Only issue i have is that they need to reduce the top speeds on the app based scooters. Way too many people flying around corners on the sidewalk and i have to peak around corners now in busy areas.
It's true that cars are extraordinarily deadly, and it's also true that most drivers don't want anything done about it if it might inconvenience them.
Speed cameras massively decrease the need for traffic-stops, which is a huge win for both safety and potential profiling/discrimination. Lowering speeds can decrease the consequences of a crash and more-uniform low-cost enforcement can allow law-enforcement to focus limited human resources on responding to calls that actually require a human.
I'm a big fan of speed cameras now, especially those that measure average speed by photographing cars at the ends of a long road segment.
Honestly the only cameras I really don't like are the red light cams that for some reason are also accompanied by lowering the yellow signal's time by half compared to a non-cam light controlled intersection. I'm sure there's a great reason for that happening but I can't think of anything charitable.
But when most people drive, it's easier to do something that seems very pro-driver, even if it's anti-safety.
Things that can help reduce speeds: - narrower lanes - less shoulder/median space - trees, bushes - traffic circles instead of red/yellow/green signals - various curbing arrangements
Since pedestrians don't have signaling apparatuses, the only way to share the parts of the road that must be shared is to clearly see everyone.
Common example I'm used to seeing is narrowing of the roads and causing a slight bend at various points to essentially 'force' you to slow down. It's not technically causing you to slow, but you feel much more comfortable going slower when transitioning through the calmed area. No speed enforcement needed... just some small changes to the road.
BS
Cars cause more danger for everyone else.
If the general public started driving motorcycles it would get more expensive.
That's only because cars are by far the largest share of transportation period.
When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work", then the best numbers I could cobble together (which are not great) from a few sources are:
Deaths per 100 million miles:
Car: ~1
Bicycle: ~9
Walking: ~16
Motocycle: ~40
Really, there are two different questions to ask:
1. What is the safest way for me to get to work?
2. What is the safest way for all of us to get to work?
You might assume those have the same answer, but they don't. The safest way for all of us to get to work is probably to have everyone walk and/or bike. But if you unilaterally decide to start biking or walking to work in a heavily car-dominated area, you are increasing your own personal risk unless you can find a route that separates you from the cars well.
Transportation safety is fiendishly complex and no one sentence comment on HN will capture it well.
Approximately 100% of the walking and cycling deaths and a good portion of the motorcycle deaths are caused by cars. Approximately 0 deaths are caused by walking or cycling.
This is a strange metric to use though, because you're unlikely to walk (say) 20 miles to work, while you might drive that distance. Unilaterally choosing to walk or bike to work rather than drive in such a situation also typically means moving closer to work.
I think a more useful metric to use when talking about safety for an individual would be a per-trip metric. I might have a 40 minute walk to the office where someone else would have a 40 minute drive to theirs, but they are functionally the same trip.
If the decision you're trying to make right now is how to get to work, then holding the mileage constant is the right way to look at it. If you're trying to decide where to live then, yes, the analysis gets a lot more complex.
If you happen to be in a position right now to be able to walk to work at all, most of your driving is probably intra-city, because you probably both live and work in the same city. However, I suspect per-passenger-mile stats weigh freeway driving more heavily than city driving: on a typical car commute into a city from the suburbs, most of your mileage is not within the city proper, but on the freeways surrounding it.
So it does make sense to evaluate commuting mortality on a per trip basis, e.g. "what is the mortality associated with day of going to the office". The point of a trip isn't to go X miles, it's to go accomplish Y thing, such as going to work, running an errand, etc. Sparse suburbs shouldn't get "credit" and have their mortality normalized away on distance for everything being spread out. The sparseness itself is a problem in that it's requiring such long mileage for such trivial trips as "going to work" or "getting groceries".
So this is a problem that will quickly solve itself.
Choosing between the sidewalk with pedestrians and the road with cars, I mean it's obvious right?
https://electrek.co/2020/01/30/limes-electric-scooters-can-n...
Forgot that I take having bike lanes in my town for granted