Comment by rrss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrss | Hacker News Reader

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>> Fatal accidents are largely caused by reckless behavior — speeding, drunks, texters, and people who fall asleep at the wheel.

> This is just not really true. Every research on this suggest the opposite.

Can you explain?

In the US in 2020, 30% ( 11,654 ) of fatalities involved alcohol-impaired drivers. 29% of fatalities involved speeding (63% of speeding drivers involved in fatal crashes were not alcohol-impaired).

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

What research suggests that fatal accidents are not largely caused by speeding, drunk driving, distracted driving, and falling asleep? It seems like just drunk driving or speeding are involved in close to half of all fatalities.

also - you disagree with the proposed solutions in the article (I do too), but I don't understand why you are disagreeing with the stated problem?

If speeding is contributing to fatalities, changing road designs to discourage speeding is a reasonable response. We don't have to claim that fatal accidents are not related to reckless behavior to make changes to discourage reckless behavior.

If a system of infrastructure is designed to make speeding the natural thing do do, its not 'reckless' for people to do so. The same goes for drunk driving, if the infrastructure makes driving the only real possibility then people will do it much larger number.

So the solution to all of this is infrastructure change. However the solution that are often pushed will never be successful, ad campaigns against drunk driving, education about speeding and so on will never be the answer.

What statistics like that also hide is the people that did not die because they were not there. In the US, there is much less walking and biking because the roads are designed as they are. So of course people don't die often walking, simply because nobody is walking in the first place. And not many people walk because its dangerous.

So basically the US has reduced fatal crashes by simply not making it possible to crash into anybody else by the virtue of nobody else being insane enough to use this infrastructure.

This book goes into a lot of that: https://www.confessions.engineer/

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