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Comment by dcsommer | Hacker News Reader

The US has this concept of "black spots" too. However, they are ironically named "safety corridors." We get a nice sign [0] to mark the death zone and then traffic continues unabated.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...

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We also mark deadly intersections and turns with white crosses, one for each person who's died there. They're worth paying attention to, and I think locals at least learn to be weary of those locations.

Weary = tired

Wary = cautious about

This long lecture is making me weary.

He was wary of drunk people with an attitude.

I've been told by driving instructors that the rule of thumb for putting up octagon STOP signs here in Denmark is only when a serious accident has occurred.

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.

Here in the US, I swear the rule of thumb for installing stop signs is only the limitation of how many can be bought under the current budget. So many intersections would be less frustrating by having yield signs, instead.

4-way stops get installed in volume because neighborhoods gentrify and the new residents complain about the traffic being too fast (the old residents had bigger problems to care about) and converting 2-way stops to 4-way stops is a cheap/easy way to slow down traffic, kinda. Then the next week they complain about having to listen to every vehicle accelerate from the stop.

Maybe the driving instructor wanted to impress upon you the importance of respecting the STOP sign with this story? Maybe it's true in some cases, but somehow I can't imagine that at an intersection with very bad visibility the traffic planners just say "let's start with only a Give Way sign and see how many accidents happen, if it's too bad we can always replace it with a STOP sign"?

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.

Might be.

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 was at a community meeting where they debated removing all such crosses. They were triggering PTSD for people involved in the crashes. Most accidents occur close to home. Imagine a survivor having to drive past such a cross every day. I don't know on which side I land on the issue.

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.

One would hope that such crosses instead prompt folks to change such intersections so that they will prompt fewer deaths. Maybe then we can have a rule: if we rebuild the road and we see a drop in deaths, then maybe we can remove the sign with crosses. Better yet, replace the intersection with a bus-only, bicycle-only, or rail as public transit, and then that set of crosses is permanently retired.

Sometimes there isn't much you can do. One I grew up near is a T intersection, between three farm fields. The road that butts into the other crests a hill, and the other road is right behind the crest of that hill, about 20-30 meters. There is a T intersection sign on the hill before you reach the top, but some people didn't see it or heed it. If you're following the speed limit with a dry road, it's probably safe even if you ignore the sign. But if you're speeding and miss the sign, you might t-bone somebody on the other road, or crash into the field behind it. I think the people that died there went into the field, but I'm not sure.

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.

Replace the T with a roundabout and reduce the speed limit significantly 200 meters before the roundabout.

I think the best/cheapest solution would be some rumble grooves 2-300 meters before the intersection to help alert you to it.

Traffic control devices that "alert" drivers and rely on their choice to slow down are pointless IMO. Better to make it almost impossible to drive at an unsafe speed without ruining your car, removing the choice.

Rounding off the corners of four productive farm fields is not going to be easy/cheap/popular, especially in areas where large farm equipment needs to use the highway too. And a 200m speed zone will not be respected by much of anyone.

> Replace the T with a roundabout

On the side of a hill? That's a ton of earthwork.

Country lanes don't get roundabouts. There's no money for that.

Traffic calming measures is how you tackle things like that. Adding a sharpish S-curve to the roads approaching the T should remove enough speed to make it safer. Won't even need a sign.

A surprise chicane, without even a sign, on a road with a history of speeding cars. What could possibly go wrong?

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.

It'd not be a surprise chicane. It'd be an obviously visible one. If you're driving in a way where that'd cause accidents you should have your license revoked.

Additional benefit: isolating accidents to only reckless drivers hitting trees rather than t-boning someone else

We can finally throw ‘think of the children’ back at them then.

The counterintuitive thing to do is to make roads "feel" unsafe to make them safe.

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"

[0] https://funsubstance.com/fun/294735/irish-speed-sign/

In the british countryside there are roads barely much better than that with similar speed limits. It's not good, you see people driving some crazy speeds having to brake super hard and then reverse to a passing place when they come up against a tractor.

Speedbumps are inexpensive and last a very long time.

I don't think anybody would be able to differentiate the speedbumps from the condition of all the roads in that area.

In warm climates. Speedbumps are a problem in cold/rural areas that need continuous plowing in winter.

Rural areas don't normally get plowed. Can you imagine the expense of plowing all of USAs rural roads. An alternative is a little swerve that requires slowing down.

Really? You think the highways through the flyover states just pile up with snow all winter? All those mountain passes that connect east and west? They are in fact a higher priority than any urban street. A fleet of double-lane plows speeding down a prairie highway is a sight to see.

https://youtu.be/lkmBP-ISzKk

Please don't use the term "flyover state". It diminishes the lives of millions of people

Or it is an owned term used by people in such areas (me) when people on the coasts lecture us how things are in our own backyard. By using it we hold a mirror to those with such attitudes re rural areas.

as someone who grew up in a rural area with lots of snow, this is false. The roads absolutely get plowed, just at a lower priority than the main highways.

Not to mention that in such areas its fairly common for locals to own their own plow attachments for their trucks (at least that was my experience in rural MN).

There are a few rural roads that don't get plowed. They have big "Enter at your own risk" signs, often in the best of conditions you need 4 wheel drive (all wheel drive will work, but if you don't understand the difference don't attempt it) to get through them at best.

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.

Sounds like the prudent way of handling your example T-intersection is to rebuild it so it is no longer a T-intersection, or to move it in a way that forces people to slow down (e.g. by turning it 30 degrees, with curves leading into it, or by setting up a roundabout, or by moving it into a position where you see the crossing road more easily).

Curves before intersections are evil for bicycles. They create unanticipated moving blind spots for drivers, blind spots than can hide a bicycle approaching on the cross street.

In all fairness, the situation OP described did not immediately strike the idea of a biking hotspot to me.

If they go to that effort why not, you know, fix the intersection/road? TBH now that I'm driving in the UK there's all sorts of weird inconsistencies while driving/the roads, but their attitude to it seems to be that it's fine.

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

> If they go to that effort why not, you know, fix the intersection/road?

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

I guess I worded that badly, I more meant "surely a number of white crosses on an intersection, and the deaths of several people is enough to take action and rework the intersection". It's a failing of a government/council to have several people die at a junction that's clearly dangerous and then decide to do nothing about it.

Economics/value of human lives at play, I guess...

I had assumed that every city I've ever lived in was doing the rest of the work too, sending out engineers to asses the reasons for the higher than average deaths and making changes like adding stop lights, clearing anything obstructing people's view, or adjusting speed limits. Seems defeatist (or more cynically, exploitative) to just throw up a sign and extract more money from speeders.

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.

Worth noting that up to a point, removing obstructions makes roads more dangerous. When the street is a complex environment with many obstructions, trees, and/or points of conflict, people drive slow because it feels dangerous to go fast and are therefore less likely to kill or maim.

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.

There's a lot of inertia in the system to design that which gets approved from above, as the article says, rather than to solve local issues locally. You can definitely do it - there are examples across the different states of various design choices - but federal funding may be contingent on following the existing rules.

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.

And the colloquial Dead Man’s curve, like in the song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man%27s_Curve

It feels like in every American city that I've lived in, there was at least one "dead man's curve" that locals would tell me about. In some places, like up in the mountains, there were entire stretches of road that only consisted of such dangerous curves.

Wtf? They put up a sign saying it was a safety corridor, but then didn’t bother to actually add it to the list of safety corridors, and they are surprised that police officers get it wrong?

What kind of lunacy is that.

And the liberal response is to decrease the speed for a road that was previously 45mph, down to 30mph. Of course, the road is perfectly straight, downhill, has a center turn lane, and a multiuse pathway to the side. There's absolutely no reason for 30mph, other than for enhanced revenue generation aka cop theft..

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.

> absolutely no reason

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.

Wow Americans really have tough bones don't they. In drivers ed, here in Europe students are still being taught that the fatality rate for pedestrians hit by a car at a speed of 70 kph or more is 100 percent, and people here drive fast

> 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.

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 evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?

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.

> What does "attrition" mean? People killed in car crashes?

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?

In general I think society is based on the idea that everyone's life has inherent worth, and thus their rights should be protected. If we start designing systems based on the idea that some people's lives have negative worth and if they die it'll be beneficial society, that flies in the face of the idea of inherent worth. It seems to me that if society says certain people's lives have negative worth so their lives don't need to be protected because their death will benefit society, that could progress into society saying that it's ok to actively kill those people.

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.

By and large, people very much like to stay alive.

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.

You’re right, mass use of roads for everyday transportation is incredibly inefficient in almost every way: Outrageously high construction/maintenance costs, outrageously large space requirements for roads and parking at both ends, high resource and environmental costs for the cars and driving per se, high costs in human health from a sedentary lifestyle and plenty of local pollution, high costs in human time spent driving around in cars, etc.

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.

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