drunk, etc).
9/11 is a better example of what you're talking about, where a genuine disaster was so traumatic as to reshape the whole society in ways often detached from risk or rationality.
This maximum would barely change your time to destination, but it would save thousands of lives per year.
- 20mph: 90% survival rate
- 30mph: 60% survival rate
- 40mph: 20% survival rate
https://www.betterstreetschicago.org/blog/chicago-speed-came...
Yes it would. The drive from LA to San Francisco is about 300 miles on Interstate 5. Much of this highway is completely straight, with excellent visibility through an unpopulated desert. When sparsely trafficked (as it is much of the time), it is safe to drive 80+ MPH on I5 for hours at a time. At 80 MPH, this is a 3 hour 45 minute drive. At your proposed 60 MPH, this would be a 5 hour drive.
>but it would save thousands of lives per year.
How many lives do you think would be saved by capping speeds to 60 MPH on I5? If alcohol or distracted driving are not factors, I would say probably close to zero. As a fun aside, the fatality rate on the unrestricted German Autobahn is about half the fatality rate across all US highways, and is comparable to other similar European countries’ highway fatality rates.
I completely agree about lower speed limits in cities, however, where pedestrian deaths are the main concern. While I don’t think a governor in the car would be practical or safe (what if I’m rushing because of a medical emergency?), automated enforcement would serve the same purpose.
Apart from the chance of accidentally killing oneself or others, it's hugely inefficient.
If we changed an interstate full of cars to high speed trains (or hyperloop or whatever) which depart every half hour, it'd be safer, cheaper, cleaner... you name it.
Instead, I bought an electric car. I bet it compares quite favorably to a typical bus. And grandma does like to see her grandkids, let me tell ya.
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
Haven't dug into their sources, but I assume this is because buses often run with low utilization. Anyway the answer is trains, the answer is always trains in public transit.
I remember once doing the math and finding that there are many times when our local light rail is less efficient than just putting four people in a sedan. When the train is full, though, it's unbeatable.
EVs throw another wrench into that math since they're so much more efficient than ICEVs.
Switzerland has a low population and is covered in trains
> low population
These are not the same thing. Switzerland has a pretty dense population. The section with low population is the Alps, where you're not going to put trains anyway.
https://www.atlas.bfs.admin.ch/maps/13/de/12614_75_3501_70/2...
Most people that live in remote areas have cars anyway, since sometimes busses only run twice a day. It's a tricky problem to measure "access to public transit".
(The BFS is an amazing source for information, they publish all kinds of statistics)
Population Bay Area 7.7 million
https://www.google.com/search?q=population+bay+area
Population of Switzerland: 8.6 million
https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+swizterland
Size of Bay Area: 6900sq miles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_th...
Size of Switzerland: 15940sq miles
See if your comparisons make any sense looking around Fresno and Bakersfield (which is still generous). Then do the area around Elko Nevada.
I don't really know what your point is. That we can't have trains that cover the entire country? So what. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have more in highly populated areas.
It should, that's the point. The only reason it doesn't is because the US has been regressing on rail infrastructure for a century.
> Bus? Again.
It should. And it should be so often you don't need to check a schedule.
Lol, heart disease wipes out an order of magnitude more people every year and we do absolutely nothing to stop people from eating and drinking themselves into obesity. But I guess you’re cool with it as long as it’s just suicide and a strain on our healthcare system?
Amazing how you'd think it's actually close to zero. So many dangerous situations are removed once speeding is at least attempted to be removed from the equation.
To name two: reaction times are increased, stopping distances are reduced. I probably know what you'd say next: the driver is distracted. Not the speed's problem. To which I'll say, yeah of course the driver's distracted -- it's because the driver's human and will never be paying attention to the road 100% at all times.
IMO driving speeds, and how a community feels about it, are huge indicators on how hostile and how selfish a community can be.
Although, as far as I understand, fatalities on highways are somewhat rare anyway, with most vehicular deaths happening at intersections. After all, it's the stopping force that kills you, and two vehicles doing 80 and 60 in the same direction will collide with less force than one doing 40 and one crossing the path in a perpendicular direction, or two going 20 and hitting head on.
As someone who used to drive a very slow commercial vehicle I absolutely cringe at the people who voluntarily fail to keep up with traffic. It's just not safe and if you're looking in your mirrors you can see all sorts of stupid happen in real time. All sorts of people cutting each other off and getting in each other's way happens as they merge to pass you. All those interactions are potential for something dumb to happen and they are needless.
My gosh, you must think horribly about us Germans.
All your points make sense on the surface, but empirically in Germany our high speed roads cause a lot less deaths than regular roads [1]. So while you might think your argument makes a lot of sense other factors are a lot more important. To name one counter argument: I'm much more focused when driving faster and regularly adjusting my speed and hawkishly watching out for slower vehicles that I am passing than when I'm cruising straight at the same low speed for hours. Other than that a lot of terrible accident situations (turns or getting into opposing traffic) don't occur on separated highways.
To be clear, I'm never speeding and I do go slower at all the limited parts of the Autobahn, which are usually limited due to some kind of danger at higher speeds.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh...
The speed limit was in fact 65 MPH until 1995.
On the flip side, cruising at 60+mph is totally doable, and while it is ~40+ minutes slower in theory, we only need to stop for gas once at lower speeds, which shaves off ~10-20 minutes.
Also, fighting through traffic takes the same regardless, so it's usually better to adjust when we're driving than trying to drive faster.
Germany has fanatically strict traffic enforcement, licensing rules, and vehicle inspections, compared to the US. You can't point to just the Autobahn without any further context.
Limiting speed in such a scenario could reasonably lead to a fatal accident.
But no I'm sure your baselesss opinion on speeds is best.
https://jalopnik.com/no-europe-didnt-just-force-automakers-t...
See https://etsc.eu/intelligent-speed-assistance-isa/ for list of vehicles.
No, it actually applies the brakes automatically. The ACC as toyota calls it.
You've saved an enormous amount of energy.
requiring cars to have the same limiters as scooters if they want to access the government-owned roads is not a huge change in scope.
Limiting cars to 20mph on most roads would energize disengaged constituents like you wouldn't believe.
The public gets what it wants. Even if what the public is stupid.
Every road and every situation have a reasonable limit, which is often higher than what you posted.
Figure 3 in this report shows a somewhat normal distribution around .15 g/dl and the mode being around .17 g/dl: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
This is already ~2x the legal limit.
Our BAC limit is 0.05, except for new drivers, where it is 0.0.
Say a DUI driver kills a random family of 5. Is that going to make national headlines? Probably not. Very little to be gained politically. It doesn't really enrage us because we love and celebrate alcohol too much to be capable of villainizing it like guns. So as a result, it doesn't spread very far on social media.
Now say a raging incel shoots 5 people at a mall (2 die, 3 are injured). Is that going to make national headlines? You bet. It easily enrages at least half of us since guns are a wedge issue. Hence, it spreads like wildfire on social media. As it's spreading, it is further coupled to politics whenever people use the story to further political goals like mobilizing peers to go out and protest, drum up support for a preferred candidate, and more.
You won't see a public reaction to car accidents similar to guns until the media decides either alcohol or cars are villains that need to be eradicated from society.
Healthcare expenses is a similar political wedge-issue that causes tons of deaths (Medicare for all, etc.) and doesn't get nearly as much media coverage because it's less terrifying.
You can see this even irrespective of how many deaths there are, like when there's a really big fire/explosion/storm that gets news coverage but casualties are zero or very low. Those are more likely to get coverage than a single car crash that killed more people
I hear a lot more ads on the radio informing me about all the ways a DUI will screw over my life, even if I don't kill anyone, but almost nothing about guns.
Now, at a national level, sure, guns dominate. But I'd say the larger differentiating factor is intent. The killer on a shooting spree sparks terror in a way that a stupid drunk driver does not, even if the latter is more of a risk.
* Age limits: There is a similar age limit to buy a gun as there is to drive a car
* Driver's license: Pretty much anyone with a pulse over the age of 16 can get a driver's license and it's nearly impossible to revoke permanently
* Insurance: The legally required insurance limits in some states is so low that it's effectively useless
This is entirely untrue.
In my state, for example, you must be at least 18 to purchase firearms generally and 21 to purchase handguns or semiautomatic rifles. Every sale has a mandatory criminal and medical background check. The transfer applications (state and ATF Form 4473) require listing your name, date of birth, address, declaration of citizenship, Social Security number, driver license number, etc. Firearms must be stored in "secure gun storage." They are not permitted on various types of school property or property being used by a school, public demonstrations, state capitol grounds, and so on. You can only discharge firearms in certain places. You must have a license to conceal one on your person. You cannot possess short-barreled shotguns or machine guns. You need special licensing for short-barreled rifles and suppressors. I'm excluding a bunch of stuff—mostly federal laws—but you get the point. Violating any of those laws is a gross misdemeanor or felony. Keep in mind I live in a state with relatively permissive firearms laws! The laws in plenty of other states are much more severe.
Purchasing, owning, and operating a vehicle is much more easier than purchasing, owning, or operating firearms.
I feel like this is in the process of happening right now. The number of car-critical and car-hostile posts has been increasing and the sentiment is gaining traction on "the left" lately. What is strongtowns if not one such publication?
Designing cities/towns where you don't need a car is one of the best things a society can do.
[0]: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2021/2021-N... [1]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/84275
However, they are performing root cause analysis. For distracted driving, for example, they break it down into distractions by other occupants, distractions by moving object inside vehicle (such as a fly), cell phone use (with hands), cell phone use (no hands), using component integral to vehicle (climate or audio), using component integral to vehicle (other), smoking, and many more.
The problem is that decision makers don't do anything about it.
In contrast, public mass transit just have less things that can go home. Trains can be really safe if we wanted it to be.
Why were they able to speed on that road? Why did they feel safe being on their phone?
Every software engineer understands intrinsically that blaming the user does not improve outcomes. You cannot get folks to click the right button by putting “you must click the right button” into the terms of service, and then suing the users who click the wrong one.
> Why were they able to speed on that road?
Every road can be sped on, especially if you’re going to crash.
> Why did they feel safe being on their phone?
They didn’t, but it was “an urgent reply”.
Amtrak (and train travel in general) certainly is a wedge issue ("Amtrak Joe"), so we fixate on the only thing interesting that ever happens with it (crashes.) We can then discuss the state of it, whether we should shut it down or expand it, whether flying is safer, etc.
If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
And 600 of them were trespassers walking on the tracks, then the vast majority of the remaining were people who tried to beat the train at a crossing. The number of dead passengers was 6 and the number of dead train workers was 11, if I'm reading this correctly: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into context.
We do need to get better at statistics and realizing that when we take on risk, we rarely are the only person impacted if something goes sideways. When I take the wheel of a car I become a risk myself and to others and I need to place as much value on their agency as my own.
I'm not arguing that self driving cars are solved but maybe they aren't quite as bad as people feel. We need proper statistics.
We can\t , current self driving is limited in many ways and Tesla is notorious for having the driver save the day multiple time in 30 minutes and Elon is not publishing this incidents. I can't stand the fanboys coming up with fake stats that only 5 people ddied this month in a Tesla where in fact you have video evidence of more people would have died if the driver would have not saved the AI,
A Tesla employee should leak the data and we should then talk about stats, do Tesla saves the driver more then the driver saves the car. (i know that in reality FSD does not mean what the words imply and OP probably had no idea that there are no real FSD cars around that drive with no limitation so we can do real statistics)
Currently "self driving cars" get in twice as many accidents as humans do per million miles driven.
In term of statistics, the error rates of human drivers are still lower than current self-driving technology. This is why the only certified fully self-driving mode is limited in Germany to operate at speed of less than 30 km/h, only on highways with congestion, and then outside any construction zones.
But driving on the highway and passing a sign that said how many people had died today doing precisely what I was doing at that moment was affecting.
Not all self driving car accidents make the news — self driving car accidents that any human diver could have easily avoided make the news. Statistically safer something something miles driven means nothing to the family of someone who died in a completely avoidable accident.
Until self driving cars reach the point of handing emergency situations — storms, ice, obstacles, children, other accidents, sudden lane changes, tire blowouts — better than humans and stop punting anything less than ideal conditions back to the driver it’s pointless to talk about safety.
All the real love for self-driving cars seems to be in the US, where they are basically competing with completely untrained drivers and a strong drink-driving culture.
No self-driving car on the road today would even come close to passing a UK driving test. They wouldn't last the first five minutes.
While a careful, attentive driver in a well-maintained vehicle certainly isn’t immune, their risk is much lower than someone who drives tired, drunk, or high in a car with bald tires and bad brakes.
My gut is public transit is still safer than even the most attentive and sober driver. So it’s the feeling of control that determines perception rather than an actual materially different risk profile.
It's merely thought provoking: every HN thread on transit will have the same half-dozen comments about violence and danger on public transit, when the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths occur each year on our highways.
No but we do have a strong, though admittedly weakening, tradition of restricting the fun of others when the danger posed is not solely to themselves. For example building and setting off bombs is fun as hell but we're not allowed to do it because it's pretty unhealthy for the neighbors.
Driving cars is pretty dangerous not just for the driver but also for other people around who have not necessarily consented to being put in danger. When pedestrians and children are routinely getting killed (as they have been in my city this summer) we should shift the danger assessment a little away from the skydiving end of the spectrum and a little more to the backyard bombs zone.
However, many people haven't really consented to driving. They drive out of necessity. Where they live and work is only marginally in their control and there are no other transport options. When I was poor, I would have loved to not have to pay for insurance, gas, maintenance, and the vehicle itself. I couldn't really afford it. But without it, I couldn't get to work to eat. There weren't other options. When I made a little more money I could finally afford to live close to work and public transport was an option. The trip was 5 minutes by car, over an hour by bus.
I'm on board for heavily regulating driving and shifting that danger assessment as you suggest. But first I think there is a moral obligation to provide alternative modes of transportation. (This should not be interpreted as excusing drivers from their obligation to be skilled and safe.)
Both ends need to be addressed and it will make for a lot of changes in the middle too. But there's no solution that doesn't involve completely rewriting transportation.
Being confronted by a knife-wielding drug addict on public transit is just a scarier proposition all around even if the numbers suggest it shouldn't be. And it feels random where death in a car doesn't, even though for the victim it often is.
What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was two orders of magnitude greater person hours on roads in non public transit.
The highway mileage includes 306 billion passenger-miles on non-transit buses.
Amtrak (6 billion passenger miles) isn't considered transit.
Regardless of what the US does, throughput is much higher on public transit than it is on highways. You can fit so many more people on buses and trains than in automobiles.
For the actual numbers, compare deaths-per-passenger-mile in-city and deaths-per-passenger-mile between cities (highways vs buses, trains, etc), and you will see huge difference in fatality rate.
I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control" because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out of railroads, but then again, I can't force them out of public roads either.
You can’t assure your bus driver didn’t pop a few pills before they came on shift.
I ride a motorbike. As part of training I was repeatedly told to wear protection not because of my riding skills, but because of everyone else's lack of skills.
Another example: On the highway I get myself into a position where I have plenty of stopping distance for the car in front of me, but also behind me in case I need to stop rapidly myself.
You also don't have any control over how far behind other cars are. The only thing you can do is to drive faster or to let them by by stopping or changing lanes. The latter is highly dangerous in fast flowing traffic on single lane roads while the first will almost never help as the other car actively wants to go faster.
Being in absolute control is you can drive as defensively as you want, in the end a distracted idiot can take you out and the only thing you can do is minimize the risk.
While I sympathize with your overall sentiment (and indeed, as a fellow motorcyclists, I know a lot about defensive driving/riding), I have never seen people consistently drive the way you describe, ever. For many intersections in the cities (probably most), you simply cannot see if someone is actually going from a side road until you're so deep in the intersection that you have no chance of stopping before it if you notice someone.
Imagine you're driving here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5703087,-122.3952816,3a,75y,...
There's a side road on in front of you. Imagine there is a car going same speed as you, on a crash trajectory (i.e. it is exactly as far from the intersection as you are). Where's the first moment you see it?
Most likely, around here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5703156,-122.3959313,3a,75y,...
where you're around 20 feet from the intersection of your routes. If you begin braking immediately as you notice the other car, you need to be going slower 15 mph if you want to avoid a crash. If you add any amount of time to actually judge the speed of the other car and its intention of stopping, you need to be going less than 10 mph. Needless to say, nobody actually does that, people don't slow down to 10 mph in locations like above.
"But he should have been using a reasonable following distance" makes for easy low effort internet points but internet points won't get you out of a hospital bed.
But in your example I'd have a good chance to prevent a collision. I'd already have my foot on the brake due to the crosswalk there. I will have brought my speed down that I will be able to stop should someone suddenly appear within it. A kid could pop out from between those two cars on the right chasing a ball, so you need to have a stopping distance of perhaps 2 - 3 feet maximum, depending what vehicle of mine I am driving that's probably 20 - 25 mph maximum. 25 mph is the speed limit there so I probably wouldn't even get tailgaters at that speed, but I don't care if I do. That intersection is a good place for a rolling stop, where you bring the car down to perhaps 5mph before you proceed, mostly because of the sidewalks on both sides and the risk of kids running around or riding bikes. That's a residential street, there should be no need to move quickly down it.
In addition to all that my car has a top of line collision avoidance system, side curtain airbags, a high crash rating, etc. I always wear my seatbelt and keep my kid strapped in with a age appropriate booster seat.
I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce your personal risk considerably.
On the arterial street that I linked, intersections like this one are placed every 150 feet. I literally never seen anyone drive the way you describe, ever. Nobody does a rolling stop every 150 feet. Very few drivers even go speed limit there, maybe 1 in 20: most people do around 30 mph, a good fraction does 35 mph. In fact, if you drive the way you describe (which I doubt, because, again, I literally never, ever seen anyone drive like that), you're more likely to get into an accident (most likely getting rear ended), due to being extremely unpredictable.
> I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce your personal risk considerably.
This is, of course, right, but my point was not to demand perfection, I just want to point out that what you describe is extremely unrealistic, and virtually never observed in real life driving.
You may object it's not perfect, but nothing is, and it does work. In fact, it works exactly the same way you can assure that your brake pad won't suddenly give way in front of a bus coming from your left.
Moreover, the route you drive most is your commute to work, so you can choose where you live to minimize travel time and intersections. There's one intersection on my way to work, so I guess theoretically what you describe could happen. But the accident statistics for that particular intersection show that practically no accidents have occurred there. Therefore most of the time I spend driving is going to be quite safe compared to the aggregate stats, and that's by choice.
Delivery driver routes are usually optimized for right turns for this reason. My dad was a UPS driver for 30 years and went without an accident the entire time, not even one that wasn't his fault. You'd think statistically he would have gotten into one over the million miles or so he drove on and off the job, but I think that just goes to show that defensive driving and route planning actually works.
No form of travel is absolutely safe. The best you can do is control what you can and hope for the best.
You might want to elaborate on your definition of control.
As you say, careful drivers are not immune. But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away.
"To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: 'Why not?'" - Christopher Hitchens, from Mortality.
And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well, yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the collision so we'll blame them. The problem wasn't us, the railway company, who are great, it's those awful drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers was drunk. Which explains why we've told his widow that she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service fund.
Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did) coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe it'd be a good idea to invent signals so that you know if a train just around the corner has broken down so that your express doesn't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's something for the railway company too. This didn't magically fix things overnight, but it did push back against the useless "blame the driver" narrative.
Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved things considerably, but that did not happen automatically, somebody had to call the corporate entities on their bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car owners on their bullshit too.
One trend I don't like is people who resist the word "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and should, prevent accidents.
You could have just stopped at "control". That's the fundamental dynamic by which we can explain this differential public sentiment--a sense of control or lack thereof, independent of whether that control actually exists, or whether that control translates to reduced risk. You went off the rails trying to link it to some objective reality; it's unnecessary, and in any event even the best of drivers takes on more risk while on the road than riding passenger rail.
Control also figures into notions of ethics and justice. We're much more willing to accept losses when we attribute the proximate cause to "nature", "god", "chance", etc. But our moral calculus shifts dramatically when the decision of a particular person or group can be fingered (reasonably or not) as a primary factor. You already subtly did that by insinuating blame upon many traffic victims. (I'm not saying the insinuation was improper or impermissible... we all frequently do that; it's a staple of public discourse and even personal reflection. Just highlighting the extent to which notions of control color our views.)
The article covers suicide, and here too the veneer of control at the point of action hides the entire complex environment in which someone dies of suicide - the social, economic, and political landscape that creates the conditions in which a former service member takes their life is not strictly personal, but we insist on treating it as such, because at the point of action, it is indeed the individual who commits the act.
Strictly by design and active and reinforced choice. Not for any other reason. Period.
As a group the safest option would be smaller vehicles, but individually each person is better off (in terms of safety during a collision) with something larger.
And it would be even more obvious which form of transportation provides the most control if you had bike-first infrastructure.
But you’re also not accounting for lots of things completely out of your control, like where highways get built, potholes, funding, insurance rates, the price of rubber for new tires, oil changes, gas stations, etc. It’s the illusion of control.
We’ve designed cities specifically so that you can feel like you are in control driving a car. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Airplane > cruise ship > car > train > bike > feet
But I may just think about this stuff more than most people. I never feel as in control when I’m stuck in a traffic jam or behind a slow driver versus riding a bike. Even trains feel like I have more control because I’m on my feet to/from the train and I could get off at a stop and just walk away. It’s very liberating versus a car.
Mass shootings are terrifying because there’s no sense of control.
Animals are scary (spiders, snakes) because we can’t control them.
Disease is scary when we can’t control it (cancer); less scary when we can cure it, even something like appendicitis seems tame because most hospitals can get it under control. It’s also why COVID is less scary to the general public, as it gets more under control (via vaccines and treatments and prior infection immunity).
yeah, this is it. This is why people will drive through a blizzard in the middle of the night but will have a panic attack trying to board an airplane. In their car they feel in control but in an airplane they feel helpless and at completely dependent on the pilot/crew/airplane.
Part of the problem is that this control is much more of an illusion than most people realize. In any car crash where there's at least two vehicles involved, often one driver is at fault, and the other is (or others are) more or less an innocent bystander, who may have been exercising all the care and attentiveness in the world. That person was certainly not able to control their safety in that situation.
And even when not involved in a crash, I don't think it's reasonable to say that one's safe outcome was caused even mostly due to their control over their vehicle. Much of it can be attributable to luck, traffic conditions, and the imperfect, but often sufficient, control that others were exercising over their vehicles.
But I do agree with you that the perceived threat/seriousness of these various bad things does have a lot to do with the perception of individual control, whether or not individuals actually do have much control over them. I know a surprising number of people who get anxious flying on a plane, but don't think twice about getting in a car, despite there being a higher probability of injury or death from a car trip.
Something I just realized: I feel like passengers in a car are also similarly not that concerned about the possibility of crashes, even though they are not actually in control of the vehicle. My first thought would be that they presumably know and trust the person who is driving, but that doesn't explain why people feel safe in taxis. I guess maybe people do feel less safe in taxis, though.
For anyone here concerned about this, it doesn’t take very much money in HN-terms to become reasonably well trained. You can:
1) Carry your own weapon, following your state’s laws in all but a few. 2) Learn to use that weapon very well, but more importantly: 3) Learn to use cover and move defensively or offensively 4) Learn to administer basic medical attention to yourself and others 5) Learn to read people and know when something might be about to happen.
After enough training, you will at least probably not freeze in an active shooter scenario. Even if you’re not into carrying your own weapon, doing some training will teach you how insanely hard it is to hit any moving target (or anything at all when the adrenaline is going).
Re. 5), many people in my state carry and I never used to notice them. Now I can pick out who is and isn’t, and usually how long they’ve been doing it (newbies will subtly check their weapon is secure every time they move).
The Secret Service is trained the same way; someone not used to carrying who is about to do something bad will send off all kinds of weird body language signals.
——
No, you don’t need to learn this because shootings are exceedingly rare. But if you’re nervous, learning these things will give you a sense of understanding about the threat, and the basic tools to do something to keep your loved ones safe in that one-in-a-hundred-thousand-lifetimes event.
Your cited statistic is one reason open carry is a Bad Idea; it puts you first in line to be eliminated. Concealment, all the way.
my veteran friend who trains others on firearms and has a license to carry would say the same thing.
If you're worried about Mandalay Bay, you're right, you will not be returning fire from the ground into an nth floor hotel window with your sidearm.
The other things on the list still apply. Learn to move, learn to use cover, learn to provide basic medical attention. It's not a bad idea to carry a TQ if you're going somewhere with crazy-large groups of people (for reasons other than shootings, which statistically you will not be involved in).
This is an excellent example of biased thinking.
But there are two cars in many fatal wrecks. A family friend was killed going to the supermarket by a car running a red light and hitting him in an intersection. A few weeks ago a semitruck slammed into stopped traffic at full speed on 95-S at the Georgia/Florida border. Nothing can be done by a safe driver to prevent that.
This isn’t reasonable to expect everyone to do, but any individual can realistically minimize their risk in this regard.
Insurance cost (data is widely available) goes down with age and you can extrapolate from that to safety but it only falls fast initially and the rest is largely a reflection of how driving habits change with age.
Occasionally someone like Tesla or Volvo will trot out some cherry picked data that boils down to "yes the very safe demographics who buy our very safe cars die less than the peasants".
Other than those two there's not much.
Sure, that’s why it’s important to know how risky automobiles are if you discard the cases of drunk drivers injuring themselves. I suspect drunk drivers injuring themselves accounts for a very small portion of automobile injuries, but we need to see the data.
It’s not enough to say “I don’t drive drunk, and driving drunk is very dangerous, therefore automobile risk estimates don’t apply to me.” You could make the same argument about driving blindfolded.
If you’re in a bus instead of a car, you will be much more protected against that kind of thing.
To stick to the legal ones;
Tired. 40% of Americans report not getting 8 hours of sleep a night. An only partially intersecting group reports they are regularly tired during daily activities. Is a driver's self actualization of tired accurate?
Attentive; bad news, most drivers aren't attentive, hence we're still seeing deaths from texting while driving. Self actualization doesn't exist here either. Add in passengers (children, dogs, friend, partner) - deep thoughts on work, relationships - combined with doing something that is mostly mundane.
Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure in tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving oils on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or untrained weather, check engine light (25%), potholes impact tie rods and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading. Very few drivers do this or pre-drive check every drive.
Your list started off good and then quickly went straight to bad faith BS.
Nobody is getting in a crash because their worn out gas cap is causing the emissions system to pop a code.
Furthermore, it's pretty clear from the statistics available and the widely varying conditions across the US with regard to vehicle inspections, weather and road conditions that these factors pale compared to human judgement related causes.
and i’d argue attentiveness (anti-distractedness) is the most important mass mitigation we could make, but it’s also practically impossible to maintain over a driving lifetime and nearly as impossible to enforce (without significant rights violations).
you can’t really lower risk, which is what “control” implies. that’s simply a falsehood some folks choose to believe that’s unsupported by a basic application of stats & probability.
i'm all for narrowing lanes and adding trees to streets as traffic calming measures in urban neighborhoods, but that's because it increases attentiveness, rather than reduces speed per se. speed governors, on the other hand, are bad because they could prevent a driver from speeding up to evade a collision.
When people die in regular road accidents, it's just a few at a time. Not compelling enough for even a mention in national news coverage. When a plane or train crashes, it's hundreds simultaneously. Often with a good debris field too. Good enough to lead with.
And then there's those Tesla accidents that must happen thousands of time a day, because they're always in the news.
"Trains are safer" is a fact, but it's not a common part of messaging around why we should all take trains more often. The messaging there usually boils down to convenience, economic, and ecological arguments.
We should ask how many more people would die each day without cars.
Somehow, this basic analysis is absent in all of the car-hate posts.
Not considering pros and cons fairly is a not an honest approach.
You can’t claim to be objective by just looking at negatives and proclaiming cars are bad overall. You need to sum up the negatives and positives (assuming an utilitarian view).
Otherwise, just accept all car hate is based on subjective emotions.
It is not like car users are cackling evil Captain Planet villains. Most of us are not rich enough to live near work and schools.
That brings me to a related issue car haters miss: Bike-friendly cities should be designed for everyone, not just for wealthy white cyclists
https://theconversation.com/amp/bike-friendly-cities-should-...
Most of those conclusions would not be in favor of cars, either. Especially not in light of environmental damage.
Cars shine in large, low density zones. For good reasons. Most anti-car people are not in favor of removing cars in these zones or removing cars altogether, so arguing here is moot.
Other places, whether removing a large amount of cars is beneficial or detrimental is decided either by culture, or by reinvestment options. And then, you're still stuck only comparing rationalities, with actual numbers being far harder to judge.
What in the ever-living fuck are you even talking about?
[1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Northfield_experiments
I've never had any issues myself, but have absolutely been exposed to those issues while taking transit. I've also witnessed those issues increase during/post lockdown.
I have no solutions, just pointing out a different angle on the "unsafe" issue mentioned above. I'd love to hear if anyone has any experience or ideas to reduce this perception of a lack of safety.
A big problem on this honestly is that news media focuses disproportionately on interpersonal crime compared to almost all other kinds of harm that can be done. Combined with generally decreased newsroom budgets, this has led to firmer reliance on, and less questioning of, direct police releases. We basically just let the cops tell us what to worry about, and they predictably tell us to worry about the things that get more funding for police.
We've mostly decided that, while these things aren't good per se, they are downstream of other incentives and requirements that are good, or at least inevitable. I don't agree, but I also don't think there's much value in a "what could be different" conversation without having a "why is it like this at all" conversation first.
I will admit that, by American standards, SF has pretty good public transit though.
I am not coming from a perspective of pro-law & order, just a commentary on drug law & enforcement here.
Spending for homeless is 61,000 per person
I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".
I'm more worried about the threat of violence from mentally-unstable people on SF's streets, though that's something that's also concentrated in a relatively small number of places (unsurprisingly often coinciding with the dirtiness).
I've lived here my entire life, and I would :-)
As much as I'm a booster for NYC (and immensely proud of our public transit), we're also a very dirty city (partially for historical planning reasons, resulting in no alleyways or trash disposal consideration).
It's also gotten worse during the pandemic, in no small part thanks to drivers: people have stopped moving their cars for street cleaning, resulting in accumulations of trash and dirt that then clog the drains, worsening our floods (and damaging the subways further).
NYC is a filthy city. I think most people that live here and love it would agree.
Take the money and incentives away from building roads, cars, parking lots, traffic safety etc. and stick them into systems which are safer by default, incentives for people to keep things clean and not cause a fuss.
You mean by enforcing a racially homogenous society which does not allow poor (or anyone really) people from other parts of the world?
> enforcing a racially homogenous society
Are you implying that criminality is genetic...?
Unless I'm in a hurry I rather have a comfortable private ride, than a less comfortable quick ride packed around strangers.
1. In nearly all of the US (maybe everywhere except parts of NYC?) it is a worse experience than driving (requires planning, takes longer, can't carry more than one or two bags with you).
2. It is déclassé.
I think #2 is at least partly a result of #1. Also note that #1 is true even for most cities in the US, because cities in the US are unbelievably car friendly compared to cities in e.g. western Europe. I don't see any public-transit solution that doesn't involve intentionally making the car experience worse, and that's going to be a tough sell to voters.
And vice versa. As I said in a thread yesterday[1]: we justify our continuing neglect of public transit by claiming that "polite society" avoids it, which in turn fulfills the prophecy.
It’s not like we’re ever going to regress into a nation without interstates. But there will be a significant reckoning over the next 50 years over the increasing burden of our overdeveloped road network.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation” – Gustavo Petro
I leave the actual wealthy out of this because they just pay someone else to drive.
I will not deny that you'll find all kinds of antisocial behavior on public transit. What I'll say is this: that it's fundamentally a civic issue and not a public transit issue, and that even with all that behavior we still see nowhere near the amount of death and disfigurement that people experience on America's roads on a daily basis.
To make it pithy: we incorrectly prioritize the feeling of environmental safety over statistical safety. The reality is that the inebriated homeless guy on the subway is much less likely to harm you or take your life than the inebriated driver in the next lane.
Some people can't even imagine walking anymore and are blind to even how much road furniture and infrastructure they litter everywhere
Some of the biggest structures we have are roads created in the last 100 years
Absolutely crazy
These same people don't even like cars or driving. I think they just like a comfy seat and air conditioning.
The car is basically a mobile sofa to the population. Shove them into the crappy cars of the 60s and 70s with no A/C and I think they start walking a bit more.
The automobile is ideal when few have them. This is exactly why the proliferated widely, now that we have 1.8 automobiles/household, the problems of automobile culture are inescapable unless we revert areas of our cities to pre-automobile urban design.
It'd be really nice if we could figure out how to convey to people that they don't have any significant control over their safety when driving, so that we can finally start making rational attempts to drive down the number of motorist and pedestrian deaths.
It doesn't just make them "feel like they are in control", the driver is in control of manouvering the car.
I guess you're arguing for the fact that not 100% of crashes are avoidable by the driver? Yes, that's true. But a very large percentage is very much avoidable by the driver and the choices they make.
In contrast to a plane crash where the passengers literally have nothing at all they can do to avoid death.
The guy filming immediately says (something like) "you see. That's what I said".
The problem is also policy is made for typical situations and people are trained to ignore problems because its a pain in the butt to deal with policy makers
Under using is probably more common but I wouldnt be surprised if some places used too many that people started ignoring it
-Edit- I think it was this. Apparently my memory isn't very good because I forgot all the cuts https://youtu.be/sCEzEVJkO1U?t=20 Actually at 1m 18s guy says "there's 5 cones". Maybe my memory isnt terrible lol
It may be part of the picture, though I still witness plenty of dangerous/aggressive/stupid driving here.
One thing we do have going for us, I believe, is "no permit" cars. These are tiny cars with tiny engines that don't require a permit to drive.
Many (most?) drivers with revoked licenses still need to drive. And they can still legally drive a "no permit" car. It's believed anyway that this serves as a security valve for keeping drunk drivers out of heavy, more deadly vehicles.
Of course, driving a "no permit" car under the influence is still illegal.
When you're driving in North America, even in a city center, it often feels like there's nothing to do except watch the car in front of you and the next light. I wonder if that makes drivers disengage and not notice dangers.
In contrast, things tend to be a lot denser and less regular here. Maybe that keeps peoples' heads on the road.
Driving is a privilege, not a right.
The problem with traffic deaths is again, structural. You are mixing 3000 pound vehicles, most of which contain only one passenger, with pedestrians in the same space. You have humans driving them.
The solution is small autonomous vehicles completely separated from pedestrians. This is very hard, but possible, and the materials wasted on oversized vehicles that are underutilized, office buildings that are mostly empty, incredibly poor density, etc. can also be used for that purpose.
Cities should actually be entirely redesigned.
My understanding changed radically when I read about Sweden's "Vision Zero". Quoting Wikipedia:
] In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users
The annualized mortality rate of a US soldier is ~100 per 100,000.
The annualized mortality rate of the average US man between the age of 25-34 is 177 per 100,000. (It's 199 per 100k for ages 18-24).
Note, soldiers are initially filtered for health conditions. It's not the same starting point.
(Put differently, I don't think there are any morbidly obese people in the military which skews the comparison you're laying out here.)
It's part selection bias, part staying healthy, part not being exposed to accident prone environments.
Still though, as a lifestyle choice it's really safe.
We give 16-year-olds minimal training, then entrust them with the control of a 3,000 lb. weapon for the rest of their lives. You can be an awful driver, but even if you get into multiple accidents, your license will rarely be taken away.
If cars had not been invented, we would have designed 20th century cities around people, rather than the automobile. We'd have a robust public transportation network that would all but eliminate the need for cars, at least in cities and suburbs (see Japan).
Between the death toll and the alienation from living in places designed for cars, I'm not sure if the car has been a net positive for society.
Have become much more sensitive about car crashes and speeding as a result obviously. Forces you to re-assess your life.
Realistic solution - Install speeding cameras everywhere, and most intersections. And levy heavy fines if a person is speeding 20 miles above speed limit, possibly even revoking driver's license in that case.
> For auto crashes, we’re talking about block level interventions, the kind of fine-grained design details that transportation departments are not able to perform.
To point out an alternative, transportation departments, if endowed with the authority, could mandate centralized control of all motor vehicles. There is no technical (nor practical) reason you couldn't turn over the whole thing to properly engineered centralized computer control. It would be incredibly expensive but it could certainly be done in such way to reduce the risk by orders of magnitude. And that is exactly the kind of top down intervention transportation departments are capable of implementing, at least structurally, if not with their current budget levels.
And I think the question of why we haven't done this, and probably won't any time in the foreseeable future, is a fascinating way to explore our approach to risk.
This is an extraordinary claim for which IMO you must provide extraordinary proof. I see zero evidence that this is technically possible today, regardless of expense or politics. It would be at-minimum a decades-long effort to computerize every car and develop central control for them.
Putting aside the tech, we’re talking about a world where many people refuse to get vaccinated due to mistrust of government. How on earth will you talk these people into government-controlled vehicles?
From my POV, the answer to “why” is not a mystery: (a) it’s literally not possible, (b) most people would be vehemently against it.
But that claim wasn't really the point I was trying to make. Pick some other more plausible (but still radical) safety measure we could take with cars. Way more stringent licensing, speed limiters, self-driving, or massive increases in public transport.
> (b) most people would be vehemently against it.
Why is that? 40,000 people die in the US every year. Why don't we allocate more resources to solving that? That's the question I think is interesting.
There is a world of difference between the reliability you need for a one off experiment, and the reliability you need for something expected to operate 24/7/365, in all weather from -40C to 40C, in a complex real world environment, and where legal liability gets involved in the case of an incident.
Every traffic fatality is documented and investigated by a trained police officer. The techniques are trained, data collection is standardized, and transportation planners have access to the information and use it to guide engineering processes.
Does the NTSB investigate car accidents? Mostly no, but they have the authority to investigate bus accidents and other livery vehicles like limousines. And the USDOT/FHA extensively regulates motor carriers with a scientific approach that removes bad operators. That’s because of the law and resource limits - but that doesn’t mean society closes its eyes and ignores everything.
For all of the vague critique of transportation departments, they are evolving and improving safety on the roads imo. There’s no question that the roads I drive on today are safer by any measure than the roads I was driven on as a child in the 80s.
Strong Towns is like the EFF. They have a compelling message, but slather enough bullshit to undermine it.
Right now driving is a situation where you take your life into your own hands and have to accept some risk. But in return you have the ability to go anywhere anytime.
Centralized control inverts that. Now you need permission to go anywhere. Does the government approve people like you going to a particular neighborhood? It becomes trivial to enforce basically anything you want. Especially, since people will not have any other options.
Digitization enables new levels of control that we haven't really explored ethically. In the 1980s building a central automobile control system was unthinkable because it was impossible. Today it could be accomplished in a couple decades. So now we have to answer the question of 'do you have a right to go wherever you want on the public roads without government oversight?'
Perhaps a touch too hyperbolic? Here's what the NTSB has to say about the matter:
> The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency, has the authority to promote motor vehicle safety, determine the probable cause of motor vehicle-related crashes, and make safety recommendations aimed at preventing crashes. Over the years, NTSB has made recommendations to NHTSA.... Below is a list of open recommendations.
The point of licensing is to restrict the privilege to those who can responsibly and competently preform the task. If they can't conform to that, then they shouldn't be driving. Tougher licensing and enforcement would drastically reduce fatalities. We already see this in many European nations with stricter enforcement and licensing.
That is the bar that autonomous vehicles need to reach. Crash rate of zero is not required, through if it is higher than the average driver then it might be worth to make the license requirements higher.
Where I live the practical part of the driver exam is 30m of driving in mixed environment, usually involving a number of environments (based on what the driver inspector can find that day). Those involve city driving, country driving and on-off to the highway, with a number of events such as driving in areas where there are pedestrians/cyclists/children, crossing railway, lane changes, roundabouts, passing construction work, and so on. Just like with a driver instructor the car has double controls, but if the inspector has to take control of the car to prevent an accident then its an automatic fail and the person has to retake the test at a later date. Minor failures can be accepted, through the basic concept is that a person who can't drive around for 30 minutes without causing an accident shouldn't be on the road.
Those of us who drive defensively strongly disagree with this metric. The "average driver" is extremely skewed towards a relatively small subset of drivers who cause most of the wrecks. Not coincidentally, the same people who can't afford a fancy autonomous car anyway.
I'm a volunteer firefighter in a rural town in the Northeast. We handle a fairly large area and go to about 80 motor vehicle accident calls a year, of which about 20-25 require patient extrication and about 5-8 involve one or more fatalities.
More of these MVAs involve a non-intoxicated elderly person who made a driving error than involve an intoxicated driver (that's including people who nod off on heroin, not just drunks).
If we had a clear-eyed view of risk mitigation, we'd make people over, say, 75 take a comprehensive vision and neuromotor exam to keep their drivers licenses current but we don't, because old people vote.
I mean, for every one person that dies in a car accident in the U.S., 16 die from heart disease and look at how good we are (collectively) at not really tackling that as a source of deaths!
If you're looking for audio: their podcast [2] is great (this article came out yesterday as a podcast, and I listened to it while I was biking... and then got angry at all the cars driving around me, lol).
If you're looking for something longer-form, I'd recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer [3]. It's literally fantastic, and changed the entire way I think about the suburbs and cities. I grew up in a suburb and recently moved to the city, and had this deep, under-thought feeling that the walking/biking (and the livability that came from it) was why I loved cities so much. This book helped me understand why I felt that way, what specifically is wrong with how we build place currently - and also practical things I could do about it!
Not to be dramatic, but that book took me from pretty much _never_ thinking about place to: volunteering for a local bike advocacy group, biking twice as much, and literally being a more friendly neighbor. Effects not guaranteed, but I can't recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in this sort of thing.
P.S. I am totally unaffiliated with Strong Towns. I just really like them :)
P.P.S. If you're looking for some interesting drama, check out the lawsuit they are currently engaged in [4] with the Minnesota Board of Licensure. IANAL, but it kinda just seems like the engineering licenses boards are trying to shut down his speech because he points out that maybe letting only-technical engineers totally design our spaces isn't really the best idea!
P.P.P.S. Donate here [5]!
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/
[2] https://www.strongtowns.org/podcast
[3] https://www.strongtowns.org/book
[4] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/2/21/the-latest-upd...
Namely, Strong Towns isn't anti-car! In fact, they explicitly arguing _against_ removing cars from city centers in most cases, for reasons related to those that you mention. If I remember correctly, many towns tried to do this in the 70's or something, and most of them failed; cars are still required in most cases.
That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people!
Again, highly recommend engaging with the source material rather than taking my word for it. I've been consuming and parroting (sometimes badly) their content for months - they have been thinking about these questions for literally decades!
That's a semantic argument that doesn't address the real problems that skimping on commuter infrastructure can cause. San Francisco and Seattle have both achieved some of the highest housing prices in the nation thanks to chronic underinvestment in highway infrastructure.
I already get enough of their content on HN to recognize dogma when I see it. Quite frankly, it's a circlejerk where everyone else is wrong unless they follow the ST-scene's ideologically-founded prescriptions, and if you post evidence to the contrary you'll often get shouted down.
And rejecting other viewpoints out of hand isn't dogmatic?
You can conduct many types of commerce, maybe most types of commerce by bike. You can’t do things like say transporting more than two sofas, or large scale building materials, but if the goal is to reduce car usage as much as possible you’d be surprised how much you can do with a good cargo bike.
With an electric bike most people could easily do a 15km commute within 40 minutes especially where provided safe cycling infrastructure. And with no need to store and transport all of these cars despite them only being used for two hours a day you can use all of that space to build more housing.
People who want to live outside of population centres and thus feel the need to own a car but need to commute into population centres can instead commute to large scale park and ride for public transit. Maybe they can also charge their cars there too, maybe even for free with ownership of a transit pass.
And the best part about strongly discouraging car ownership and usage while strongly encouraging sustainable transport is that it frees up space on the road for busses, emergency services, cyclists, pedestrians, and those who need vehicles for transporting goods or for accessibility reasons.
Finally, consider that housing prices in areas with sustainable transport options might be higher because people want to live where they can safely walk and cycle surrounded by trees and plants. Make that possible for anybody who wants it and we’ll have a cheaper house prices, healthier populations, less climate change, safer societies, and just generally a nicer time.
Of course there are going to be caveats and cars will always have a use. What matters is that people have a choice of convenient public transport rather than cars being the only option that's practical.
https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and decisions if that's all we see.
I'd say virtually all of them, in some form or fashion. Everything has a tradeoff. There is an acceptable death rate electrocution, if there wasn't we wouldn't allow our homes to have electricity.
All of them?
I can't think of any engineering area which has a mandate of guaranteeing it will be 100% impossible to have an accident with the product, or it doesn't get built. Can you?
Back in the good old days, they funded improvements to high accident rate intersections, corners, roads, etc. Because as a public company, they were mandated to reduce insurance costs.
That’s all by the wayside now, of course, because we elected a government that turned the company into a general revenue cash cow, leaving little funding for safety improvements.
Data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics
0.00000003% chance of dying if you drive a kilometer to the yoga studio.
Want to make it less risky personally? Drive less, or drive a safer car.
In addition, avoid doing the things that cause most accidents. Don't drive impaired (sleepy, drunk, etc), pay attention, get some car control training (not required in the US so most people don't).
It'll never get you to zero risk of course, but you can have far lower chance of car crashes than the national average if you make all these choices.
Every time we do something which we know may be risky, but we do not have a catastrophic result, we further reduce the perceived risk that the catastrophic result will occur to us.
An assumption that's nowhere even stated, let alone supported: that auto crashes are amenable to highway engineering changes. Why is "reckless driving" dismissed as obviously wrong?
> They need to recognize that the growing crash fatality rates are a direct challenge—even a rebuke—to their theory of traffic safety,
excuse me: growing crash fatality rates?? Shouldn't he at least demonstrate that they ARE growing?
As maerF0x0 demonstrates below, they are NOT growing, and roads and cars are certainly WAY safer than they were 50 years ago.
What a remarkable thing to track in such a prime location. Clearly at some point someone cared quite a bit about traffic deaths. Not sure if this was some hyper local Edmonton issue for a while or there was broader concern around car deaths during this part of the 20th century.
At some point though this concern about the startling amount of traffic deaths clearly ended.
Suicides of soldiers work as a deterrent to military action. No political actor wants that tool to be removed from their toolbelt. They want their "Defense Department" to be deployable at will with no hesitation from the American Public.
Traffic deaths are a necessary evil of transportation, economic activity, and the profits of the oil industry.
Once people understand why something is essential they will do it, but we have to keep fresh generations of drivers informed and involved imo.
I definitely have noticed more aggressive drinking post covid and I hear about it more. Even a gas station worker mentioned randomly to me how people in our city are crazy drivers. This is anecdotal but I've become more worried about driving with the family.
* Death rate per mile driven is down like 95% or nonetheless drastically since 1925.
* Current deaths per year is less than 1975, despite driving like 50% more miles
Now, safety likely could be much greater if people gave the same care to driving as in the past. Two phenomenon are likely happening :
1. Driving is more familiar, so its approached with less care, and
2. People have become accustomed to the safety technologies aiding them such that they increase the riskiness of their behavior to match their base risk tolerance. Eg: as brakes get better people drive faster and closer. As cruise radar gets better people use their phones more and rely on it braking.
Alas, this may fall to the same issue with greenhouse gasses / climate change -- Technological change is simply not fast enough for the goals of society, and a net reduction must occur. We cannot make our economy green enough soon enough such that we must simply reduce our consumption, and it seems our safety standards cannot keep up with increasing consumption
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Not to mention that the goal of WW2 spending wasn't to improve some abstract death prevention statistics, it was actually to prevent madmen from taking over the whole world and turning it into totalitarian hell.
These are generally totally ignored as well unless they are one of the exceptionally rare Electric Vehicle cars. Then they are all over the news ZOMG TESLA CAUGHT ON FIRE!?!
If 1000s of people die in ways we deem them able to control (be it car crashes or obesity) that's on them. If they die in ways deemed beyond their control (plane crashes) then that's something you have to stop.
1) Require regular re-certification of people's driver licenses, and have much more stringent tests.
2) Mandatory speed limiters in all vehicles, using GPS to limit speed based on location.
2020: 1909 deaths daily from heart disease in the USA
Trains and planes get such strong safety assurances because they are typically commercially operated, so they are subject to another popular feature, which is commercial operators' permanent fear of liability lawsuits.
It's much harder for people to accept to trade off personal freedom for safety than it is for people to demand safety guarantees in commercial transportation services.
Sensible gun regulations like red flag laws for those with mental issues or convictions for domestic violence or even just background checks? Well that might make it slightly more difficult to buy a gun so that's a "no".
More than a million Americans died of Covid, at a peak of over 3,000 a day. For reference, that's basically a 9/11 every day. Mask mandates to reduce transmission rate? Getting vaccinated to hopefully reach herd immunity? Nope.
American corporations routinely outsource activity to other countries that frequently use effective if not actual slave labor or otherwise horrible working conditions? Nope, we're OK with that too.
How easily we trade convenience for the lives of people we don't know says a lot about human nature.
I think reacting to amtrak crash makes sense since it moves on rails! how on earth something moving on rails could possibly crashes? doesn't make sense... but cars are different.. if you be honest with yourself you should always wonder how on earth we can get to a point without an accident with cars! think about that.. sorry this is just harsh reality.
True, but that doesn't disprove the fact that most people are a party to the accident they are in, regardless of who was at fault.
For example, if someone is driving with an insecure load, I give them a very, very wide berth. There's a word for it - defensive driving.
1. I always drive attentively with both hands on the steering wheel.
2. I completed on-track driving instruction in a race car, multiple times, and also took training in evasive driving maneuvers.
3. I constantly maintain situational awareness of what's going on around and with my vehicle.
4. All of my vehicles are relatively new (less than 10 years old) and impeccably maintained, and provided with the highest quality tires available replaced on a regular cadence based on service life.
5. I do not drive when I am overly tired, after having consumed any alcoholic substance, or in adverse weather conditions. In any of these situations, I either do not travel or I find an alternate way to travel that doesn't incur the risks of driving.
A simple example of #5 is that I was on a road-trip headed North in the US, and we had a late-Spring snowstorm happen around mid-day. I had originally planned to get a further 150 miles down the road before stopping for the night, but I instead immediately pulled off and booked a hotel room, and left again the following morning after the roads had cleared and traffic had let up. Could I have made it? Almost certainly. Was my vehicle equipped for the weather? Yes, absolutely. Was it worth the risk? Not at all. A hotel room was $120 for the night, which was cheap insurance against possibly dying on vacation.
If I get onto a public bus, or into a ride share, or a taxi, I can't guarantee any of the above. The driver might have personal issues causing them to have stayed up late the night before, and then they had a few martinis to help them sleep, and started the morning with heavy coffee drinking, constantly checking on the status of their personal issues on their phone while they're driving. The bus due to it being a public service may be maintained at the margins of acceptable standards with tires and other consumable maintenance items being used to the full extent of their service life, rather than being replaced preventatively. We've all seen the "gators" on public roads of tire treads ripped off of truck and bus tires that were retreaded rather than replaced, or shredded rubber from large tire blowouts. The bus could be 17 years old with a spotty history and frame damage. All of these things are out of my control. But I can control myself, my driving, my vehicle, and ensure I always leave enough spare tire capability to evasively maneuver.
I'm nearing 40 years old and I've avoided HUNDREDS of accidents that could have happened due to other drivers. I have never once in my entire life been in an accident where I was at fault. In fact, I've been in multiple accidents, all of which involved my vehicle being entirely stopped and stationary and being rear-ended by an inattentive driver, sometimes with me not even being in the car when it happened. As long as I am actively moving down the roadway, I consider my risk to be massively below the national average, because I am a better driver than nearly anyone else I've ever met and I drive better quality vehicles that are maintained better than nearly any other vehicle on the public roads. It's as simple as that.
The average driver in the US has a very flippant attitude towards maintenance and towards tires in particularly. Yet, tires are one of the most important if not most important safety items on your vehicle.
The flip side (and something I think Strong Towns would fully agree with me on) is that most American cities are constructed for cars and not for people, which means stricter licensing standards and being more careful about licensing of older drivers is somewhat of a non-starter if it means people have no feasible way to get to the store or the doctor (or for those below retirement age, to work).
I also realize that my position is heavily privileged, both by my ability to afford newer cars and impeccable maintenance, my time and affordability of training, and that I will likely retire early enough in age to not ever become a road hazard due to my age. It is not lost on me that this cannot apply to most other people, and I recognize I'm an outlier in this way. I heavily support policies to increase public transit options, and I hope that self driving cars become a reality in my lifetime. We cannot build society's policies based on our highest or lowest outliers, but need to consider the reality of the normal person's experience.
this is an important point. When the lockdowns and things were being talked about i thought it would never happen. I thought there's no way people will stand for it. I was shocked how many people would just do what they're told. I think it surprised a lot of people in power and now they're seeing how far they can push it before the people push back. I wonder what the response would be if someone in power just went on TV and said they were mandating no more driving between the hours of 9Am and Noon across the nation. I bet 60-70% of the people would comply with no more reason than "that's what they told me to do".
To re-iterate, covid has emboldened the authoritarians
Amtrak runs 300 trains a day, very rarely has accidents because the environment is so controlled.
The US runs 120 million cars and trucks a day. 93 fatal accidents a day, many through driver fault.
The risk profile is entirely different. We expect people to crash cars. It's why cars have seatbelts and airbags, and why Amtrak doesn't.
We don't ignore car crashes, we just pay a lot more attention to rail failures because it shouldn't ever happen. They're preventable. Automotive accidents aren't, yet.
Just as we intuitively expect that going to war, seeing and doing what needs to be done will have an enduring effect on people's mental health. We expect that from all higher-stress jobs.
It's the deviation from our expectations that makes it "newsworthy" or not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do stuff about it, or that we should be happy with our expectations, but they're big fish outside the scope of the point I'm trying to lean on here.
[1]: I'm British. Not the safest, but up there and relatively high density.
The drip drip is deaths with no one doing anything to make it safer.
Perhaps it's not a sensible society.