U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high | Hacker News Reader

U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

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350 pointsrntn607 comments

I guess pickup trucks fall under the category of SUVs?

It's wild how we've lost access to our streets and neighbourhoods for the convenience of mostly suburban vehicle users. Actually not wild, but disgraceful.

The majority of roads are too wide and with little options for alternative modes of transport, drivers are growingly frustrated and angry on the road. We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution is wider roads.

An incredible policy and prioritization failure. That said, it would take very little work and money to fix the problems. Road diets (as pointed out by the article) and tactical infrastructure is cheap and the solutions are well known. The spend will be a drop in the bucket compared to most other budgets.

In many areas, it would take a ton of work in the effort of making destinations closer to each other. Huge parking lots, setbacks, wide roads, and detached houses on their own quarter, or even eighth, of an acre lot make it so the choice between walking/bicycling and using a personal car is not much of a choice.

Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.

Plus the separation of commercial zones and residential zones mean public transport is always going to one specific area, and so if you have any interest in traveling outside the central core, you are once again depending on a personal car.

Yes, some areas in particular the big box developments are almost a lost cause. What needs to happen to those first is large, dense development within the plazas. Build residential on top of the mall, remove parking lots (or move them underground), and densify first. Once you move that needle, you can focus on active transport options.

The type of development I describe is happening (two examples in my Canadian city). Ultimately the evolution of a poorly built model.

"Densification" can eaily lead to poorer quality of life and oppressive housing, though.

There is a middle ground, I think.

I like individual houses with gardens (most people do, I think) with a size such that convenience stores are viable and reacheable on foot. It's like that in my area (England): good size houses but it's dense enough that I can walk to 2-3 different convenience stores when I need a few things, with a Post Office counter in one of those stores.

In Europe there are also plenty of small scale 'appartment buildings', say 3 to 5 floors surrounded by some greenery and a small carpark, which I think works well, too. A random example in France (near a world famous tourist site): https://goo.gl/maps/avKMYuRAfgxq3gvM9 (that area is also built around a big shopping centre, which is therefore within walking distance).

The bigger it gets the higher the likelihood that it becomes shit.

In the parts of Europe I lived in (France, Switzerland, Sweden) there is one additional important thing: there is usually at most one parking space per apartment. This makes everything already a lot denser.

> "Densification" can eaily lead to poorer quality of life and oppressive housing, though.

Where I lived, there used to be tons of orange groves, beautiful natural areas, trails, and fields to ride your bike through. They all turned into suburban houses. Tracts of homes with huge offsets. Cars zooming by at 60 mph on streets so wide it takes half a minute to cross them on foot, all while dodging cars.

Some people try to make it sound like densification will lead to Soviet era buildings or everyone living in Skyscrapers. But it mostly just leads to the city staying in the city instead of spreading out like a cancerous tumor across farmland and nature.

What is your definition of a convenience store? To me, a convenience store sells candy, snacks, beverages, sometimes coffee and rather nasty hot prepared food, vapes and tobacco products. 95% of what a convenience store sells is stuff that you really should not be eating. Perhaps they'll have a small basket of apples or bananas, but they are a far cry from the small grocery stores I've seen in European neighborhoods that stock a reasonable selection of produce as well as meat, dairy, and dry goods.

In the USA, I think many people would view having a "convenience store" in their neighborhood as a negative thing. I know I would.

A konbini (convenience store) in Japan serves the purposes of a fast food restaurant and small grocery store. New York bodegas are often similar.

I was on holidays in Sardinia 15 years ago, and around the corner from the place I was staying was a corner shop that sold the usual sweets and tobacco products and wine and bread ... and a zillion other things, including live fish (for eating).

Outside of major cities and very rural areas maybe. NYC lives and breathes on bodegas. Many very small towns will probably ONLY have a 'convenience' store, with an actual grocery store being many miles away. My family's mountain cabin is 5 miles from a convenience store, but 25 miles from a grocery store.

In these situations Convenience stores probably have a very small section of fairly durable produce, maybe some frozen meat but probably some lunchmeat, certainly things like toilet paper, bread, cheese, eggs, snack foods, household cleaners. Certainly not the kind of selection you'll get out of your kroger's but enough to get by. (the place near my family cabin also has a small selection of fly fishing gear during the 'season' swap for some wintery items during the winter)

At least in the UK and France, a fair proportion of "convenience stores" are owned by the big supermarket chains and stock a subset of the products that you get in a large store.

Rather different in the UK, more like a small supermarket (often Bangladeshi or Pakistani run), sweets & tobacco but also lots of tinned goods, small selection of breads, often fresh vegetable in packets ... and rice, Indian pickles & sauces, you can live out of these places.

I live in a suburb in Oregon and our local convenience store, within easy walking distance, is a small market. Half dozen aisles, perhaps 2500sf of floor space. Yes they have some traditional 'convenience store' items like you describe -- mediocre hot food, fountain drinks, and snacks. They also have a decent selection of all the usual things you find at a larger market, just without the same variety of each item. Milk, eggs, meat, dry good, etc. Marked about 25-50% compared to the nearest large store, but for that I'd have to drive.

I sometimes get the impression that HN folks think there's only one kind of suburb in America.

The USA already has those btw, they're called "streetcar suburbs". They're also some of the most expensive piece of real estate in America, because they're the nicest places to live in.

If the goal is to diminish VMT, we need to be creative and add places to go to walking in suburban neighborhoods, as well as incentivizing people to walk/bike. It's not easy when all public meetings are at 2pm on a Tuesday and everyone who shows up is a 70 yold NIMBY who thinks that adding a bike lane will end the world.

The British terraced house to me is basically perfect urban development.

Terraced housing allows places like London with a fully functioning public transport system whilst also allowing for a civilized home life, hobbies, gardening etc.

It's one of the best things about UK cities IMO. I feel like people who are obsessed with towerblock apartments miss the forest for the trees.

That looks exactly like the type of row houses that have become extremely popular in the US over the years. At least in my region. Especially close to light rail and bus lines.

In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.

However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.

My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.

Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.

These US cities can and should be made walkable again.

I say again, because they used to be. Even Houston didn't used to be such a car-focused hellhole.

> I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at al

Driving in Manhattan was precarious during the pandemic. Little traffic but peds walking into the street without looking far more than typical.

I see this repeated whenever pedestrian fatalities are brought up, almost like clockwork. Is this really an epidemic of phone-gawkers that is causing a consistent increase in instances of cars killing people for their crime of entering a roadway on feet instead of wheels? I suppose it's a possibility. What I know for sure is that since the inception of the automobile, car companies have been extremely successful in shifting all blame and responsibility for cars killing pedestrians onto pedestrians. This talking point stinks to me as more of the same.

In the case of SUVs and trucks, we are talking about a few tons of steel accelerating to speeds that easily break bones, maim, and kill people with the slightest of errors. If you are going through neighborhoods or places with high pedestrian traffic at a speed that you can't reactively stop on a dime, and/or are driving a vehicle that has poor line of sight especially for small humans, that is a problem.

Maybe there really is an epidemic of people walking into the street without looking, I've just never seen it happen personally. In any case, if pedestrians are guilty of walking into traffic while looking at their phones then I can almost guarantee that drivers are even more guilting of staring at their phones while driving through neighborhoods and other areas where pedestrians are likely to be. The notion that distracted pedestrians are more of a problem than distracted drivers does not come close to passing the smell test for me.

>My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone

Which means you failed to see the pedestrian a yield to them. You caused the near miss.

"He was right, dead right, but just as dead as if he had been dead wrong."

Outside of HN, in real life safety is a responsibility of everyone. You are careful when you drive, careful when you walk. You don't text while driving, you don't text while crossing the street. Everyone stays safer.

The 'you can be right and dead' trope is so tired.Of course we should always be looking to mitigate dangerous and distracted drivers.

>Outside of HN, in real life safety is a responsibility of everyone.

The person driving the gas propelled two ton vehicle has more responsibility to avoid hitting things than pedestrians have to avoid getting hit.

>. You are careful when you drive, careful when you walk. You don't text while driving, you don't text while crossing the street. Everyone stays safer.

Pedestrians *should* be able to text while they cross the street. The only reason they can't/shouldn't is because American drivers are largely allowed to operate their machines in a negligent manner at all times.

Walking is an inherently safe activity. Driving is an inherently dangerous activity. Drivers should have more a burden for safety than walkers. You, as a driver, should expect things to enter the road. That's why we have speed limits. That's you watch the road instead of playing on the road.

In every city I've lived in the US jaywalking is actually illegal, perhaps it should be legal and even encouraged in your opinion but until it is - it's your responsibility to follow the rules.

Who said anything about jaywalking?

>t's your responsibility to follow the rules.

Sure! And motorist need to follow the rules of the road. Unfortunately when they break the rules, which they do most of the time, they can easily end someones life.

I'm guessing you're one of the good ones who definitely doesn't speed every time they are in the car.

The conversation is about pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words. Please don't try to ad hominem, it just shows that you don't have any arguments of substance and degrades the discussion.

> pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words

This is... not the definition of jaywalking. It is legal to use one's phone while crossing the street.

Aside - history of the term "jaywalking," from Wikipedia: "The word was promoted by pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, according to historian and alternative transportation advocate Peter D. Norton. Today, in the US, the word is often used synonymously with its current legal definition, crossing the street illegally."

It depends on the state, I guess, in which state you can walk into traffic without paying attention, with or without phone, legally? Please be specific. And yes, I've seen this article in Wikipedia, it forgot to explain how pro-automotive interests managed to enforce that in USSR, for example.

You're the one that brought up jaywalking when that wasn't the crux of the argument, are confused about what jaywalking actually entails and then you accuse them of trying to ad hominem.

> The conversation is about pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words

Sorry, you are not understanding what jaywalking is. If you can find a definition of jaywalking that mentions phone, I'll concede your point, but you can't, because it has nothing to do with phones.

Sorry, the rules don't work like that. Jaywalking with a phone is still jaywalking, same as speeding with a phone is still speeding or littering with a phone is still littering. Here is the definition from Wiki:

Jaywalking is the act of pedestrians walking in or crossing a roadway that has traffic if that act contravenes traffic regulations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking

Please show me how using a phone suddenly stops contravening with traffic regulations or whatever definition you believe is true that cancels jaywalking somehow when you stare at a phone.

> In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedestrian accidents.

From what I understand, trucks, including pickups and SUVs, don't have to meet the same safety requirements as regular cars, which is just insane, when you think about it. They are already bigger and heavier and therefore more dangerous, and on top of that the safety rules are looser?!

Big trucks require a special license, but small ones can be driven with a regular license. Maybe that needs to change. Either they should follow the same safety rules as regular cars, or they should require special training and a stricter license.

So remove parking, then hope something comes in to fill the need for transport?

Some of us like big vehicles and the freedom that enables. The last thing I want to do in a Houston summer is carry groceries to a bus stop in 102 degree temperatures and then spend 30 minutes riding a bus when a car does it in 10.

You don't need a big vehicle to go grocery shopping.

In a city, supermarkets should be in walking distance.

Sure, turning Houston into Madrid would be very hard. But this is one of the most incrementally solvable problems I've ever seen. There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better.

In the handful jurisdictions where I am familiar with zoning laws and the permitting process, low cost and low effort is not how I would describe any part of even a straightforward approval.

Lord help you if you need a variance, and I cannot even imagine what eminent domain on that scale would look like. I do not see how the change would even be possible without tearing buildings down and building new ones closer to each other, and to do it legislatively adds unimaginable legal expenses, I presume.

Edit: Also note the popular local opinion in many places is keeping a place car dependent means the population who cannot afford a car is kept out.

I meant stuff like city counsel passing a new zoning law. Maybe some concrete bollards to make a protected bike lane. Run a few more busses and trains. That kind of thing.

My point is that does nothing, because the root problem of destinations being too far from one another is not addressed.

A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it. You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car. The bus or train has to run at least every 10min, otherwise one missed connection and you’re wasting 20min+ with your refrigerated groceries.

And that type of frequency is simply not economical without density. Chicken and egg at this point. Best case scenario is to build outwards from already dense areas, but it will involve eminent domain and demolishing buildings and parking lots to make new ones that are pedestrian friendly and hostile to cars.

Zoning changes and removal of parking minimums are the first steps towards bringing things closer together though, and that can happen at the stroke of a pen. Towns can't begin to densify until they're permitted to do so.

Allow someone to build an apartment building on top of that enormous parking lot next to a shopping center, and in many cases I don't think you'd need eminent domain; it'll happen simply because the apartment building is more profitable than the surface parking lot.

(Though a good form-based code might help to nudge things in the direction of walkability too.)

> A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it.

So add more buses and trains.

> You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car.

More buses and trains will make this happen. More bike lanes will make this happen. With the proper infrastructure people can go longer distances without a car. All these things can be done incrementally and you're trying to claim they can't be.

> The bus or train has to run at least every 10min, otherwise one missed connection and you’re wasting 20min+ with your refrigerated groceries.

No it doesn't and your groceries are fine being out in the heat for 20 minutes. They won't go bad. They could be out there for 2 hours and be fine.

https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/are-you-stori...

> Refrigerate or freeze perishables right away. Foods that require refrigeration should be put in the refrigerator as soon as you get them home. Stick to the "two-hour rule" for leaving items needing refrigeration out at room temperature. Never allow meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, or produce or other foods that require refrigeration to sit at room temperature for more than two hours—one hour if the air temperature is above 90° F. This also applies to items such as leftovers, "doggie bags," and take-out foods. Also, when putting food away, don't crowd the refrigerator or freezer so tightly that air can't circulate.

On top of that, this two-hour thing is a general guideline for maximum safety and is overly restrictive on purpose to avoid ambiguity. Realistically you could leave things out for longer but the FDA would never admit that because it sends mixed messages.

Another note on the refrigeration issue - I get around predominantly by bike, and if I need to I have a soft cooler (like delivery people use) that I can put an ice pack in to transport frozen goods. But last night I went out with just a backpack in 80F heat and bought ice cream that survived the 20 minute trip home just fine.

> your groceries are fine being out in the heat for 20 minutes

It's not 20 minutes. It's 20 minutes more than the normal trip duration.

That 2 hours rule seems to be health related. But a lot of food gets bad much before it becomes unsafe to eat.

Anyway, city traffic is not caused by people getting to a grocery store. That's all a red herring.

> That 2 hours rule seems to be health related. But a lot of food gets bad much before it becomes unsafe to eat.

Name one that does that in a 6 hour time period.

> It's not 20 minutes. It's 20 minutes more than the normal trip duration.

Tomato tomato. It's a negligible time period. Food out for 3 hours and 20 minutes is not going to be worse off than food out for 3 hours.

> Anyway, city traffic is not caused by people getting to a grocery store. That's all a red herring.

City traffic is caused by people driving cars. People drive cars to grocery stores.

City traffic isn't caused by bike lanes, buses, or trains either. That's all a red herring.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2019/jul/0...

[0]> But fluid and traffic are not the same thing, as shown by 60 years of governments trying and failing to road-build their way out of congestion. The idea of induced demand – more road space brings more cars – has been known for decades, and it also works in reverse. This is especially so with bike lanes, which are such an efficient use of the same space that they can often mean the same amount of space carrying more people overall.

[1]> Yes, traffic jams have worsened in some cities where bike lanes have been built, but studies show this is largely down to other factors, for example the growth in the number of Uber-type private hire vehicles and Amazon delivery vans.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/induced-travel-de...

[1] https://content.tfl.gov.uk/understanding-and-managing-conges...

> Name one that does that in a 6 hour time period.

Ice cream that somebody already said around up-thread is an example. So I guess you are not very open to them.

> Food out for 3 hours and 20 minutes is not going to be worse off than food out for 3 hours.

There is a lot of difference between 30 and 50 minutes. But yeah, if you compare it to a decade, it's irrelevant too.

> City traffic is caused by people driving cars. People drive cars to grocery stores.

People drive cars to go to work and school. But yeah, why talk about 95% of the problem when we can focus on solving the 0.2% of it.

I agree with you, especially because the crux of the matter is convenience of car versus public transit.

Cars are VERY convenient, so public transit needs to be on time, frequent, and very close by to compete. The other option is to make cars inconvenient, which is politically unpopular.

Zoning is how you start to fix density issues. And getting rid of parking minimums. Charging fair market rates for existing parking can funnel more money in to public transport while also making it the cheaper option. Dedicated bus lanes and signaling changes can make busses faster than cars. All of those can be done with words written on paper or paint on roads.

Where I live the city council deliberately rezones the city on a regular basis in a manner contrary to state law. Each time, it's overturned by the same group of citizens. It's a deliberate political tactic so they can tell voters "well we're trying to fix the issue but the awful government won't let us!". This way they can campaign on the same issues until the heat death of the universe. All the NIMBYs know in practice it is safe to vote for them, as they will never rezone the city.

> In the handful jurisdictions where I am familiar with zoning laws and the permitting process, low cost and low effort is not how I would describe any part of even a straightforward approval.

At what point can we as a people say: screw it, break the laws and just get it done. it'll be worth it in the long-run.

Exactly. You can't "fix" most of our cities overnight, but you could do a lot to make them a lot better within about a decade.

> within about a decade

Which is longer than the elction cycle in most counties, not just the US. Herein may lie part of the problem: its hard to incentivise politicians to solve long-term problems when doing so does not help them get re-elected.

>"There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better."

I used to think this as well, until I started sitting in on HOA and city council meetings. Good lord, even the most seemingly simple proposals are drenched in red tape and artificial barriers imposed by busybodies. I'm not sure how to get around this, sadly.

Easy: drop the public commentary portion of development. Random old people with nothing to do all day shouldn't be allowed to delay a project by months because they want to complain about the orientation of a window on a project. If you don't own the land, weren't democratically elected, and aren't funding the property you shouldn't get a say in local land use. Ridiculous that we've even set up these systems.

Months is incredibly generous

That's ridiculous to prohibit residents from having a say about the area development, whether they are old or not.

They wouldn't be prohibited from having a say, they get to vote.

They have a say when they vote for the city council members or whoever.

Matt Yglesias had a good piece about this a few days ago.

https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/community-me...

What if that window is looking straight into your bedroom or bathroom? I'd want to at least voice some concern over that. It's then up to officials to ignore that complaint or not. Having no way to express such concerns is faster of course, but there's downsides too

Move out of the city, or put a blind over your window

Being able to see other people's windows from your windows is an inescapable consequence of living in a city. If that's not acceptable to you, then you buy an acreage in the woods somewhere. It's not a reasonable thing to be protesting a development approval over.

Of course, in this case. It's up to the official to dismiss such constraints if unreasonable.

But we got such laws and processes for a reason.

The law and process is a zoning bylaw. If a development conforms to the zoning bylaw, there should be no need for public engagement.

In no other scenario do we have a process of public meetings to decide whether or not to follow the law.

What is the election cycle in Houston, exactly?

Incrementalism is difficult when the longest any single policymaker can be guaranteed to be office is 2 years.

Key point: all of these "low cost, low effort" ways depend on people staying where they have influence. Any change to zoning laws, or to approve funding for bike and public-transit infrastructure, etc., requires residents who support those things. People who grew up in a city because that's where their parents lived, or who run away from the suburbs to the cities (or to other countries), have zero influence over the problem where it exists and therefore have little moral standing in these debates. Don't just make things better for yourself. Don't be a coward. Stand and fight.

Are pedestrian and bike bridged out of the question?

In my opinion, yes. At its root, it’s simply physics. Once the distances between destinations becomes sufficiently large, it is impossible, especially for the elderly or children.

Search for Target/Costco/Best Buy/Walmart/Kroger/mall and do a street view in US suburbs and see if you can walk those distances carrying things.

You could easily be looking at a quarter mile just from one store entrance to its adjacent store entrance, or even crossing the road which is usually 8+ lanes.

Pedestrian and bike bridges are car infrastructure. You can tell because they make the person who is moving under their own power, climb a set of stairs, walk across the bridge, and then walk down the stairs. In the meantime, the most vulnerable road users (Disabled people) have to cross 2 miles down the road at a deadly intersection. All the while, people who are sitting in air conditioned motorized vehicles have a straight level crossing.

In my opinion, if you can't afford to build an at grade crossing for pedestrians with a car underpass, you should close the road to cars, or lower speeds 15 mph with chicanes and raised crossings. Making people climb stairs to cross the road is insane.

Considering how much of the country is suburbs with large streets or freeways separating housing tracts from shopping centers, is your proposal really to close those freeways and arterial streets down? Or just demolish all the homes that are there and move those people to higher density areas?

I'm sympathetic to the idea of building new large developments in a non car centric fashion, but how do you do this with the majority of existing areas.

To be honest, the majority of existing areas will probably go bankrupt as densification happens, plunging the value of cookie cutter, match stick homes to be bulldozed and hopefully re-wilded. Most of suburbia is already going bankrupt. The roads, sewers, pipes, and electrical wires are falling apart because they are too expensive to maintain. All it takes is one company to move out or the land to run out before they start to spiral. San Bernardino CA is a good example.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...

https://www.businessinsider.com/10-american-cities-that-are-...

I’m highly skeptical of the core thesis of the “strong towns” link, and cherry picking a few examples certainly doesn’t convince me.

I can cite plenty of small suburban areas that had an influx of demand without “growth” and the subsequent increase in tax revenue.

Even if you are correct, what time frame do you think this will happen? Will hundred of millions of Americans living in the suburbs be in bankrupted cities in 20 years? 40? 60?

It is already happening, with the pending commercial real estate crash I expect a lot of the big ones will be looking down the barrel soon. Most cities are propped up by short term gains. Foreign investment, capital firms, large business offices, etc.... It won't take much to tip them over. We're sitting on a ticking time bomb trying to add seconds to the clock instead of disarm it.

https://www.wmtxlaw.com/cities-declared-bankruptcy/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxCVUpaelHw

However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.

Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.

Lot size isn't really the issue, it's having big swathes of land zoned all-residential or all-commercial. We live in a small college town with mostly half- to one-acre lots outside of the downtown core, but we walk and bike everywhere most of the year because it's an actual town laid out before cars, with pockets of not-housing spread out among houses, and no wastelands of giant retail parking lots.

I would really like to get more infill development and smaller lots, personally, but just for the sake of preserving open space. It's easy to walk and bike in actual cities and towns already. Suburbs are the issue, because they are entirely planned around cars.

As true as that is, I'd be happy just with attention being paid to sidewalks and protected bike paths. I live in an area with a grocery store that is well within biking distance. But it is on the other side of a four lane road and there's no safe way to get a bike across it. In other parts of the state, there are housing developments within walking distance of grocery stores, but no sidewalks.

It isn't uncommon to see people get in their car to go to the mail kiosk 2 blocks away, in part because of the lack of sidewalks.

> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.

I think it depends on where you are, but useful public transit is very possible in most places. Low frequency is the result of poor planning, not a requirement of public transit.

> Low frequency is the result of poor planning

Not in my experience. It has more to do with funding. We have a specific tax levied just for transit, and people don't vote to increase it.

I'm treating them as one and the same here. My point is more that it's not endemic of public transit itself, but the way it's implemented (and supported and funded).

> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is

I love how even people with radical anti-car discourse just shrugs it away and never even stop to think that half of that catch-22 problem can be solved by just the government spending some money on running empty buses.

No social reorganization, no legal change, no non-popular choice; just spending what is pennies compared to transit infrastructure.

I am speaking more to the political possibility. Things like increasing car parking costs, removing car parking, and spending money on more frequent buses is feasible, but politically impossible.

Sufficient voters will have sufficient resources to own and store their own car, and they are going to want to use it, and they are not going to want to spend money on empty buses.

And make those buses have dedicated lanes cars can't use. It is amazing how nice a bus can be when it's not stuck in the same shitty traffic as all the cars.

Exactly - this tactic converts busses from "shitty cars that stop all the time" to "faster, huge cars with a built-in chauffeur."

One of the most important factors in whether someone will vote for a transit tax if is they can imagine riding it themself. Since the current system sucks people can't imagine that and they vote no. Which keeps these networks starved of resources.

Meanwhile legislators approve billions for highways every year. Zoning laws and minimum parking laws are kept in place. Every time gasoline prices increase politicians seek to sooth voters/motorists.

I think it's difficult to make cities more dense if viewed as just strictly taking the current cities and trying to condense them, but that also seems like the less productive way to do it

First and foremost is that the US government itself needs to change how it gives out funds. Instead of emphasizing car and highway development over all, it should give money for cities which plan out multiple modes of transit and also develop 20-30 year maintenance plans (infrastructure maintenance is not currently factored into development). This would result in cities being financially incentivized to build for things other than car traffic throughput

The next place to start is with the new developments, giving them new regulations for how streets should be placed, reducing regulations involving setbacks, lot size, parking and allocating more land to mixed used or denser building, rather than single-family detached housing

As time goes on and roads need repairs, cities can use those as opportunities to connect cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, fix intersections (remove traffic lights, add roundabouts) and properly segregate public transit routes from private vehicle routes

It's a long process but cities only need to change the rules now and start building better developments. People will move to them over time, and they'll be able to convert older developments as people move out of them over time.

The thing that needs to change first, though, is the attitude and belief that car travel above all else needs to be heavily subsidized at the expense of everything else, only then will federal, state and local governments be able to begin making space for people

There is so much land available in the form of parking lots, and so much unmet housing demand, that you could reasonably infill your standard mall or big box lot if zoning allows.

A lot of malls have been doing this since retail has been in free fall for quite some time.

Fixing bad infrastructure takes time, but you don't even need that to reduce pedestrian deaths. If only people had smaller vehicles the rate of survival would go way up.

I could pretty easily imagine a sliding vehicle tax scale where safer, more practical sub-compacts and minivans are subsidized by the mega-lifted land yacht SUVs and pickups. Sure it doesn't fix the design problems of cities, but it at least means the vehicles that are traversing them aren't as likely to kill and maim people while we sort out the other problems.

We wouldn't even need to change taxes if we just stopped subsidizing gas. Fuel would cost about $12.75 per gallon, naturally making the Prius significantly cheaper to operate than the F-150.

> drivers are growingly frustrated and angry

Good luck making policy changes against the wishes of a majority population that's frustrated and angry as it is. We are in deep, deep trouble. Not only are we not removing lanes and giving space back to people, we're still adding lane miles in every city in America. Even my "urbanist" home town of Portland Oregon is about to spend billions to add a few dozen lane miles to an urban freeway that already destroys the entire East bank of our waterfront and a couple historic neighborhoods, and is used mostly by people and companies that don't live here.

Shame we can't instead invest billions into making public transit, especially the max lines running from the suburbs into downtown, far more efficient as a practical solution for commuters. The Esplanade is one of my favorite bike routes in the city, second only to the Springwater corridor. I love cruising up the East side and back on the West side while looking out over the Willamette.

I'm going to be sad if that route gets all fucked up, and all just to add a few lanes that simply induce more demand and do nothing to solve traffic problems in the long run. I hate to be that guy, but its inescapable.. cars (as currently conceived and implemented) are a blight on humanity.

If only we could have made max more like a real urban rail system instead of a toy. It's brutally slow, especially if you are unfortunate enough to take it through downtown Portland.

That really needs to be fixed. I live in NE, and if I need to go to Beaverton, I ride my bike to the West side of downtown to catch the Max there. It saves 30 full minutes. They need to get rid of half the downtown stops.

I'm hesitant to take the Max in Portland because of the homeless/drug problem and I'm a fairly big guy in the prime of life. Definitely not taking my family. I LOVE being able to cart my kids around in my perfectly sized and designed mini-van.

Statistically, the Max is way safer than your minivan. I take my family on the Max all the time.

citation please.

I did take the max recently downtown to Jury duty, it was fine. Lots of extra security that wasn't there when I rode daily years ago.

I-5? They should route it around the city altogether. Or cap it and build over the top.

This is a relatively easy fix. Remove zoning regulation and the market should build towards denser towns. It is outright illegal to build dense right now in most of the US. There are other ares that need to be fixed that all exacerbate the issue: The NHSTA recommends large wide roads for moving vehicles faster, CAFE standards makes cars heavier and larger since trucks / suvs don't have the same regulations, FHA loans require developments are built with curvy roads and not grids. We need laws that prioritize pedestrians and bikers, force cars to be smaller through regulation and taxes.

Is zoning regulation as a concept really the root cause, though? Houston famously has no zoning code and is fairly lax with land use generally (although it isn't completely the Wild West), and it isn't very dense. It seems like zoning could even be a key part of the solution, being a tool that could be used to mandate that new construction be more dense around mass transit hubs, for instance. There are lots of anti-density zoning regulations that should be reformed, it's true, but throwing the whole thing out seems like overkill to me.

Houston has zoning codes but by a different name. They use Deed restrictions which functionally act as zoning.

Japan has the right solution though. Japan has a national level zoning that is black list based as opposed to white list, also it only has a few categories. In the US a town says "You can only build homes here with these requirements". In Japan you can build homes anywhere, and light commercial anywhere. So only heavy commercial and industry is effectively limited. In fact their "light industrial use" zones is where something like 60% of people live.

Houston might not have something specifically called a "zoning code" but it has plenty of the sorts of regulations that lead to sprawl.

Take a look at this table of parking requirements for Houston, and keep in mind that a typical parking space takes up 320 square feet: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/par...

Fire department accommodations also shape road size. Being able to turn an engine for instance eliminates a lot of older alley designs in new construction.

Preferences vary, but the vast majority of Americans prefer to spread out and live in single-family detached houses with some space and privacy. HN users love to complain that this is irrational or wasteful or imposes externalities on others. Those are valid points, but they don't change the choices that home buyers make.

Many people do like that. But there is a difference between "Allow people to build a single family detached home" and "make illegal anything except building a single family detached home". If you look at traditional american towns, there are a lot of walkable nice towns with nothing but detached homes, but they didn't have the same setback requirements as they do now.

> FHA loans require developments are built with curvy roads and not grids

Do you have more information on this mechanism? I can readily connect this with anything I’ve seen.

How is that a solution? Downtown L.A., for example, is not "full." And if you "densify" what are now single-family neighborhoods, that single-family neighborhood will simply move to the next frontier. Then the oh-so-horrible reign of terror will continue there. How does that help?

Zoning allows people to choose what kind of neighborhood they want to live in. If I wanted density, I'd live downtown. Why should developers be allowed to just roam in and destroy the lifestyle that the people in the area selected?

However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.

Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.

I don't think analyzing this issue from the perspective of individual interactions is useful. Even in safe, walkable cities, some pedestrians will be reckless. Even in Phoenix AZ, some drivers will be courteous toward walkers.

All that disappears in the aggregate though, and we're left with the fact that the built environment is the main factor dictating how we interact on our streets. We build wide roads and build huge dangerous vehicles to go very fast on them. That's the issue.

How many times are you going to copy and paste the same comment in replay to different parents? I see you do that a lot, and it doesn't seem productive.

Agreed. A pedestrian recently got themselves killed near my house by darting right into the rode in front of a driver who was going under 35 mph in a 35. Driver had no chance to avoid him. The pedestrian didn't even turn their head before being hit and was likely high or drunk (per the local business owner who was familiar with him).

Yes they do now, in my State, until I think 30 or 40 years ago, pickups had to register as commercial and had to follow laws specific to them and pay more taxes. Some lows restricts commercial vehicles from many roads. I suspect it was a move by Reagan when he deregulated the trucking industry.

I think if a vehicle meet specific weight and size criteria, it needs to pay more and have restrictions. These new big pickups and SUVs fully meet that criteria.

>The majority of roads are too wide

Actually in my state it is the opposite. Most roads are way too narrow. When two large pickups are driving at each other, one needs to pull over.

In California, pickups are still registered as commercial vehicles. This comes as a surprise to some first-time truck buyers.

The new Rivian R1T is registered commercial and weighs over 3 tons, bringing further restrictions as to the places and times it can be driven or parked. Again, surprising some buyers.

Not true. I had a Tacoma that was not commercial registered. This was two years ago.

OK, go ahead and prove that with photographs or something. Because it's quite clear in the law that if you have a pickup truck it is to be registered as a commercial vehicle, unless it has a fixed camper top or other thing that permanently covers the bed. That's why almost* every pickup truck in CA has commercial plates distinguished by their format of a single letter and six digits, instead of three letters and four digits.

* almost, because you can still get custom vanity plates on pickups.

That is untrue. Passenger vehicles are specifically excluded.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-registration/new-regis...

You may be thinking of the classification they apply to pickup trucks that costs like $24. They have no additional regulation as a commercial vehicle unless you're using them, well, commercially.

OK, but you are completely wrong, which you can demonstrate to yourself just by walking outside and looking at the license plates of pickup trucks.

Alright, I'm wrong, that's why I quoted the actual California DMV. You're right, my bad.

You quoted an irrelevant source which you do not understand. The primary source is right here:

CVC §410 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

CVC §471 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

CVC §260 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

The last of which makes pickups, based on the prior two definitions, commercial vehicles. "A “commercial vehicle” is a motor vehicle of a type required to be registered under this code ... designed, used, or maintained primarily for the transportation of property."

Or, you could just google "are all trucks in California registered commercial", ask any truck owner, or ask any truck dealer.

> Actually in my state it is the opposite. Most roads are way too narrow. When two large pickups are driving at each other, one needs to pull over.

There are two interpretations. One is that the roads are too narrow. The other is that the vehicles are too wide.

My suburb does as much as it can to make itself walkable. There are crossings and sidewalks everywhere, but it's still a low density suburb so it doesn't make much sense to walk almost anywhere (my kid does walk to school as it happens to be close, but that's it). So while they are trying to address this problem, very few people actually walk.

But all of this said, I want low density. Having lived many years in a high density ant colony (aka "walkable city"), I want nothing to do with that. Keep your high rises to yourself. I think that high density living is inhuman. I respect your opinion, but we don't think alike. And I promise to not mess with your lifestyle if you don't mess with mine, we can all live together many miles apart.

I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go. I exercise every morning by walking around for 45 min in my cookie cutter neighborhood; the air is pure and it's a joy to walk around trees, ducks and birds instead of buses, cabs, people sneezing etc.

A walkable city doesn’t have to be an ant colony. American exceptionalism really is hard to grasp sometimes.

Take a look at a city like Brussels to understand how a capital city can be both walkable and high density without being Seoul.

Hell you can probably look at Seoul, assuming it’s anything like Tokyo or London you have a very long tail of dense but pretty low outer rings.

Curious, have you considered the in-between here? Consider medium-density European cities, which still have massively higher density suburbs, but rarely the density -- combined employment and population densities -- of the urban core of most American cities.

I hated living in Seattle, but I'm now an American finding I enjoy living in London. I walk around trees and birds every day, because I have good park access, and I can walk to them without having to worry about car traffic.

For what it's worth, by the way, you almost certainly AREN'T willing to pay for the infrastructure that supports you: Suburbs are almost overwhelmingly economically supported by cities. I hate NotJustBikes (his self-righteous attitude is just awful), but he does have a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Reading this discussion I can't help but get reminded of the whole discussion around free-range chicken. Just in your comment, you talk about how tou have "access" to a park. Sounds like a little pasture area meant to distract you from the urban "farm" you are in, and you get a little slice of free range grassland to keep you happy. Dangling it infront of you to keep you productive. Does this not disturb anyone?

Yeesh that's a dystopian view of the world. Some of us like living in cities due to proximity to other humans, and amenities like running water and sewage systems with toilets that flush, and don't want to live like ancient humans in the wilderness.

If you want to live in the country, live in the country.

I, though, like living in my neighborhood of single-family homes & small/medium size apartment buildings, with four coffeeshops, two independent grocery stores, restaurants, local shops, and more within walking or biking distance. I like being able to take a walk to pick up some bread and eggs and buy a present for a family member (no car) and bike to a major river area where I can hike for tens of miles if I like, or even go swimming and drown (it's wild enough for that if that's what you value).

People are driving in risky ways these days, running red lights much more than they used to, but it still does feel that in my city neighborhoods, folks are more conscious of pedestrians and bikes than in the suburbs I sometimes visit for friends/kid stuff/work. In the suburbs there seem to be many wide roads (4 lanes) separating areas of cul de sacs, with 35 mph speed limits but people actually going 50. Part of this is that the city streets are packed with parked cars and there are people visibly carrying out activities of daily living, while the suburban wide streets give this impression of being cars-only.

Your theory about "suburbs are supported by cities" is controversial. I already know the video you shared and it isn't very convincing. But arguing about this will basically be the usual link exchange (I'm not an urban planner or state accountant and I assume you aren't either). I have some data for you though:

- My county doesn't have any medium-sized or big cities, so all the county maintained roads (most of our roads) are fully paid by our property taxes, which are relatively low percentwise but, as a high-income county, adds up to a pretty penny. I do most of my driving inside my county.

- A lot of road maintenance comes from the gas tax, which I pay plenty and is used inside and outside the county.

- As a tech worker, my state income tax bill is WELL above the median (like 3x-5x+). And the same applies to the suburban county I live in - these suburbanites pay a TON in state income tax. The county only receives a small fraction of the state taxes, which also goes to subsidize - guess what - city living programs.

- My federal tax bill is also huge, well above the median, as is the case with my fellow suburbanites, so I think I'm paying for all my use of federally funded highways in my state and the next 3 or 4 states to the north (if not more).

Suffice to say, I do pay a lot for this benefit, and I'd pay even more if it came to that. And if it was that much more expensive, land in the suburbs would be a lot cheaper than it is now, which would even the math.

To each their own. His attitude seemed to me like finally, someone, somewhere actually gave a damn about the fact people are killing us and our kids, and stealing our cities, instead of abstracting it away.

Your ideal described lifestyle is very expensive to cities and ultimately subsidized: https://i.imgur.com/msDV0zm.jpg

There is a middle ground. Walkable cities are not a cluster of high rises and this is mostly the result of poor zoning (we lack the appropriate "missing middle")

A lot of people think they as willing to pay for it, but very few really want to see their property and fuel taxes double or triple.

I pay more than $3462 in property taxes alone. So I'm good? The majority of people in my county pays more than that, so it's pretty clear to me that the city isn't subsidizing us... More likely, we're subsidizing the city in our income taxes (in my state a significant chunk of income taxes are spent on welfare services for city dwellers).

Usually, if you are out in the suburbs, your infrastructure costs way more than you are paying in taxes, just because of the distances involved. I don’t know your specific situation. Strong Towns has some info about this if you want to know more.

I hear you, and I've seen these videos and claims around, but I don't believe them. They don't make sense. I've seen the public financial statements of my suburban county (which, again, has no big city in it), the average income and funding source of roads, schools etc in my county/state.

The numbers don't add up to the city subsidizing the suburbs - quite the opposite instead. The rich suburbs pay a TON in state, local and federal taxes. So while I suppose it's possible that the cities pay relatively more than they should in the road construction category, all other categories are subsidized by the suburbs on a per capita basis (roads are just a small fraction of overall state expenses, which are dominated by health services and other type of welfare vastly subsidized by the richer suburbs).

Interestingly, this just reminded me of the situation in a nearby county that includes both a large city in a wealthy suburb. The suburb at one point wanted to secede from the city and create their own county because of the massive transfer of funds within the county towards the city.

There is a middle ground; I live in a detached, standalone house in small east coast city, and I am within a 10 minute walk to a really good coffee shop/bakery, a pharmacy, small public library, a few restaurants, small boutique kitchenware and fabric/clothing shops, etc. I'm also a couple of blocks away from a bus stop that can take me to the train station.

The neighborhood is dense, but there are no high-rises, and I actually know my neighbors.

Similar. Englewood, Colorado. 5-10 minute walk from the grocery store, barber, bar, several good restaurants, and the theater. Really can't complain, why aren't more places like this?

Where do the people who staff those establishments live? How do they get to their jobs, and at what cost?

Probably in nearishby highrises or in detached homes with roommates, by either car or bus, because it's an east coast city so those things most likely exist.

Contrast with Houston, say, where in most areas streets are not really crossable.

> I want low density.

That's fine, but lower density requires lower level of service: narrower roads, some gravel, etc.

> I'm willing to pay for these roads

I'm not saying that it's impossible that you wpuld want to spend that much, but you couldn't possibly know if you live in the US, because you've never paid for it.

I don't mean to suggest that you're in the wrong for taking resources someone has dangled in front of you for something that looks nice; the malpractice lies with the people who designed and perpetuate those systems. But those systems are sucking rural places dry and preventing the creation of new urban places.

The whole high rise situation in almost every U.S. city you described (i.e. small central cluster of high-rises) is more a result of insane zoning policies, not traffic safety. High density and peace and quiet really aren’t mutually exclusive, although admittedly 99% of towns and suburbs in the U.S. fail to build such places, largely, in fact, because of traffic engineering.

For example, I lived in a town of around 100k in the Netherlands called Delft for a while - high density, walkable, and far quieter than the two suburbs I lived in the United States.

Not saying the situation will ever change here. But it is possible.

Implementation definitely matters. There's plenty of quiet to be found in the Tokyo metro area for example, which is quite dense relative to US cities. The residential areas are pretty tranquil all day and aside from nightlife hotspots, big chunks of the inner city are absolutely dead at night.

It is unrealistic to expect this lifestyle in the long term. The era of the car will come to an end, likely in the next few decades. The personal car is a profligate use of materials and energy. We can afford them at the moment only thanks to market distortion and a massive one shot energy surfeit. When the real costs are priced in, very few people will be willing or able to pay. Had the real costs been priced in from the beginning, we might not have designed an entire way of life around them.

Your cookie cutter neighborhood (mine too) depends on circumstances which are unlikely to last. I say this with the utmost respect, and as an SUV owner!

I disagree with your claim that cars will be gone, as the rare non-SUV owner (and as someone who also answered parent to argue.) Cars don't cost that much when you drive reasonable cars for occasional trips. They're expensive, but certainly not as much as, say, food.

When there is enough momentum to push most cars out of town centers and to slow those not removed (10mph is ample to do the heavy lifting which should be the domain of cars), there will still be a place for asynchronous, on-demand high-speed travel. It will probably be a return to the family car for those with families, and other efficient arrangements for others.

When that happens, the relative free-loading of tractor trailers on interstates will be more exposed, plus the big box stores won't be as popular without daily car trips for all. By some highly suboptimal taxation scheme, we'll push logistics off the roads, except, once again, for high value uses where asynchronous, on-demand roads are worth the price.

Edit: I learned that the 2013 Odyssey is 19lb. over the minimum GVWR, so I am, in fact, a truck driver.

Assuming https://ourworldindata.org/land-use is reliable data, the world currently has about 1.5 million km^2 of built-up land usable for human dwelling. If we further assume it isn't a viable option to just remove even more of the land currently in use for things like farming, rainforests, and polar ice caps and what not, if we try to divide that land evenly among 8 billion humans, we get roughly 187.5 m^2 per person.

The problem is that is all built-up land, including commercial and industrial use and the roads themselves, including whatever small amount of urban greenspace might exist like parks, including schools and courthouses and everything else we need to just run human society. If we conservatively estimate this takes up maybe half of built-up land use, then we're down to more like 90 m^2 per person.

Let's assume a family of four, so now you get 360 m^2 or about 3875 ft^2. According to https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/sold.html, the average lot size of a single-family house in the US has gone from 18760 ft^2 in 1978 to 13896 ft^2 in 2020. We're talking now something like a quarter of current lot sizes if we wanted everyone to live in a single-family home.

So, as it stands, sure, live how you want, but don't forget that your ability to live the way you want is predicated upon the vast majority of humans on the planet living in much higher density, which you apparently consider to be not living like a human at all, in spite of it being the condition most humans find themselves in.

> I think that high density living is inhuman.

Which is laughable because for most of human history, we've lived extremely close to each other. Cavemen didn't have acre plots separate from other cavemen.

>I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go

Your lifestyle requires a massive subsidy from the federal government, so you aren't really willing to pay for it. Suburbs generally require other places around them to also have massive parking lots and roads to accommodate the car lifestyle. If suburbanites just stayed in their bland community, it'd be fine, you all want to drive really fast through other people's communities and you clog up our roads.

>I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go. Except you aren't, nearly all infrastructure that your using will need to be bailed out and paid for by the Federal Government because otherwise your taxes would need to at least double.

I understand the sentiment, but is it these assault vehicles at fault here? I tend to think that the real problem is distracted driving, since EVERYONE from the smallest Kia on the street to the biggest lifted truck seems to have trouble staying off their phones while driving.

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

How does distracted driving explain increasing pedestrian death rates in America while death rates are flat or down [1] in other industrialized countries? Unless there's a reason why distracted driving particularly affects America, I don't think it can explain this trend.

[1] https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en/Table?IndicatorCode=59

There could be a number of reasons from average vehicle size to urban planning norms to pedestrian culture. Maybe we jaywalk more on more dangerous roads with larger vehicles with less visibility and our fat bodies have larger hit boxes.

I think the majority of the increased deaths are probably from the higher grills and weight -- instead of tumbling over the hood of a sedan, you get hit center mass by a truck or SUV which is far more damaging. That said, great point on jaywalking more, compared to when I was living in Germany or Estonia, we jaywalk far more (and engage in riskier activities in roadways like with scooters and ATVs) than those places.

Tall vehicles are not at fault for causing pedestrian accidents, but they make it more likely that a pedestrian accident results in a death.

Given that pedestrian (and especially child) visibility is so low in these gargantuan vehicles, I don't see how you can make such a definitive statement absolving their fault in causing collisions without data.

The increased distance something must be from a larger car for it to be visible also contributes to accidents.

In Washington DC, ridesharing has taken over. I think if someone truly correlated this, they'd find that having a bunch of untrained and self regulated rideshare drivers contributes greatly to these troubling statistics.

Cities are also flooding roads with inexperienced bike and scooter riders on faulty equipment in favor of the revenue it provides, cities also have not updated traffic light infrastructure since the 50s...

The biggest innovation to come to traffic control are simply speed cameras, which dramatically reduced police on streets. It's all be a chaotic mess and cities also lobby their policies online, hiring private companies to provide spin and brigade online on sites like reddit in favor of their failed policies.

DC years ago introduced a campaign that everyone should stop for pedestrians in crosswalks (green light or not) and that has empowered some to walk into streets even when they are not clear. Cities have also turned already congested traffic lanes now into bike lanes, while bicycle traffic is untaxed to fun the arrangement. The aforementioned change also completely removes parking which existed before, leaving driver to double park and dangerously block traffic. The combination of frustrated drivers and frustrated pedestrians is a toxic mix. Many cities and states have been reducing speed limits in the past years since the pandemic to increase their ability to give out citations, despite cars being safer. more efficient, and able to stop faster now than ever. The changes being made now contradict logic as the demand to be on time increases more and more, and the statistics are showing deaths are going up.

In my opinion, separating traffic by type would go a much farther way to encourage safety. Innovation should also be centered around a smarter traffic light system, on separating traffic lanes and routes, and and in better and more affordable parking arrangements in every city. It's not a complex problem, the problem is that decision makers are often high on individual bias and not routed in reason to conquer this issue. Perhaps the decision makers need to be look at more closely, and held accountable for their continual failure to bring the number of casualties downward.

I'm surprised you wouldn't always be required to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Vehicles going fast speeding in dense areas are a huge driver of pedestrian fatalities so reducing speed limits sounds great to me. I've heard that lowering the speed limit from 35 to 25 mph can actually increase average throughput in cities by calming traffic. Here in Massachusetts we're trying to make it legal to use automatic speed limit enforcement (cameras with license plate readers detecting speeding vehicles).

Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!).

Barrier separated transport is great for cyclists (and pedestrians), but not if it means restricting cyclists to only riding in bicycle lanes. If you limited cyclists to only riding in places where they had dedicated pathways you'd vastly reduce the practicality of riding in any US city I've been to.

I personally feel much safer riding on streets when there are more cyclists around me. It feels like the motorists are more likely to keep an eye out and not do something careless.

We could also try and force automakers to make safer "light trucks", as they're currently much more dangerous than This article[1] suggests the rate of pedestrian fatalities by vehicle type is 50% higher for light trucks than for cars per mile driven. It's baffling that we allow such large and dangerously-designed vehicles on the road.

[1] https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/4/232

> Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!).

This [0] is useful context. Bikes are rounding errors compared to everything else.

[0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

The person you're responding to sounds like they are rolling off a litany of automotive industry talking points. Especially the jab about "faulty equipment" in the form of bikes and scooters.

Ah yes, we need to quarantine pedestrians far away from cars, further locking them out of the physical spaces in their cities. Plus build more parking garages (what? lol). Oh, and let's take aim at the scourge of ride-sharing, all those inexperienced drivers are a menace! Get rid of scooters and bike-share programs while we're at it, all those inexperienced bikers/scooters are practically _trying_ to get themselves run over.

Why not take it a step further? While we're at it, we need more economic incentives in the form of tax breaks or other mechanisms to increase new car sales to help solve the problems with these pesky pedestrians getting themselves maimed and killed. I mean older vehicles are inherently less safe right? [please ignore the obvious design choices on new trucks and SUVs that serve no function outside of aesthetics which are contributing to the killing of pedestrians, especially children]

Telling pedestrians they can walk into a busy street when the signal clearly shows to not cross is not intelligent behavior. Regardless of right of way or safety stances, there is everything from impaired drivers to drivers with faulty brakes and other car issues that make crossing at any time unexpectedly unreasonable.

Pedestrians should only be told by officials to cross streets when signals indicate it's safe (as had been the case for many years prior). Regardless, they probably may not do so, but local government should not empower people to simply be reckless in crossing streets. Telling people they are somehow protected or justified simply by being in a crosswalk (even when signals indicate to not cross) contradicts years of jaywalking tickets given out in states for decades prior, when the death rates were lower.

Traffic lights are there for cars, of course pedestrians and everyone else should be able to ignore them. They are not there for safety, and unprotected road users are superb at managing risks.

Jaywalking should never be a crime if you live in such a community you really have along way to go.

> We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution is wider roads.

I swear, bro. Just let me build one more lane. I swear we're gonna fix traffic.

https://youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE

I live in a small town with... not enough sidewalks. I try to walk my dog, but half the streets where I live, I have to walk on the street or else on people's lawns. I definitely walk a lot less because of it

Not really a systemic issue in this case, just a pet peeve

If anything designing a neighborhood with no sidewalks must be a systemic issue?

It's just one town. Doesn't necessarily apply to the other towns or cities nearby

It is very common if street view is anything to go on.

I watched a movie (I think from the 50s), and it was amazing to see people ambling casually through the streets, and cars driving slowly and carefully to avoid them as if streets were for people, and cars were the intruder. I'd love to recapture that aspect of the past.

Which movie?

We've been regulating the wrong things when it comes to vehicles. Instead of being obsessed with MPG, we should have been obsessed with weight and size.

There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. There's no reason 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.

Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.

I only ride my bike on protected bike lanes now. It's inconvenient and limiting, but there's no way I can expect to share the road with these behemoths.

There was a brief and futile anti-SUV movement in the 90s. Manufacturers generally got much better about size and safety compared to what they were, but they still sell based primarily on looks. For anyone who actually needs all that interior space, you're always better off with a minivan. And really most people, even families, can make do with a regular sedan. I've got a wife and two kids we can fit ourselves and enough junk for a 4-day vacation in a compact pretty easily (which I rent as needed because I live in a walkable city).

> And really most people, even families, can make do with a regular sedan.

That’s still the norm in Europe. Every summer you see the Dutch migrating through France in station wagons.

A roof carrier or a small trailer does wonder (when you don’t just go with a camper).

Even the same sedans are built with different engine options between North America and Europe.

Europe models will start with smaller engines that are just unavailable in US models.

No idea why given Europe has mountains too and 120 and 130km/h speed limits are the highway norm but often with shorter on-ramps.

American cultural sensibilities making small engines a hard sell?

Historically the torque converter gearboxes were a big problem for small euro engines, but nowadays I’d assumed the gearboxes either are DCT or have lock-up clutch so it should be a non-issue.

Americans are just terrible and inattentive drivers in general, because the culture is that driving is a necessary thing, and therefore a right. They also like to merge onto highways in the stupidest possible ways, so you "need" 200 horsepower even in a damn corolla so you can accelerate to 80mph from 30 because you don't understand the concept of an on-ramp or smooth merging.

>Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.

Doesn't this work both ways? If you focus on MPG then lighter, smaller variants of the same model will win out over bigger, heavier ones.

What does weight matter on a road trip? Unless you are exclusively driving at 30 mph uphill I don't see it mattering much. Wind resistance is the dominant force. This is the same reason why most railroads put limitations on the maximum grade they have to climb. They are mainly working against wind resistance, not gravity.

>Wind resistance is the dominant force.

Hence, smaller cars have better MPG. Smaller cars also tend to be lighter.

There are two numbers on the sticker for fuel efficiency. In-town and highway.

For in-town weight matters greatly (both because you essentially throw away energy every time you break, and because rolling-resistance matters more at low speed).

For highway, up until 2008 the maximum speed tested was 55, which disadvantages heavy-vehicles, as rolling resistance is a higher component of energy used at lower speeds (as a simple approximation, rolling-resistance is linear, and air-resistance is quadratic).

The thread was specifically about a road trip. I can't imagine anyone taking a road trip entirely in town.

I've done road-trips entirely off of limited-access highways.

Driving around Yosemite or Yellowstone is gonna be closer to in-town riding than to highway riding. I wouldn't be too surprised if time spent on driving at the destination was ~50% of my driving time at some road trips I took.

Heavier vehicle puts more work into deforming the road. It must follow it also puts more energy into that.

Road damage scales with fourth power of axle load.

A car that is 50% heavier does 5 times the damage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

The thread was about fuel economy on a road trip.

Railways have very low gradients due to the limits of friction of steel wheels on steel rails.

To a certain extent, yes. I'm mostly daydreaming about if you magically remade my little Volvo with modern materials and one of those low-displacement turbo engines they put in cars today. It would be 500 pounds lighter with 3 times as much horsepower.

But... that car would be a dud today. It's too simple and lacks features (like power seats).

Also crashing into anything would kill you. Modern safety standards are very heavy.

Yes, but no, because the MPG standards in the US are on a per-size basis. I forget exactly what, but it's per weight, or per footprint (m^2) or something else that lets you shrink the ratio by just building a physically larger car.

Don’t forget there have been massive loopholes in vehicle emission regulations which favour larger SUVs and pick-up trucks.

If regulations actually focused on MPG, these vehicles would not be the size and weight that they are.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-lo...

Right target. Bad implementation.

Going forwards, with widespread electric vehicles, focusing directly on size and weight makes a lot of sense, in addition to MPG (or more generally, energy efficiency).

Hang on!

I was there in 2008 during carpocalypse.

I’ve typed this before in detail, but this is NOT A LOOPHOLE!

In 2008 Obama came in and made changes to CAFE and CARB with Californias very willing help.

The news headline you might have seen, and just saw again this year with Biden Admin pushing it was “All vehicles to be XX MPG by 20YY”. To which people who know absolutely nothing about vehicles clap for. People who understand vehicles or politics know it’s something else.

What happened was Obama Admin came in and wanted to push towards an economic future that wasn’t technically possible for stoichiometric reasons.

The end result was in meetings with MFGs, the admin knowingly compromised and said “We’ll just judge a vehicle based on its size”. A single vehicle’s emissions could be 1.3 or so if it was 1.3 the footprint of a vehicle at the time.

The MFGs replied and said ”If you are going to grade us on size, we are going to give you size”. And they/we have.

Look at vehicle bodies from 2008 on. Larger every single revision.

You can’t actually legislate technological advances. What you can do is knowingly change the game so “your people” have an advantage.

There is a WHOLE lot of bullshit with CAFE and CARB (which is not just California when you understand the market), and even NHTSA anymore.

But… Do not call an intentional “gift” a loophole. Everyone involved knew exactly what was going to happen.

Sounds like a loophoole to me. You just wanted to get in a swipe at Obama, which is fine, he screwed up here.

No, I voted for Obama.

I was working a Chrysler when this went down. I was in the room for some of these meetings.

But, you believe whatever you want. Everyone involved knew exactly what was happening. There was no “oops, we didn’t know that would happen loophole”.

I think it's just people defining loophole differently. In our minds, it sure sounds like some unintended trickery to get around a rule. I think OP is saying that it was known and intentional. Is it still a loophole? By definition, I think it is, but not how it's usually used.

That's right, thanks obama for big trucks.

Seriously though, this law wasn't passed in 2008. It was passed in 2012, after democrats lost control of the house. This "gift" as you call it, was an appeasement to republicans to get them to vote increase MPG in general.

You do realize things don’t happen overnight right?

The new Obama admin came in and said “you are going to do this” in 2008. Everyone knew it was happening. Things take a little bit of time from the backend to the front end.

Remember what was happening at the time. TARP, carapocalypse (bailout of GM and Chrysler, massive re-org at Ford).

Today, I’m working products on 2032 vehicles. Spoiler alert, they’re still gas and won’t get 55mpg.

  I’ve typed this before in detail, but this is NOT A LOOPHOLE!

Sure it is. Going back to whenever, heavier vehicles classed as light trucks (or worse) have been subject to less stringent emissions and safety requirements. That's generally what folks are referring to when they mention regulations favoring trucks.

  Look at vehicle bodies from 2008 on. Larger every single revision.

That's been generally true since the fuel crisis subsided in the 70s.

CAFE has had an exception or lower standard for light trucks and an exception for heavy trucks since 1978, and vehicles used as passenger vehicles but meeting either of the truck categories have been incentivized since then; its not something that started 30 years later.

The rise of SUVs and Minivans was a product of this — in the 1980s, not the late 00s.

Do minivans meet the definitions? Mine has a pretty low ground clearance, and I don't think it meets the attack angle requirement, either (which is typically the cheapest.)

Edit: I guess I'm a trucker! The 2013 Odyssey is 19lb. over the minimum GVWR!

Not true. CAFE was amended in the late 2000s to provide more fuel restrictions for smaller cars while keeping the same fuel restrictions for bigger cars. The result is bigger cars being made.

> Not true.

What isn't true? Nothing you said, even if it was true (it's not) contradicts anything in the grandparent post.

> CAFE was amended in the late 2000s to provide more fuel restrictions for smaller cars while keeping the same fuel restrictions for bigger cars.

No, it wasn’t. The footprint model within the passenger car class did differentiate by size, but it didn’t provide more restrictions for smaller cars while keeping larger cars the same.

Interesting. So you're saying small trucks aren't technically viable under current US legislation? That seems like a glaring emission indeed. Why not just create a light truck category with more lax emission standards? (I suppose it's not too difficult to disallow normal cars from qualifying as light trucks to get higher emissions?)

Glaring *omission. But apropos typo ftw!

So, fun stuff!

There are light trucks. The ranger, Tacoma, Colorado, gladiator, etc. They make money, but not like the bigger trucks.

They’re also larger than 1/4 ton trucks of decades ago.

There is a side game with CAFE. Things like the 2DR Wrangler exist - so Jeep could sell more 4DR wranglers and Gladiators. You balance what you have to make with what makes money.

A LOT of Tesla’s financial history is wrapped up in them selling California “carbon credits” (not sure the actual process) to GM, Stellanis, Ford so they then are allowed to sell more trucks in California.

All the mfgs take a small to medium loss on their small cars so they can average their line out. Dodge small cars haven’t made money so long as I have been working in automotive.

If you want an example of nonsense, find a new Tacoma and look between the grill and the front of the radiator. There is more than a FOOT of empty internal space in there.

Being in this industry taught me a lot out government regulation and how it’s almost never what it seems. Regulations exist entirely to be worked-around and not built to. If we built cars to regulations they would all look identical and be pretty poor at everything.

In other countries, vehicles are organzied and taxed by class. Where light trucks can emit more than SUVs the idea being they are needed for work instead of for comfort. This system is gamed too. For example, let’s say Indonesia, it’s far cheaper to get a 4DR Jeep Gladiator than a smaller 2DR Jeep Wrangler. The tax on the latter is high. Both are premium vehicles there.

Regulations exist to be worked around or to be expensive for anyone but your friends to manage. Once you accept that, it makes a lot of decisions make more sense.

Hang on, the F-150 and Silverado started ballooning in the late 90s. The Hummer came, Nissan introduced their Titan truck in 2004, the Toyota Tundra got massive. All years before 2008.

Regulations may have well prevented reversal, but the buying public was clearly already making its preferences loud and clear.

There were more fuel restrictions for smaller cars after the CAFE amendment of the late aughts. Automakers were incentivized to build bigger cars to get around the restrictions.

Airbags, crash testing, NHTSA, fuel injection / data bussing, small changes to CAFE, comfort options, and emissions equipment all made vehicles get slightly larger, that’s true. But not “ballooning”.

The 2004 Nissan Titan you mentioned was smaller in every single dimension and aspect over its comparative 2004 Dodge Ram. That was Nissan trying to play big boy, but was nothing unusual.

I’m talking about everything. Take an entire line from a MFG and look at its model over model changes.

Find a vehicle that decreased in wheelbase. I wish you luck in your search.

> I’m talking about everything. Take an entire line from a MFG and look at its model over model changes.

Yes, I agree that every car was getting bigger well before 2008.

You're right. A University of Michigan study predicted 12 years ago that cars would be bigger to "comply" with CAFE fuel standards.

https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-c...

Blaming regulation removes agency from people.

Or maybe yeah, most consumers just mimic other people and cost be darned. Then when gas eventually becomes pricier they complain because they had the foresight of a goldfish.

(And theoretically no efficiency laws need to be passed. Increase taxes on fuel and there you have it)

If people exercised this level of agency, no economic incentive would ever work.

Individuals have agency. Populations behave statistically in line with the structural incentives of the systems they operate within.

I disagree -- I'd love if my last car was a station wagon, but there were eight station wagons on the market in the US at the time, made by five manufacturers. And of those eight, four have an MSRP under USD$50,000, and only two have an MSRP under USD$30,000. And the market hasn't substantively changed (Jaguar and Buick have dropped out of the market, but Mini entered the market and Porsche added a second model) since 2020, when I got my car.

I'm calling this out specifically because, in another era, the station wagon would have been the preferred option for a "family vehicle" that needed more space than a sedan. But since it's "easier" for an automaker to get an SUV on the road, the regulatory environment dictated how the market went.

I agree, I certainly think manufacturers are to blame as well

No, not necessarily. Starting in 1996 there was an update to CAFE regulations (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) that set tighter restrictions to start 2005 which only got tighter year over year from there. Conveniently thanks to the Jeep Cherokee XJ, the Chevrolet/GMC S-10 Blazer/S-15 Jimmy, and the Ford Explorer moving into a more luxury oriented direction, SUVs became the fastest growing segment starting in 1994. So how did the companies targeting the U.S. market react? They started pumping out SUVs, and later, crossovers, also called CUVs.

The CUVs started as cheaper ways to make SUVs using sedan platforms and showed up with the Toyota RAV4 and the Honda CR-V first. The third major crossover, and the first made to exercise a loophole in CAFE was the Chrysler PT Cruiser, which was a mid-size hatchback built on the second generation Dodge Neon's platform that was classified as a compact due to them purposely engineering the interior to be smaller, since vehicle sizes are partially determined based on interior dimensions in the U.S. for some odd reason. Chrysler then got it shadily certified as a "light truck" with the EPA for emissions thanks to how the unibody was designed and the rear hatch. At the same time other companies also started exploiting this loophole, such as Ford with the Escape, which was based on the then brand new Focus.

As the 2000s wore on the loophole was closed slightly, but still left open with the so-called "footprint" rule. The footprint rule dictated that light trucks with longer and wider wheelbases were subject to lessened emissions and CAFE regulations, meaning they could pollute more and get worse fuel economy with fewer or even no penalties. As a result smaller more efficient sedans and hatchbacks became less and less profitable and thus manufactured less because they were subject to stricter and thus more expensive regulations, the exact inverse of what was intended to happen with CAFE. This caused a growth in vehicle wheelbases and thus overall sizes to try and lower costs, and the eventual death of several models and even market segments outright. Three door hatchbacks ceased to be in the U.S. market sometime around 2007, as did nearly all hatchbacks. Minivans also suffered because they couldn't always be reclassified as light trucks due to some shenanigans Chrysler had pulled in the 1980s to try and lock out Ford's Aerostar and Chevrolet's Astro, and so prices went up, creating another reason minivans pushed further upmarket in the late 2000s.

The Cobalt was replaced with the larger Cruze in 2008, the Neon replaced with the larger "light truck" classified Caliber in 2007, and the long-in-the-tooth first generation Focus was given a half-hearted exterior styling change and neglected for the updated Escape and Taurus X/Freestyle come 2007. Suzuki replaced the Aerio with the SX4 in 2007, Nissan tried supplanting both the Versa and Altima with the Rogue in 2006 but failed, Mitsubishi shifted all their focus to the Outlander and Endeavor in 2008, and Honda doubled down on the CR-V with it's third generation in 2006. The 2008 financial crisis shuffled things up a bit and thus Ford finally brought over the Fiesta and the fourth generation Focus from Europe in 2011 while Nissan gave us the new Versa and the brand new Leaf that same year, but GM doubled down on CUVs and Chrysler just gave up and put all their money into Jeep in order to make the new Compass and Patriot they'd introduced in 2007 because it was the only thing they could afford. European brands meanwhile jumped on the same bandwagon of bigger CUVs because they realized they could jack up the prices just by jacking up the ride height, and thus developed the MINI Countryman in 2010, FIAT 500X in 2014, and the Opel Mokka which was brought over as the Buick Encore in 2012.

At this point in 2023 nearly all new vehicles sold in the U.S. are either SUVs, CUVs, or full size pickup trucks. Ford infamously axed everything not in those categories except the Mustang, Chevrolet only has one sedan left in the Malibu, Buick has nothing but CUVs after killing off the Opel-filched Insignia sedan and it's Crosstour X branded station wagon version, and Dodge and Nissan are the only ones left in their respective market segments as non-luxury full size sedans with with Charger and Maxima. Even the mighty Honda Accord and Toyota Camry in the venerable mid-size category are falling, with the Camry selling 408,000 units in 2013 and only 120,000 sold so far this year with a projected sales number of only 250,000 by the end of the year. And that's in a ravenous market desperate for new cars.

In short, yes. Fuel economy regulations in the U.S. are to blame because they backfired when it comes to vehicles. And since the U.S. and China essentially dictate world trends for vehicles, the U.S. has set in motion the death of the small car.

> the U.S. has set in motion the death of the small car.

Small cars sell fine everywhere else in the world

Not for very much longer outside of insulated markets like Japan and central Italy where big cars physically will not fit the streets. In the UK for example nearly half of all cars on the road now are SUVs or CUVs which are inherently larger than their hatchback counterparts regardless of what size and tax class they're weaseled into. Two of the best selling cars there in 2022 were the Kia Sportage and Nissan Qashqai, both compact CUVs with Nissan having completely dropped hatchback offering in that size class. In the EU and U.S. crash regulations have dictated cars be wider to accommodate side-impact airbags and side-sill reinforcement bars on doors, while hoods grow taller to adhere to pedestrian impact regulations. In China it's starting to be seen as unsightly or lower class to still be clinging to an A or B-class city or subcompact car, and so the market has trended towards mid-sizers. Combine this with the small car profit problem, and cars like the Ford Fiesta and Kia Picanto won't be around for very much longer. Ford's already discontinuing the Fiesta this year with no announced replacement.

From what I understand if you outlaw anything heavier than 3000 lbs you've basically banned most EVs other than the tiny ones resembling a city car.

I don't think the pedestrian getting hit cares whether it's an EV or not.

“My life is flashing before my eyes but at least it was an environmentally conscious Rivian that took me out and not a gas-guzzling RAM. My life may be over but the Earth is in good hands. Nice color too, really like the yellow.”

I don't upvote jokes out of principle but this was pretty funny

I dont think the pedestrian getting hit cares whether the car is 2,999lbs or 3,0001lbs.

I mean this is obviously false. The heavier a vehicle is, the slower it needs to be going to cause a certain amount of damage, up to and including death. How many pedestrians are hit every year? If you can lower the average weight of vehicles on the road you're directly saving lives.

not only that, but the height of the vehicle front also matters A LOT.

A SUV is perfect for killing pedestrians, it has the perfect triple combo:

* Weight * raised front to perfectly shatter a chest * low visibility for the perfect "i didn't saw him" excuse.

The couple drivers I'd have to avoid as a pedestrian explained to me that they were not looking in the direction of travel. So I can't see what height or visibility would matter.

It's in the comment you're replying to

> raised front to perfectly shatter a chest

An SUV, pickup truck etc will hit an adult in the chest, and a child in the head, flinging them into the ground. That's often fatal.

A sedan, station wagon, sports car etc will hit the person in the legs, scooping/rolling them over/around the car. This is less often fatal.

This assumes two vehicles of similar dimensions.

An aerodynamic 3,001lb vehicle would be much preferable to me than a 2,999lb flat-front. The physics imply only a portion of the heavier vehicles energy is imparted to me.

I don't make the comment to argue that weight isn't meaningful, but to say that "lethality" of a vehicle has many factors.

Yes it does, because we're talking about regulations that would cap the size of vehicle classes. You're not going to turn a 6,000lb F-150 into a 2,999lb truck, but you can shave 50 or 60 pounds off a vehicle.

All else being equal, lighter = less deadly. That's all I'm saying.

I always think the same thing about federal gun restrictions in the US. I can't imagine someone getting shot and thinking "I'm so glad he didn't shoot me with a barrel shorter than 16 inches!!!"

the differencing between breaking a leg and dying are kinda big... Weight and frontal height are deciding factors on that.

Clearly the barrel-length restrictions were intended to be about how easy they are to conceal. There was an attempt to draw a distinction between long-guns and hand-guns.

The NFA ended up exempting pistols, which results in the strange situation where manufacturing a pistol to fire a .223 Remmington is legal, but shortening an AR-15 is not.

Perhaps if they only exempted revolvers it would make more sense.

That is false. The objective was to prevent the handgun ban from being circumvented. The handgun ban never became law but we're left with an oddball restriction around short barrels on rifles.

which should be fine, because heavy EVs aren't exactly more environmentally friendly, they just make very different trade offs. Yet, they are more deadly, destroy roads faster, and devalue quicker (half its value come from the battery).

Small City EVs are great though, better for environment, better for not killing more pedestrians, better for urban planning, and cheaper!

Citation needed.

> There's no reason a 1/2 ton pickup should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150

It is funny that we still call trucks like the F150, Ram 1500, Silverado 1500, etc as 1/2 ton pickups. Even though they are still officially categorized like that by all the manufacturers, Edmunds, Motortrend, KBB, and so on, they are actually essentially 1 ton pickups. Our "light-duty pickups" (which is their official classification) are actually 1 ton pickups.

The whole tonnage designation refers to the payload capacity of the truck (people and gear in the bed for example). Traditionally a 1/2 ton pickup could carry 1,000 lbs (half a ton roughly). This was the light-duty, "everyman's pickup".

But take the 2023, F-150. It has a payload capacity of ~2,200lbs on all trims above Lariat. And just shy (~1,800-1,900 lbs) on lower trims. These are literally 1 ton pickups being sold as 'light duty' 1/2 ton pickups. They are way more power than the average person needs, yet they are the best selling vehicles in america. When I look at my neighbords, of the 18 houses on my street, there are 14 pickups (3 of which are 3/4 ton pickups, the rest are 1/2 ton). There is one guy that carries a small trailer a few times each summer with a dirt bike in the back. The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.

Not only are they more dangerous to pedestrians, and are worse for the environment, but they also clutter up the streets because they often don't fit in garages,so more and more people park on the street.

For fun, I looked up the current payload of the Ford Ranger, which is Ford's 1/4 ton pickup. And it clocks in at 3/4 of a ton. So again, we have moved up two notches in truck size.

FWIW, I doubt my neighbors see all the stuff I haul in the bed, or the trailers I pull, when my truck is not parked in my driveway.

I still think people who delete their diesels or lift their trucks, etc are compensating though. I just won't judge a person who has a standard pickup truck.

I owned an F150 because there's a weird premium on anything smaller, it was cheaper than a Ranger or Tacoma.

Eventually just switched to an economy car with a trailer hitch, and it was somehow mind blowing to everyone that a Toyota Camry could haul 2000 lbs.

I was hauling a motocross dirtbike, 200lbs (trailer was maybe another 400), if it was a 200lb person any small car could seat 4 of them.

When I switched to a sports sedan and wanted a hitch all the forums were like "Just get a cheap truck", for some odd reason they only sold the hitch in Europe.

Seems like the solution to anything slightly heavy or large is "Buy a truck that can haul 2000lbs". Meanwhile my old Scottish dad would remark to me "We used to haul caravans with cars smaller than this!"

Yes, a car with a hitch and trailer would be more economical to purchase and drive.

Unfortunately it's not as convenient for the average person.

A station wagon is about as convinient as a pickup as long as you don't need to transport gravel.

> The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.

Imagine the quizzical looks and stares and sarcastic remarks that would follow someone who decided to hitch an empty trailer to their family sedan and haul it around every single place they go. To work, to the dentist, to the bank, to the grocery store, to drop the kids off at daycare. An empty box the size of a grand piano bobbing around behind them everywhere, complicating everything involved with driving, parking, and fuel economy. For no purpose except the same once in a blue moon haul of a television or a couple 2 by 4s.

And yet this is literally what suburban pickup trucks do all the time- burn gas hauling a giant empty box every single place they go, for no reason at all.

But because it's a "pickup truck" it's normalized and no one thinks anything of it despite it being exactly is ridiculous as the car scenario.

> The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.

I have an older pickup that my in-laws sold us years ago. It's not in the best shape, and most of the time we use it for typical second-car usage: picking up kids, getting groceries, etc. However, it's been useful _so many times_ in the past five years that the convenience of having it outweighs having some other smaller car and then renting a pickup when necessary.

- holiday travel, packages and luggage fill the back. (I'd prefer a minivan, but we don't have one.) - Some local farmer donates a bunch of stumps for the school garden, we can use the pickup - trash / e-waste delivery to the dump - get / deliver furniture - bring school projects to/from school - buy a bunk bed at IKEA, it's in half a dozen six foot boxes of wood

Most of these are occasions where there's significant disruption if we were to go try to rent a vehicle from Uhaul or Home Depot, which makes it less likely that we actually do these things, or suffer through trying to shoehorn things into a tiny car. Being able to throw things in the back of the truck makes life occasionally a lot more convenient.

With the pickup being mostly useless, but occasionally Extremely Useful, it is not surprising to me that many keep them, and even consider buying higher trim levels to have a nicer+bigger cab, especially as their kids get older and larger. :)

Just rent a god damn trailer when you need one. It costs nothing and is available at every gas station (at least where I live).

Having recently rented a trailer, this doesn't mirror my experience at all.

Picking it up took an hour and was a pain in the ass. You still need a vehicle that can haul a trailer, and a compatible hitch. You have to drop it off by a certain time, so now you're rushing. If 3 other people in the area decided to move on that same weekend, you're now screwed because you have no access to equipment.

> You still need a vehicle that can haul a trailer, and a compatible hitch.

Pretty much everything above compact can haul a small trailer, and surely they all use a basic ball hitch?

> Pretty much everything above compact can haul a small trailer

Not according to trailer rental companies. And since it's their trailer, not yours, they get to make the rules - yet another way it's more convenient to own a truck.

> and surely they all use a basic ball hitch?

I had to go buy one, and there were three different main sizes of ball hitch, so there doesn't appear to be a single "basic ball hitch."

PS, I don't own a truck, but this experience - and many similar days where I ended up renting a van or similar - have led me to eye the Maverick.

> Not according to trailer rental companies. And since it's their trailer, not yours, they get to make the rules - yet another way it's more convenient to own a truck.

> I had to go buy one, and there were three different main sizes of ball hitch, so there doesn't appear to be a single "basic ball hitch."

Damn the US are silly as fuck. The wiki confirms that the US has 4 size of hitch balls (1 7/8, 2, 2 5/16, 3).

In europe there’s only the ISO (50mm) hitch ball. Above that you might get drawbars and pintles, but they tend to be more specialised and for heavier applications than a basic trailer or camper.

But surely you can get a class II or class III receiver tube, and then have a set of tow balls you can swap in based on trailer requirements?

In the US most places are less concerned about the hitch and more about the vehicle itself. Even if the identical car is sold in Europe and rated to tow something hefty, it's probably not rated as such in the US and you'll have a hard time getting someone to rent you a trailer.

Part of the problem is that there are generally more restrictive speed limits on RVs and cars with trailers in Europe (and those limits are generally more stringently enforced). e.g. Spain sets a limit of 90 kph for a car with a trailer while South Dakota sets the limit at 130 kph.

Indeed you can even get a single, uh, shaft, that has a ball on each side and pull it out and rotate it to select which one to use. Maybe not for a 3” hitch.

They are called 1500s. So they should be 3/4 ton trucks, no? 1500lbs is literally 3/4 of a ton.

IIRC it’s basically a different generation of naming. 1/2 ton trucks got bigger and increased to 3/4, manufacturers labelled them 1500 (but the 1/2 ton informal naming remained), then they kept growing but the class remained.

So now you have light duty trucks with >2000 lbs payload, badged 1500, and called half ton.

The 240 is a beast. And yet, having just Googled it, it's 400 pounds _lighter_ than a 2022 VW Golf.

The other day, I saw a 1990s Chevy S-10 that had been raised to the height of a modern step-up pickup. It looked ridiculous. Similarly I was on my bike at a red-light looking to turn right with a (stock height) late-model F-150 next to me going straight. I couldn't see over its hood.

>There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.

Sure there is. Those 90's pickup trucks were absolute death traps. Bench seating, no airbags, drum brakes, no ABS, no crunch zones. There are very good reasons that cars have become much heavier in the last 30 years.

MPG regulation would have had the same effect if there wasn't a loophole to avoid it by making the truck bigger :(

> There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs.

Because batteries are heavy. Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever?

> There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.

Did that have a back seat big enough for adults to sit in? If not, then there's your reason.

Maybe F-150's should be considered impractical family vehicles instead of trying to shoehorn them into a do-everything-everywhere-all-the-time kind of vehicle?

Only the new ones fail at being pickups because their beds are short they can't fit much and so high off the ground you'll blow your shoulder out trying to load it with anything but groceries.

> Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever?

why not? At least until bateries are good enough. Heavy EVs are not exactly more environmentally friendly than ICEs, they just make different trade-offs.

Instead of thinking of the dangers of an ICE sedan, and showing an abomination called an EV sedan, just have a simple EV city car, or invest in actually humane mass transit, propper city planning, etc. If you use just your ICE sedan for longer trips, that's decent enough.

EV replacement for our current type of car types are just an hacky way that doesn't really help, just changes the problems.

Yes, my dad drove exactly that truck and we did several roadtrips with 5 adults, 5 bikes, and our luggage in back.

  Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo
  240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.

The 240 was a good car for its time, but its time was the late 70s. A 2023 Camry hybrid is rated at 53 MPG highway and is much safer for everyone involved. When the 240 was sold you could still buy a new car where you were unlikely to survive a 35 mph head on crash into a wall (e.g. crashing into something roughly the same weight).

Meanwhile Euro NCAP rates cars based on the risk to pedestrians (and NHTSA has proposed following suit). A 240 is going to be far less forgiving.

Europeans also focus on MPG. Their cars haven’t ballooned in the way American cars have.

They have ballooned quite a lot, we are still behind the obscene size of the typical American SUV. Range Rovers are seen as a status symbol

It's Ford Kugas as far as the eye can see. Lots of absurdly high Rangers too :-(

mpg is directly correlated to size and weight.

I don't know the details but apparently some concession was made to big auto on mpg that meant there was a loophole and bigger heavier trucks didn't count against your mpg targets as much. That, not a focus on mpg, is the cause.

mpg wouldn't be as bad as it is if they didn't allow the giant light truck loophole -- regulating on weight would have the same problems if they excepted a class of vehicles that everyone would then flock to

The reason why drivers are increasingly angry where I live is because there is no enforcement of traffic laws at all. Red lights are run nonstop, drivers use bicycle lanes as travel lanes, etc. I watched someone just reverse down a road opposite the direction of travel yesterday. Like it was no big deal.

This has been my experience, in my area people have even found ways around the newly installed red light cameras, they just remove their license plate. Usually you would get hit with a pretty big ticket for that but the police are not enforcing any sort of traffic laws and relying on cameras to do the enforcing.

This is what happens when every traffic stop is billed as a combat situation. Cops feel like their dangerous (and they are) because America can't pass sensible gun restrictions.

Cops don't actually get shot all that much. Most deaths were covid-19 during the pandemic.

Oh yeah, that's 100% true, but take a look at the way they train each other.

What do you mean by "sensible"? People would probably start carrying Glocks with a suppressor, stock, vertical front grip, and micro red dot. That's only sort of safer for police as long as people don't look up how to make an armor piercing bullet.

It's always fun having gun nuts pretend to debate in good faith. Thanks

Lol statistically nearly every traffic stop is a completely benign affair with zero danger. Cops just spend all their training being told everyone is trying to kill them and to shoot anything they don't like.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of cop deaths are from traffic accidents, but try telling cops to stop driving like idiots or driving distracted and they'll just tell you "no no no no it's a hard and dangerous job".

Sanitation workers die on the job more often than cops.

Agreed. Sometimes I feel that most traffic laws only exist to serve as stand-in probable cause for forces' own agendas.

Nah that's what drug prohibition is for. It turns out almost everyones vehicle smells like weed.

This is an extremely local phenomenon. We have very light touch enforcement in our state yet people do not run red lights or stop signs, because that's a stupid thing to do and a great way to get into an accident.

Distracted driving could use more enforcement though.

US cars seem to be a special case. Saw a Cadillac Escalade on European streets and it was so comically large. The driver looked like an ant. And I complain about SUVs here...

Article ignores it, but looking at the source data you can see pedestrian deaths were flat, then a large spike in 2020 during Covid, and now we are at a new higher plateau. Cause is not a change in roads, or cars, or more SUVs. Covid/lockdowns changed the way people drive. Less civility, less police enforcement, more chaos. Driving is noticeably worse and more stressful than pre-Covid.

Why would COVID/lockdowns have “changed the way people drive?” Any proposed mechanism?

Seems more likely you had a lot of shifting around of people’s driving (e.g. city dwellers moving to suburbs)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9342743/

https://www.google.com/search?q=people+driving+more+aggressi...

This doesn’t answer my question. It just says people claim [other] drivers are more aggressive than before.

The post COVID era is more stressful for sure.. (pandemic, inflation, war,?)

It coincides with the general rise in anti-social behavior that happened during and after lockdowns.

There's definitely a lot of people reporting a change in driving attitudes. During covid, people went fucking nuts. There for a while, it was a source of local news articles.

I dont have an answer for why. Just it has. I live in a major city in the midwest and its wild how often I see people drive with zero regard for anyone else.

Running red lights and almost hitting someone, cutting people off, swerving in traffic erratically to be faster. Its honestly scary some days.

My experience mirrors yours perfectly. When the lockdowns started, people began to drive "crazier" for lack of a better term.

I hesitate to speculate as to what caused it, but the difference was as clear as night and day.

My anecdote is remarkably similar. I worked from home for a couple months, then had to mask up for a couple of service calls on essential production lines... There was a massive step function between late February in 2020 and May 2020 on the roads from Michigan to Indiana and back. Coworkers and customers who told me they used to go 79mph in the left lane (because it was unlikely to earn a cheap 2-point ticket instead of 81+ which was a more probable and more expensive 4-point ticket) but now bragged about driving 90+ or hitting "triple digits". It was kind of like talking to a religious fundamentalist who can't understand how unbelievers restrain themselves without the Ten Commandments and threat of torture in the afterlife providing consequences for theft, murder, and adultery. I've never gotten a ticket and had no idea what the penalties were, the legal consequences were never a part of my reason for not driving unsafely.

Speed limits and traffic enforcement had been fully suspended, and people drove however they wanted to. It also felt like there was some griping about being part of the unlucky few who had to risk their lives for the sake of those who got to stay home in safety and comfort with all their necessities delivered.

My brother-in-law's laughing response to my description of my service call drive is etched in my memory. He'd been massively busy delivering pizzas, and after hearing about how I'd had my doors blown off, he said "Welcome to the apocalypse, we drive fast now!"

I'm acutely aware of it as a bike commuter. It has saved my neck on a few occasions in the past three years since I have adopted the assumption that everyone in a vehicle is intentionally trying to kill me.

It seems like it's a combo of impatience + lapses in attention more than anything else, but something has to be fueling it because it is consistently worse now than it has ever been in my 15 years of biking for transport. Pre-emptive braking with the right of way has saved my ass more times that I can count.

I can't believe we are blaming this ENTIRELY on drivers... with people in the comments even claiming that the quality of drivers has gone done because work from home has put more poor people on the road.

Just look at the pedestrians you pass on your next drive. Count how many of them are looking at their phone while walking. I just did this and it was 4/10. I think Pedestrian behavior and awareness *might be a little different than it was 40 years ago as well.

We're blaming drivers because it's a core responsibility of driving to not injure or kill people with your vehicle.

There's no corresponding responsibility inherent in walking. In fact many people who walk also have other statuses or impairments that prevent them from fully perceiving the world they are walking through, such as blindness or being a child.

It is the driver's obligation to ensure the safety of the people around which they choose to operate their vehicle, regardless of their awareness or behavior.

If you are worried that a pedestrian might step in front of your car, then the onus is upon you to drive even slower than you already are. The speed limit is a maximum in urban environments. You're free to go slower, if that's what's required, and by your own admission it seems to be.

Yes people glance at their phone while walking. Just like drivers glance at their phone while driving (or fiddle with those stupid touch-screens that are ubiquitous now).

But just like there aren't many drivers who would stare intently at their phone while driving through a busy intersection, there aren't many pedestrians that will stare intently at a phone while crossing a busy street. It's simple self-perservation.

Also, phones have been around for ages now. Pedestrians are being hit and killed at a higher rate since the pandemic started, not since the wide adoption of cellphone technology.

Look at pedestrians? Look at drivers. Many many drivers will text, talk, or use their phones constantly. Considering that the driver is the one operating the dangerous machine, their attentiveness is much more important

Less congestion means vehicles can reach higher speeds which means more fatal accidents.

Congestion generally works to keep vehicle speeds slower and therefore safer.

The roads were wide open for 2+ years, people got used to driving very fast and not really paying attention to their surroundings because there wasn't much other traffic to start with. People started running red lights because not other traffic to wait on. You could drive recklessly without much risk. Now people are still driving recklessly but have a lot more cars and activity around them.

One thing that I've noticed is people moved to a suburb or took a new job that was a reasonable commute at the time. Now that traffic came back, it's not a reasonable commute anymore so they're trying to drive like crazy to get back and forth.

By definition this should be a very small subset of drivers, since before as you claim 'roads were empty'. If most drivers stayed at home they should not got those bad habits.

Very surreal this discussion, very US specific too. Here in Europe, in past 3 years tons of new cycling infrastructure, either wider roads or parts of roads taken from cars and given to cyclists (ie 1 lane instead of 2 lane roads). The goal isn't to move traffic asap, but rather make coming into cities as annoying as possible, so key intersections have in incoming directions green light ie for 10 seconds.

And no, not seeing any increase in aggression neither. But then again Europe is massive and culturally extremely diverse, and I haven't visited more than 10 countries in past 3 years so somewhere this may be valid, but its not an overall trend.

The article being discussed is US specific.

Frequency of driving was reduced but when you did drive, the roads were empty. The people who did continue to drive daily was not insignificant (maybe 10-30% of people, guessing IDK) and may be the ones creating the problems. Eg. in heavy traffic if 5% of vehicles are driving reckless, it's bad.

There was (and still is) greatly reduced traffic enforcement as well.

Strong +1 on this -- in DC I've noticed people driving incredibly recklessly because there is little enforcement (both at the ticketing level and at the making you pay up for the ticket level). It's even gotten to the point where people don't update their tags because they won't be fined for it.

Sorry, paywalled, but Matthew Yglesias has made it a personal priority of his to work on these issues: https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-cant-tolerate-fake-expired-a...

It has changed the population of drivers on the road. Wealthy, highly educated professionals are driving less because they work at home more. "Essential workers" are driving as much or more. They are biased toward poorer and less educated people, who are also as a population worse drivers with worse vehicles compared to the population staying at home. These shifts in driver population are more than enough to account for the change.

> These shifts in driver population are more than enough to account for the change.

This is an interesting and maybe even plausible hypothesis, but it lacks any data whatsoever for the final claim.

The rise in traffic deaths coincides with laws passed that allow drivers to kill pedestrians if they feel threatened by them. Both this, and the charged language used by politicians on this topic, will most likely play part in this increase. Social and political backing for your fear usually doesn't help reduce it.

> with laws passed that allow drivers to kill pedestrians if they feel threatened by them.

Can you cite a source on this I've never heard anything like this.

The poster is most likely referring to laws like those in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's "anti-riot" bill, which was passed but eventually found unconstitutional. It gave civil protection to anyone who ran over protesters with a vehicle. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt also signed such a bill, House Bill 1674 in 2021, which says that people who run over protesters if they "feel threatened" can't be held civilly or criminally liable. North Dakota (HB 1203), North Carolina (HB 330), Florida, Tennessee, Rhode Island, and Texas also proposed similar bills. It is worth noting that several of the bills do say that if a driver wilfully runs over a protester, it's not ok, though language varies.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/us/legislation-protects-drive... , https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/22/us/oklahoma-law-drivers-prote...

It appears that none of the laws in your first article were ever passed?

The "defund the police" movement that happened just before Covid has contributed to police pulling back enforcement of all sorts of things.

Also, many cities have a "no chase" rule for police now because of high-profile crashes which killed people. Guessing the lawsuit payouts were large and contributed to the decisions.

I think people realized there are no consequences so decided to do what the heck they wanted.

All while many states have increased funding.

Here in Florida the cops are complete dead weight, they used to enforce DUIs religiously Friday / Saturday night. Now you will barely see anyone pulled over and definitely a marked increase in suspected DUI drivers in the early hours (2-4am).

We literally have people planning open street races and shut downs on Facebook groups, and the cops do absolutely nothing.

Side shows in the Bay Area are incredibly common now and sometimes, in the middle of the night, go on for an hour or more. In the summer, I can hear them miles away, due to the still air and open windows. It's nuts. And, when I drive around town, you can see the tire tracks in the middle of intersections, marking where the side shows were. Dozens of places in the areas I drive, which isn't far or often.

In SF, enforcement of traffic laws has been steadily declining since 2014. It wasn't a covid thing: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/s-f-supervisor-w... (they are trying to get them to do their jobs again but it's really tough)

> The "defund the police" movement that happened just before Covid has contributed to police pulling back enforcement of all sorts of things.

How? That movement failed and police have more funding now. If you're paying them more and they're doing less that's a problem between y'all. You got what you wanted you don't also get to blame us.

I suspect that a movement that took the 'ACAB' slogan mainstream did a pretty good job of demoralising the police, though, leaving them less effective even with increased funding. Why should they risk their lives for a society that hates them?

They should do the job they get paid to do. Insisting we also adore them for it seems pretty precious. No one made them be a police. Barring the anomaly of the post sept-11 US it has always been an unpopular job.

The "risk their life for" thing I don't even want to get into but here we go. Most of the risk is the normal health damage and accident risk of being in a car all day, and it's comparably dangerous to other jobs where you're in a car all day. Statistically in a police encounter, the lives most at risk are any but the officers'. And were you not here for Uvalde or what?

"oh the poor poor police with zero accountability for literal crimes we have on camera, won't somebody think about their poooooooor situation"?

Come back to me when I can just refuse to do my literal, contractual job and have the supreme court rule that it's fine, and I won't even get a negative mark on my record.

> Why should they risk their lives for a society that hates them?

Ideally because they are paid to do so, and voluntarily sel-selected into a job that requires such. Nobody is forcing anybody to be a cop. But every citizen has a responsibility to hold their public servants accountable for their (again, self-selected) responsibilities.

Physical brain damage. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12VbMkvqUF9eSggJsdsFE...

Edit: My point isn't to argue about all the studies listed, this is just why I think brain damage is a plausible reason for the population-wide decrease in car driving skill.

Does this compilation include negative studies, or only studies with positive results (i.e. publication bias)?

A proposal that I haven't seen discussed in other responses:

COVID lockdowns saw a rise in home delivery services. The drivers in this gig economy are financially incentivized to go fast. Lockdowns initially enabled them to go fast, and, once the expectation was in place, it's hard to roll back.

(just my opinion, I don't have data point to back it up, curious if anyone who participate as a delivery driver could confirm/deny).

Social contract frayed...

You have criminals getting out on low or no bond in higher numbers. You have serious issues with felony bond violations as well. You have reduced police enforcement. Your typical felon doesn’t car as much about traffic laws.

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminal-ju...

I promise you that this is not a result of "less police enforcement".

>"less police enforcement"

I personally don't think its "police enforcement" but I would wager a large % of deaths (at least in New Mexico, the state with the highest rate) are from panhandlers in the street. IIRC, they're trying to make new laws to prevent ppl from standing in the middle of the road.

I'm pretty critical of police forces -- but my experience living in Charlotte NC for the past 8 years leads me to believe that police enforcement is at least a part of the equation.

We had a pretty large step-back in traffic enforcement [1][2] starting in 2019. Since the pandemic, traffic around the city has taken on a decidedly Mad-Max vibe. _Every_ time I drive, I see red lights get run. Most times I get on the interstate I see people passing on the shoulder. _Every_ time I get on the interstate I see people driving recklessly fast. Not high-speed flow-of-traffic fast, but 20-30 mph faster than traffic, weaving in and out of traffic without using indicators. Uptown residents have been complaining about the regular street-racing incidents since 2020.

I'm confident there are other factors, and I know not every city has the same problems as Charlotte. But for sure the fact that the police have just stopped enforcing most of the traffic laws has played a part.

[1] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/...

[2] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article26...

Why? In San Francisco the number of traffic citations issued has fallen to essentially zero. The cops are on strike and no longer perceive any marginal benefit from doing their jobs. They get paid either way.

https://transpomaps.org/san-francisco/ca/sfpd-traffic-enforc...

There are more plausible explanations that have been extensively studied, like cars getting bigger. Where are the data showing a causal relationship between police enforcement of traffic laws over the past three years and increased pedestrian deaths? Do we even have indirect data, e.g. Sun Belt traffic enforcement declining more than in other states?

Not sure, and those are all good avenues for exploration. But it doesn’t look to me as if vehicle size, power, and weight can have caused the sudden increase because that happened over 20 years.

I was sort of curious about whether or not other non-pedestrian motor vehicle fatalities also increased and came across an interesting stat. It looks like overall passenger vehicle occupant fatalities have also increased [1] and, interestingly enough, some of this is probably a result of a lower rate of seat belt usage among those fatally injured [2]. All of this coinciding with Covid.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... [2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...

hard to draw conclusions about the trend post COVID when you're talking about a year or two of data

I have been seeing people drive the opposite way on a highway on the shoulder of the road to not sit in traffic. I have seen this many times in the past few years and never saw such flagrant dangerous selfish (in terms of no regards for societal laws) behavior before.

I have seen a car slow down and reverse in one of the inner lanes, because they missed the exit. This was at night in Milano. There was almost no traffic, we passed them from the innermost lane, but there were 2 more lanes to them to the right, all empty.

Some people are just really bad at this :/

This is certainly true. The number of red light runners in the Bay Area has skyrocketed, but not only that, the number of people driving fast and running red lights has gone way up, too. It feels like chaos out there.

Pedestrian deaths aren't evenly distributed, they concentrate among the elderly, disabled, and impoverished.

Our covid response forced us to make explicit some parts of our social agreement that were not usually stated outright before. Covid deaths also concentrated among exactly those groups.

We established outright that harms to these groups are an acceptable cost for convenience to the rest. It's not a large leap for people to apply this to their driving behavior, even unconsciously.

There is also the fact that covid isn't the only thing that happened in 2020. Since that summer's protests the police in my city have been on open but unacknowledged soft strike. They only take actions that are personally fulfilling to them individually, which certainly isn't traffic enforcement.

Further support for this theory is provided by this graph, which shows two separate, distinct jumps from 2014-2016 and 2020-2022:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FzU9P7iX0AARi1F?format=jpg

What happened in 2014 was Ferguson, followed by the Ferguson Report, and the initial stages of changes in enforcement. Then in 2020 we had Floyd and an even larger pullback.

Roads did not change. Phones had been around for years by 2016. SUVs had been gaining in popularity for literally decades. It's not dispositive, but the only thing that fits the timing perfectly are the changes in policing after 2014 and 2020.

Police in some cities have almost completely stopped doing traffic enforcement. San Francisco, for example, used to issue something like 12k citations per month. Now they issue just a couple hundred. The change started right after the Ferguson Report was released:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/10lkdhk/traff...

Other cities have done the same. Police didn't just back off. They practically stopped enforcement altogether. We're talking about 95% drops in enforcement in some places.

You are really cherry picking to come to that conclusion, but if citations correlates that strongly to less accidents that should be easy to show. It can not be the only thing though.

Remember what we're trying to explain here: two distinct step-ups in pedestrian fatalities occurring in just one country. Any proposed explanation needs to address both 1) why it happened when it did; and 2) why it happened in only that one country.

Cars are getting bigger everywhere and have been for decades, so that fails both tests. COVID only happened in 2020 and it happened everywhere, so that fails both tests. Smart phones were introduced in 2007 and they're available everywhere, so that fails both tests.

But "U.S. police departments drastically reduced both the number of traffic stops performed and the total number of citations issued starting just after the Ferguson Report in 2015" is practically slapping you in the face.

As I said, it's not dispositive, but I can't see any reason to reject it (that's not political in nature).

You are postfixing your post saying that this "evidence" is not enough to support you case on its own. My point is that it is even worse.

You miss everything that disproves your opinion. The graph does not support your argumentation at all, there is too much noise. You need to explain how citations affect accidents. We fired most of our traffic cops in the eighties here, the number of citations plumeted. The number of deaths are on a steady decline.

> You need to explain how citations affect accidents.

No, I don't. You're plainly demanding a standard of evidence that you wouldn't in any other domain, especially if you were inclined to prefer the explanation. I'm going to take "citations affect driver behavior" as axiomatic, unless you can disprove it. I'm not going to wait until we have 100 studies to confirm that a commonsense mechanism does indeed function in the most parsimoniously explained way.

We have to act in the world.

We don't have 100 years to figure out if ticketing drivers affects their behavior to some ridiculous standard of evidence you invented just now because you would prefer that explanation weren't true.

People really need to stop allowing themselves to be held hostage to this kind of special pleading.

There’s a growing sense of anger in literally almost everyone I know.

Somewhere on the way, people have become more misanthropic, close-minded, and angry. I’m not sure why.

I think it is social media and the enshittification of all these services? Also, the rise of authoritarianism in America and abroad may contribute to this? Regardless, more and more I see people living in a fantasy world where people both “suck immeasurably” and (strangely) have no freewill or agency and are just meat robots.

I think these two things together are really pernicious.

> I’m not sure why.

The general state of the global economy, late-stage capitalism fucking everyone who isn't a literal millionaire over, climate change, general political instability, the mentioned rise of authoritarianism, etc. All of those are vastly more influential than "social media, enshittification thereof".

They may well go hand in hand. Through social media we are all bombarded with messages about how fucking terrible everything is on a daily basis. Unless you are incredibly selective about your social media usage, you can't spend 10 minutes on a platform without seeing some kind of stressful or depressing or outrage-inducing news.

It used to just be home-bodies and elderly people who sat in front of news programs all day, but now it's all of us. Bad news generates clicks, and there's plenty to be found.

It's really easy to explain? If you are conservative you think the world is going upside down with people just allowed to say they are whatever and you think that trans people are all degenerates or stupid and need to shut up and go away. You likely think that the 2020 election was LITERALLY rigged, and you believe that someone was shot in a peaceful protest at the capitol building. You believe all democrats are molesting children regularly, that they killed Epstein and covered it up. You believe that caravans of gang members are driven across the border regularly, and that democrats want to allow them to just walk into the country, collect benefits without working, yet also steal all the jobs. There's a million more things you are mad about, and you think we pay too much attention to the problems of black people.

If you are progressive, you think the world is warming up and imminent horrors are on the horizon, you see a class structure designed to keep you poor, you will never own anything more expensive than a cup of coffee, you see your friends and loved ones being physically harmed by individuals, and structurally harmed by the state itself for the way they were born, for no clear reason. You see women quite literally dying because doctors cannot legally protect them from a dead fetus. A few rich people have strong say on basically everything that happens in your life, and they are all bitching and moaning that their life is so hard. Meanwhile, all your conservative relatives are screaming that this is a liberal hoax, basic science is a liberal hoax, trans people are a threat, and that democrats deserve death.

People are living in two entirely separate realities and it doesn't matter that only one is closer to actual reality if the people in the other just don't care.

I mean, I agree with what you’re saying… but then again, they aren’t living in 2 different realities. As far as I am aware, there’s still only one reality.

Just because some (potentially most) of these people are delusional doesn’t mean that reality is different for them, just the framework they’re living in doesn’t match objective reality.

And part of all this delusion is a belief that a great many people are idiots, assholes, and irredeemable. That propaganda atomizes us.

I live in a subdivision full of young families with kids. I'm also a runner, an avid dog walker and someone who walks his kids to and from school every day. As someone out on foot on a daily basis I am constantly blown away by the amount of people speeding on residential streets and not stopping at stop signs. I don't get it! These are clearly people who live in these neighbourhoods yet they don't care enough about their own community to drive safely or responsibly.

If people aren't willing to at least drive carefully in their own neighbourhoods, imagine how they drive when they don't have to worry about running over their neighbours kids.

Transition to trail running if you can. Ive stopped taking chances with road running because of the insane drivers. Same with biking. Added benefits of being in nature and getting off pavement helps your joints a bit.

+1. my favorite loops both have some streets though including ones without sidewalks. I run against traffic and it's basically a game of "does that driver see me" for decent stretches.

I understand why runners do this (asphalt is softer than concrete, no sidewalk in a given stretch) but as a cyclist I've had inattentive or aggressive(?) runners force me into traffic lanes by running contra-flow in a bike lane with painted directional arrows. Am not in your running shoes, so I won't judge where you need to run to feels safest, but please be on the lookout!

good point. I'm in the suburbs so no [explicitly] directional lanes but agreed runners should almost always yield nevertheless.

If you are a small woman and there are cougars in your area, trail running is also dangerous. You look like prey and trigger the hunting instinct. Pepper spray won't save you either, because they attack your neck from the rear. You're already dead before you are reaching for the spray!

Source: the signs outside Northern California open spaces (and the newspaper)

Since we have began keeping records in the late 1800s, there have been 26 confirmed deaths from cougar attacks in the US. Which is not to say one shouldn't be smart and aware of the situational risks of any activity, but calling it "dangerous" on that basis seems a bit extreme. In the past 30 years, despite a steady increase in hiking and trail-running, there have been 62 attacks total.

It is estimated that 50 million Americans go hiking each year, and of them 25,000 will die out on the trail. Hiking has some inherent risks. Cougar attacks should only be slightly higher than "swarmed to death by killer bees" on the list of reasons you don't go hiking or trail running.

Have ran 1000s of miles in cougar country without ever even seeing one ... Way more afraid, and more likely to be hit by a motorist on the road or struck by lightning. Not saying ignore the dangers of wildlife, but its very unlikely.

> Transition to trail running if you can.

Key phrase: if you can. I'm a runner too, and I run year 'round in a suburb that has all of the problems others here have mentioned. It is possible, and I've even written guides on how to do it safely. It just takes more effort. In particular, wearing headphones is even less advisable in winter than it is the rest of the year. You need to hear when vehicles are approaching, even if they're EVs and all you're getting is the tire/wind noise. It's certainly not for everyone.

For those who don't want to make the effort, I recommend cross-country skiing or snowshoes. Work with what you have.

same re: runner+kids. It's insane. I watch people blatantly blow through red lights on a daily basis. Someone once grabbed my mother-in-law and pulled her back because she walked when the signal said walk and she would have been hit.

Until now I didn't really have any data, just my eyes, and my brain, and I knew things weren't trending well.

Sad.

Same. I live within a mile of an elementary school and giant park that I was excited to allow my kids to roam to and to run to myself. There's 300m of 35mph road and a network of 25mph residential streets. The latter feel pretty safe, the 35mph section, though, sees people going 55mph while staring at their phones on a regular basis.

I bike to and from work most days, decked out in fluorescent colors and reflectors and blinky lights that should make a negligent vehicular homicide civil suit a slam-dunk for my wife, plus an excellent set of life insurance policies if that doesn't work.

To my shame, I have a large old SUV that I use on days I can't bike, but it brings me a perverse joy to drive at or just under the actual speed limit on my road and watch the traffic pile up behind me.

this is the way. don't feel bad. whoever is angry about you can't really complain about it. If you are often late by car, the solution is to start a few mins earlier, not reckless speeding.

Besides slowing the vehicles behind you down to a safe and legal speed, a secondary advantage of obeying the speed limit on neighborhood streets is to influence routing algorithms.

Many routing algorithms base their decisions on past travel time and current traffic conditions. If you convince enough of your neighbors to drive legally then eventually the routing algorithms increase their anticipated travel time for those streets which (depending on what the alternatives are) may result in fewer people being routed onto those streets.

There's also a social media element. There are many accounts who post close calls along with questions like "who was in the wrong?"

The answers you see are sometimes jaw-dropping[1] and I suspect there's an element of "the blind leading the blind" as people assume some of this is correct.

[1] For example someone posted a close call where a truck turning left nearly hit a pedestrian crossing in the crosswalk and the top comments claimed that it was the pedestrian's fault because the red hand was flashing and she should not be in the crosswalk.

Edit: There are also sooo many incidents of psychotic road rage posted on social media that it makes you lose faith in humanity. But it's hard to tell if this is an uptick in incidents or an uptick in visibility.

One thing my parents taught me even in the '70s was that a red light or stop sign isn't going to make anyone stop. You never step into a crosswalk just because the light says it's OK.

Also a runner here - over the years I've lived in a handful of towns, and the wealthier the town, the more likely people are to just totally blow stop signs without checking. (And they get mad if they almost hit you)

> And they get mad if they almost hit you

I don't read much into that. It's extremely common for people to become angry when startled, especially in a near-collision situation.

I'll just say, it's hard for me not to read something into it.

The wealthiest town I lived in (in college), a group of classmates and I almost got run down by a minivan, while we were crossing during a red light and walk signal. The driver rolled down the window to yell at us that we were in the wrong, "Because we didn't pay taxes in this town". Is that normal/common? Because that sort of experience was normal for that town - I knew a few people who actually had been hit while walking with a similar experience, being yelled at by the driver while they are lying on the ground.

As a cyclist in France and Belgium, I'd say it's again the extremes.

Wealthy and poor neighborhoods are the dangerous ones where drivers are absolute dangers. And to me the reason is simple : there's not much law enforcement there. The rich ones because they are friends with the mayor/police chief so they have orders to not bother the locals. The poor ones because not sending police there is the easiest way to keep the bad guys there. At least they are not doing their stuff elsewhere.

Many people told me so and I didn't wanted to believe them because it was too simple. But bad experience after bad experience made me come to the same conclusion : where there's no law enforcement, more and more people are breaking the law, no matter the consequences for their peers.

Stop signs basically dont work anywhere. If you want people to drive slowly, you have to build streets that make them do so.

If anyone is interested in this stuff, the youtube channel NotJustBikes talks a lot about this and related topics. Here's a short video on how "traffic calming" infrastructure gets drivers to slow down, and we all know that stop signs just dont.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tGOBOw9s-QM

Stop sign + a tiny roundabout is the cheapest way to this, e.g https://www.google.fr/maps/@37.4461846,-122.1654555,3a,75y,3...

Someone probably died here for this roundabout to be added though.

This is not the best design, you can still go full speed through it. Much better ones actually force you to slow down, ie sub 30kmh otherwise your suspension, tires etc will get hammered a bit (or more). There are numerous ways how to do it, ie central island is wide, island's walls are high and steep, you can have speed bumps before it etc. Its has been done elsewhere and it works.

Already done.

A car leaps 7 meters into the air across the roundabout.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aniguxnz9ik

Important to mention that driver was drunk out of his mind (2.8‰ BAC)

So it worked, weeded out dangerous driver before it can kill bunch of kids crossing the road on pedestrian crossing. Generally it really works, I mean 100% of the cases where I live. Everybody slows down, normal cars, sports cars, motobikes etc. If you don't, you suffer for your own ignorance.

Indeed, with even a halfway decent sports car, a roundabout isn't a traffic calming measure, it's a little bit of excitement. If you want to slow traffic down, put in an Indian style speed bump. Though in the US you'd probably have vandals taking it a jackhammer to it the next day.

The European solution is the right-before-left rule which means you always have to yield to cars coming from your right.

In residential areas you never would have any signs because of this rule.

You can speed through it if visibility is good but it is very hard to argue you weren't at fault in case of a crash.

There's no single European solution. Only some countries have the right-before-left rule.

Britain can shrink the roundabout to just paint, or sometimes paint and a slight hump: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4722603,-0.0655446,3a,75y,32...

Denmark prefers tight corners and narrower roads. Just one parked car and you have to slow: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6754101,12.4699621,3a,75y,28...

speed bumps and lower speeds are the best way in residential areas. You can run a stop sign, you can't run a speedbump.

> we all know that stop signs just dont

Are there some numbers on this? Even if your own?

I mean, _some_ people don't stop, sure that's valid on its face.

But they "just don't work anywhere", is that what, half of drivers refusing to stop at a four way stop? One in four?

I get that it's a fraught topic, but still...

It's not as comprehensive as you're probably looking for, but I saw a video a while back with some observations on this in Ottawa: https://youtu.be/HT_KdFCVEdc

It is true from my experience that yield signs are used extensively in some parts of Europe. Are stop signs really that common in NA?

> Are stop signs really that common in NA?

More common than yield signs, by far. Which is probably why most people treat them as yield signs.

If you were to bike around my city, you will notice that between zero and one percent of vehicles will come to a full stop at any stop signs or while doing right turns on red lights. For pedestrian safety, I think rolling right on red lights is worse because the cars will often only be looking left, and never check to their right for someone in the crosswalk or a cyclist approaching on their right.

The psychology of this seems easy to explain, too. Stop signs get folks into a routine of basically, "stop, see nothing is there to stop for, start moving." Do that enough times, and you accidentally move on to "start moving" from habit alone. Contrast that with things that have you slow down, where you will slow down every time from the same learned habit. Even if you accidentally move on and potentially hit something, you will have at least slowed considerably beforehand.

(Yes, you should also be coming to a full stop, but it is impressive how rapidly people will go through the motions of "stop, look, go" to the point that they don't realize they didn't finish any one step. Similar to talking, all told. In speech, most words blend together and you don't have meaningful stops between all words.)

Also looks like the perceived risk is too low. In other countries, ignoring a stop sign (or red traffic light) can cost you your drivers licence fairly quickly, if the police notices it. So there are lots of cameras that 24/7 get the reckless drivers. And driving without readable plates is also not a small thing that gets handwaived.

But the rules only help you so far, you need the execution (iE: police on the streets that actually performs their duties). Might not be as glorious as stopping a shooter, but ensuring smooth traffic literally also saves lives.

As someone who lives in a pre-car suburb, I don't feel that at all.

Road design goes a long way towards that, and roads that _feel_ safe counter-intuitively make drivers behave in less safe ways, while most drivers (broad generalization) will behave more cautiously when the roads they drive feel unsafe. The fact that your subdivision is statistically likely top have wide roads with plenty of visibility, few (if any) cars parked on the street, and big setbacks means drivers feel more comfortable with going 30+ MPH in a residential zone. On the other hand, my narrow street with cars parked on both sides and only about two feet of clearance on each side tends to make most drivers only go 20-25 MPH (although there's still daredevil scofflaws).

Edit: and the city is improving it -- my street is scheduled to get curb extensions, which should both make it slightly safer for drivers (visibility into intersections will be improved) and for pedestrians (the road will be further narrowed at intersections).

Gold star for using the term scofflaws.

Residential speeders are bunch of no-account ruffians if you ask me.

I think the rise of delivery of all sorts of things (food, goods) has people who don't live in our neighborhoods doing a lot of this fast, stop-sign-running behavior. When I walk near dinner time I notice a lot more of the behavior.

Delivery can be especially bad because the drivers have a direct incentive to dash from customer to customer. Maximizing their revenue takes precedence ūber (over) driving safely. This is nothing new. Dominos had to cancel their 30 min or its free guarantee because drivers were running red lights.

Backup cameras are Federally mandated in new cars because there was a predictable kill count of parents running over their own kids in their own driveways. Cars are so common that we don't really think about their dangers.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/cars-us-now-required-backup-camera...

That probably varies a lot by region and neighborhood. My neighbors and I don't usually stop at our stop sign. But the sight lines are good and none of us drive faster than 15 mph, so formally stopping just because there is a sign is not worth much. If someone is walking or riding their bike, we stop for them whether there's a stop sign or not. We did have a neighbor once who tended to speed, but peer pressure turns out to be pretty effective, he drives as slow as the rest of us now.

You should try to get the stop signs replaced by yields and possibly some traffic calming. A stop sign everyone blows through is a normalisation of deviance.

There is a stop sign in front of my house and probably around 95% of cars stop, and the amount of cars that completely ignore it (ie don't even slow down) is easily <1%. I think this is just more of an issue with local cultural norms.

> There is a stop sign in front of my house and probably around 95% of cars stop

There was some discussion amongst my neighbors about a sign near us and we found that the key variable is the speed at which one considers a vehicle to be "stopped". Some folks felt that a 6 mph (10 kph) rolling stop at an empty intersection counted as a stop while others felt that anything more than 1 mph (1.6 kph) meant that the driver was running the stop sign. Since the majority of drivers fell somewhere in that range the estimates for how many people stopped were wildly different.

In many states you are required to stop if a pedestrian is crossing the street.

What has happened a lot is I will stop to let a pedestrian cross the street at a legal cross walk and the person behind me will assume I am an idiot, honk, and speed around me.

My intuition is this is the cause of a significant amount of pedestrian deaths: impatient drivers that assume every stopped car is just an obstacle to zip around.

We had an 8 year old boy die in my hometown to this exact scenario and I have witnessed too many near collisions to count. I would support making passing like this automatic jail time, equivalent in severity to drunk driving.

This happened to me and it left me with lasting anxiety. I stopped in town at a crosswalk for a pedestrian waiting to cross, and the car a couple seconds behind me went around and tore through the crosswalk.

I don't know what the answer is. Drivers make mistakes -- they don't see things, they might be preoccupied, etc. etc. And yeah, all too often they're negligent to the point of malice. But urban landscapes are almost explicitly designed to force those misjudgements to have literally life-ending consequences, and I haven't seen any large-scale societal acknowledgement of that.

The thing to do is NOT do the unexpected. Being excessively courteous and letting an oncoming car turn left, or stopping for a pedestrian who is not already in the crosswalk but is waiting for a gap in traffic, is unexpected. It surprises other drivers and they get annoyed and then do something stupid like zooming around you.

If you are required by law to stop for them once they are in the crosswalk then cars should expect to find people stopped some of the time and stop themselves.

If nobody expects to stop then pedestrians either must always wait for a big enough gap that they hope to cross unimpeded or step out knowing you are coming to force you to stop. The first is frequently impossible and the second is dangerous. It also creates the "dangerous" situation of having a car stopped at an intersection.

Older folks especially likely to have a hard time doing A or B due to decreasing mobility and vision. Personally I think if you can't handle such a scenario safely you have no business being in charge of a car.

I don't disagree but I also know who's going to "win" in a collision between me and a car.

When I cross a street I have my head on a swivel and I do not step into the crosswalk unless I have the "walk" light and the cross-traffic is already stopped, or far enough away that they have room to stop. I try to make eye contact with drivers so I can be (more) sure they see me. Or if there is not a signal at the crosswalk I wait until there is a big enough gap that I won't be causing approaching drivers to stand on their brakes to stop for me.

And with all that I still assume that the approaching cars do not see me and am prepared to break into a sprint if needed to get out of the way.

It's actually solvable like a lot of things if we have time and willingness to invest in doing so. You put cameras at intersections or accept cryptographically signed unmodified dash cam footage and mail out the notice that the offending driver is a pedestrian for the next period of time starting at 3 days and progressively increasing until they are giving up driving for the next year.

If they drive during suspension the same cameras allow us to send escalating fines calculated based on their annual income in the last 12 months terminating in confiscation of their car.

Most bad drivers will get small escalating fines that aren't ruinous and stop driving like assholes. A tiny minority who are basically a menace to society will end up owing a ruinous amount of money and losing their wheels.

The problem with making this jailable (which I do not support in the absence of a collision) is that you stopping to let a pedestrian legally cross is difficult to distinguish from you stopping in a travel lane or bike lane to pick up an Uber fare or stopping to double park near someone waiting for their own Uber. The latter two cases are actually obstacles created by anti-social behavior and are probably more common in aggregate than drivers stopping for pedestrians.

If you pull up behind a car stopped at a pedestrian crossing, your assumption should be they are stopped for a pedestrian.

GP is suggesting they’re in a locale where mid-block pedestrians have the right of way. (I think they may have edited their post to add “at a legal crosswalk” as I don’t think I read that the first time and it does change the meaning significantly.)

Or they assume you're an idiot and zip around in the other lane nearly killing the pedestrian

It's very easy to distinguish. People indicating to the right and slowing down are probably picking up or dropping off a pedestrian. If they aren't indicating, you must assume there's a hazard in front of them, slow down, and proceed with caution.

Ok, but what do you do then?

Fundamentally the issue is that cars are huge visibility blockers. It is completely inconceivable that a cyclist could stop or slow to let a pedestrian cross, and the driver behind them would not see the pedestrian.

Without clear sight lines, drivers would need to communicate. But fundamentally drivers have extremely limited means of communicating information to those around them, and all of them are ambiguous. Hazard lights can mean a million things, including either "please pass me" or "it is extremely dangerous to pass me". In my city they most commonly mean "I want to park in this bike lane." Honking can mean a million things too, and sounds angry, aggressive, and startling. You can't really use your words, in a car, unless all of you have quiet engines, quiet tires, and roll your windows down. It is very hard, in most lighting conditions, to see the driver if they are trying to signal with their hands, because of sun glare, window tinting, lighting differentials between the cabin and the exterior.

So, the car in front blocks your ability to receive information about what's in front of them, while also being unable to communicate any helpful information themselves.

I see exactly this in Oakland, CA a lot. If someone slows down even a bit, people will rip around them and pass them in what should be turning lane. I think people are stressed, traumatized, maybe disabled from the pandemic/long covid. I also think instant gratification devices/apps have made us super impatient. And there's next to no traffic enforcement in many cities now.

> In many states you are required to stop if a pedestrian is crossing the street.

Wait, are there states where this is not required?

Not if there isn't a crosswalk.

People randomly crossing the street? Yeah you have to stop to the best of your ability because murder is against the law, but if they are jaywalking across a busy street and get hit? I highly doubt any state would prosecute you if you were going the speed limit and hit your brakes but still hit them.

This happens a lot in PDX and it makes me furious. It's like putting a hit out on the pedestrian crossing the street. I would like to see how the people honking their horns would like it if someone called for their death.

In Britain stopping (to load/unload the car, or to park) at a pedestrian crossing is worth a £100 fine and ¼ of the driving licence 'lost' (do this four times within 3 (?) years and you're banned from driving and must retake the driving test). This is similar to passing a red light, or going slightly faster than the speed limit, though I think they have a larger fine.

I'm not sure what the penalty would be for overtaking a car stopped at a crossing. In theory it's the same, but in practise I think the stronger offence of dangerous driving would be used. If found guilty, that's an automatic ban from driving, an unlimited fine and up to 2 years jail.

It's so rare I can't find any news on this happening without other serious offences (speeding in residential areas, etc). I think it would count as "overtaking dangerously" though: https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...

The area you aren't allowed to stop within, or overtake within, is marked with zig-zag lines: https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/pedestrian-crossings.html

Not only do we kill thousands of people a year with our vehicles, and get away with it, we stole the outdoors from our children. For every child a driver kills, hundreds — thousands — more are told to stay away from the road, to play in the backyard, not the front, and that no, they can't walk or bike to school, maybe when they're older (but of course "older" basically means "when you can drive").

Then we wonder why kids seem so insecure, anxious, and to lack independence. And why adults are so lonely. Where we used to have humans we now have steel beasts hurtling along at terrifying speeds. Our streets are places of violence.

We're moving the the Netherlands this summer because the US has gone absolutely, mind-bendingly insane. Mechs slaughter our children and far too many think the kids are the problem.

I'm not even slightly surprised by this, sadly. Cops need to start ticketing people who drive like maniacs. I drive in DC, and every week I almost get hit by some loon going 30+ over the limit who doesn't care that I'm in the lane they're merging into. I've never seen anyone get ticketed. The roads have become something out of Mad Max, just pure developing-world anarchy.

The merging and the lane etiquette are the two biggest for me, though I do a lot more driving now than a few years ago. People going below the speed limit in the leftmost lanes regularly back up the freeway since no one can pass. Also is way more dangerous since some weave in the middle lanes (or right) to make the pass.

Yeah that is a weird one because no one is going to get ticketed for going the speed limit or 5 over in the passing/leftmost lane and technically they are doing nothing wrong. It just makes driving more difficult for everyone else.

The rightmost lane is somewhat similar. You really shouldnt travel in it. It's for getting on and off the road. If you are in it you're making it harder for other to merge on/off the road. But again you're not going to get a ticket for pulling into that right lane and staying as long as you'd like.

Some people are actually not even aware of these, "rules". I had a friend who at 25 still drove in the right lane all the time and would get mad when people were always slowing down to get off the highway.

How do we pass on this knowledge that, while fairly important, is not actually law?

It's funny how "going the speed limit or 5 over in the leftmost lane" and "actually using the rightmost lane" are exactly the things I wish more people were doing in this country in Europe.

> The rightmost lane is somewhat similar. You really shouldnt travel in it. It's for getting on and off the road. If you are in it you're making it harder for other to merge on/off the road. But again you're not going to get a ticket for pulling into that right lane and staying as long as you'd like.

I'm curious as to where this is the law. It was not in the state where I learned to drive.

It isnt law anywhere. That is my point. If you're traveling in the rightmost land on a three lane highway you are making it difficult for others to get on and off. The middle lane is where you should be.

I drive the speed limit. If I did that in the middle lane, people would be passing me on both sides. The right lane is for slower traffic. Lanes to the left are for passing. Merging is the responsibility of the drivers merging.

By rightmost lane, do you mean the on/offramp? Otherwise, it's legally required in much the country to stay in the right lane except when passing.

I meant 3 lane highways.

Enforcement is not the solution because it requires constant vigilance. Road design is because you can build the road in a way that brings about the speed/safety envelope you desire, and then it always works correctly whether anyone is monitoring it or not.

It's always amazing to me how on this engineering-heavy forum, so many users fail to recognize the benefit some simple engineering can deliver.

Well because the roads are what they are, and "reengineering" them to be something else would take years, would be disruptive, and cost millions. So at best you'll get change when the road needs to be rebuilt anyway, because it's worn out.

Roads are re-done constantly. I'm certain you passed a construction site in the last week of driving around - and I am certain without knowing your situation or where you live. Cities and communities have massive budgets to just maintain infrastructure.

Each such moment is one where small incremental improvements can be implemented. When a road from 2009 is re-done in 2024, govts can easily enforce that it must adhere to the 2020 guidelines. Each time a line is re-painted, it can be re-painted to increase safety. Each time a curb or bollard is fixed, it can be fixed to protect pedestrians just a bit better. etc.

Yes, it takes ages. But infrastructure is never finished it's a constant evolution of small steps. It's trivial and cheap (as in: free) to make those steps in the direction of more safety. All that is needed is a will do to so...

Not really.

You can make a new protected bike lane by just throwing a bunch of jersey barriers on the side of a road. It costs (in relative transportation cost terms) almost nothing.

These sort of things would instantly make the roads dramatically safer.

The only reason this isn't done isn't due to cost, but due to political opposition to having any amount of road space removed from exclusive car use.

how is setting up a few cameras and issuing serious tickets to idiots not an engineering solution?

obviously it's not a long-term one, as the only real one is to offer effective alternative to all this constant mandatory carmageddon by having walkable/bikeable cities, blablabla.

Although I agree in general, enforcement is a reasonable band-aid to save lives while waiting for the entire road system to be re-engineered.

The engineering explanation fails to account for the major change from pre- to post- 2020. The road design didn’t change, but clearly driving behavior did. Strong Towns says it’s because roads are less congested now, but I’ve seen plenty of aggressive, reckless driving regardless of congestion level (it seems some people are frustrated by it and act out).

Reckless drivers will do their thing regardless of road design.

Except they cant kill as effectivly whit a good road design..

I honestly think it's a "do both" issue.

We seriously need to radically re-engineer most roads around me, but the police also really need to step up enforcement.

Before 2020 I could count the number of cars with either no plates or expired temp plates on one hand, since 2020 the number of cars with no plates is crazy, and the number of cars with months expired temp tags is just insane. That also tells me those cars don't have insurance, since I don't know of any insurance that will actually cover any claims you have with no valid registration.

https://www.thv11.com/article/traffic/arkansas-has-27000-car...

Even crazier to me, it looks like California is going to exact opposite direction and making it something you can't be pulled over for.

https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB50/id/2813949

Why do you need to get pulled over for this? In Europe you will just get a letter with your fine.

What? Without pulling you over, how would they know who you are in order to mail you a fine? The point of the plate is to identify the car, after all. Otherwise, you're just an anonymous moving 2-ton hunk of metal.

If something is wrong with the car, the owner of the car gets the fine. The owner of the car is on file.

If somebody uses the car on the owner's behalf and the fine is tied to the driver the fine must be forwarded by the owner to this person.

And since the issue we're discussing is missing a license plate, how do you propose identifying the owner of the car, in order to fine them, without pulling the car over?

We need automatic enforcement via speed cameras and such, but whenever these are brought in, the car lobby moans about how it's a "cash grab" and not about saving people's lives.

DC already has an enormous police:population ratio. If more policing were the answer, surely DC would be on the forefront of using police to stop traffic violations.

Police cannot effectively solve this issue. This requires engineering. DC's super wide, straight streets tell drivers "its safe to go really fast here, you have a ton of space". That's where the problem starts, and thats where the solution has to start.

> Cops need to start ticketing people who drive like maniacs.

Not just this, but people who continue to drive like maniacs need their licenses and cars taken away. Driving is a privilege.

> pure developing-world anarchy

The developing world (generalizing hugely) can be better in some ways. Yes, the traffic isn't as regimented. But in many places, lots of people are on mopeds and scooters, and a shared sense that everyone is a vulnerable meat-bag persists. Plus there are forms of politeness, like chirping the horn to warn people -- "heads up on your left".

The US, by contrast, is full of SUV and pickup drivers who feel invulnerable, and I don't see the same nods at civility.

On the whole, though, the US' more regimented traffic culture is still safer, I have to admit.

Speed Cameras are a lot cheaper than cops, they don't get killed and they don't need a pension. They should do gofundmes for installing speed cameras in your hood, I'd fork some money.

The efficacy of speed cameras depends on the socioeconomics of the area.

The "car culture" lunatic drivers I've met in the Baltimore / DC area just make a hobby of fighting tickets. They have lawyers they regularly work with and somehow always make it out with their license intact.

I mean, you have a photo of them timestamped, there should be no recourse in those cases?

The point I was trying to make is that, after a threshold is reached, one would reasonably assume that these individuals would have their licenses revoked or, at least, be forced to drive in an automobile factory-locked to not be able to travel faster than e.g., 70mph.

The lawyers involved don't stop these individuals from having to pay fines. They can afford the fines and the lawyers.

The lawyers are there to keep the licenses intact. "But Mr. X needs his license in order to get to work at his important job for Corporation Y!"

Financial deterrents don't work well in places with high median incomes like Maryland.

Finland fines drivers according to their income: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...

(Still disappointing that he was only banned from driving for 10 days, even though it was a third offence.)

Just one more evidence point for why crossovers, SUVs, and trucks are stupid passenger vehicles. There are way too many of these behemoths on our roadways, many lifted, making it worse for pedestrians, anyone driving a normal decent car, and the environment.

We have an arms race of stupidity with everyone trying to get a bigger vehicle than everybody else so they can drive more aggressively, see past the other stupidly large boxes, and feed their false egotistical ideas about safety in size.

When will we get regulations that get us back to actual cars on the road instead of a sea of “bimbo boxes” as predicted in Snow Crash?

Is it really stupid to participate in this arms race? The data suggests that you are much safer in an SUV or truck when it comes to vehicle on vehicle accidents. In fact, the average deaths per 10 billion miles for cars and light vehicles is roughly 40, which is almost twice as many deaths as compared to trucks or SUVs. It's even worse for mini 4 door cars, at around 80 deaths per 10 billion miles. The only thing safer than a truck or SUV is a minivan. The correct choice for individuals is to participate in the arms race, unfortunately. You are correct that the only way around this is though regulations, but a lot of people aren't going to hold their breath. If you can't beat em, join em.

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

Good point. This can be trivially tackled to have ie vehicle tax based on some formula with horse power, weight, category of vehicle etc. Ie Switzerland has it, each canton their own rules. You wanna destroy roads and environment more with your poor car choices? Pay up and go ahead if you want. Use earned money to road repairs, cleanup of pollution etc.

There is a video of a pick up driver with a front camera which was the only way he could see the Miata in front of him.

Well this is my point. As long as vehicles like this continue to be on the road, it's in the best interest of the Miata driver to upgrade to a larger vehicle.

Which is an arms race in stupidity.

One solution I've heard mentioned is charging a tax per 1000 pounds of vehicle. There needs to be some incentive for using a lighter/smaller vehicle.

That sounds reasonable but I wonder how well it'll work. Gas here in SoCal is over 5$ a gallon and people still driving massive cars paying over 100$ per fill up. It's nuts!

Also related, one of my favorite philosophy papers: Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked? by Douglas Husak

Argues that SUVs are immoral because of the high crash incompatibility. They cause more damage to others (disproportionally), and ironically don't provide more safety for drivers due to higher rollover instances.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447

This is also one of my favorite papers. It's utterly ridiculous how the "normal"/"average" vehicle in the US is now a huge crossover that drives like a beached whale, most of which have 4 occupants or less from manufacture to when they end up in a junkyard. It's utterly ridiculous. Nearly anything a crossover or SUV can do, an AWD hatchback can do better while being safer for pedestrians, other drivers, better for the environment, and generally less of a nuisance.

Americans have become pathologically selfish when it comes to driving.

Everyone seems to really want to blame cars being too big or whatever, but since cops stopped enforcing traffic violations in many places over covid some drivers have gone absolutely crazy. I'm the last person to ask for _more_ policing but something has to be done here. I also suspect that more and more people are walking in general, although I don't have any evidence for that.

In a functioning built environment more walking should result in exactly 0 more pedestrian deaths, but alas it's the people who are to blame for killing each other.

A pillars are getting wider, and the bottoms of windows are getting higher. These changes are being made for crashworthiness, the effects of visibility on accidents are understudied.

I just purchased a 2018 F-150 and was concerned about being able to drive it safely after reading threads like these. Surprisingly, I can be much more aware of my surroundings and have fewer blind spots in the truck than my CR-V. Even directly in front of the tall hood I can see fine.

There are a lot of valid criticisms of big trucks but most of the discussion around them is pretty ignorant.

We've definitely seen a lot more pedestrian deaths in our area in the last couple years. But it's not the prevalence or size of the cars, SUVs, trucks.

What's happening here is that there's an explosion of homeless living and walking in and around the very fast two-lane roads and one highway in particular. They are drugged out of their mind and oblivious. Just about every couple weeks there's a fatality where someone wanders into the road or crosses unsafely in the night and the car or often 18-wheeler can't see to avoid them. At highway speeds it wouldn't matter if it was a Honda, and sometimes is.

This isn't a suburban or urban area where it's people getting mowed down in the crosswalks. This is out in the desert. Just another way that fentanyl kills. Since 5 years ago, it seems to have increased almost an order of magnitude.

So as captivating as the SUV story is, at least here it's nothing to do with it. But might not be like that everywhere. But the article doesn't address this at all.

If you are making claims you have to back them up somewhat.

doesn't that go for the "experts" (especially Martin) in this article, too?

while unsatisfying, the evidence that i put out is from first-hand experience and is at least better than the hand-waving correlation/causation. especially when it's easy to point to at least one obvious factor that isn't mentioned.

I found this which does goes into it partially:

http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/media...

Well, sort of. If a professor of finance writes an article about how options work I'll trust it, but if he starts saying "historically options were used to xyz abc political thing whatever" then sure he should back up his argument.

Yep, it must be the massive increase in jaywalking causing this.

in our area there has been a massive increase in jaywalking. Not jaywalking-per-se like just crossing out of the crosswalk.

Like, passed out lying in the road, sitting in the road, stumbling around on-and-off the sideway or shoulder dazed and oblivious, staring at the sky mumbling, wading into traffic against the lights without any care. bicycling in the traffic lanes going across or the wrong way or across flipping off and daring people to hit them. They are either completely oblivious or don't give a f@ck.

There's also been a massive increase in people driving like utter maniacs. Those would be the meth-heads that have a car.

Can confirm, my one incident is a homeless guy who decided to sail down a hill on his BMX at night, wearing all black, and run a red light against my right-of-way.

He "hit me" as much as I hit him, but given I'm in a car on a freeway exit, obviously he was worse for wear.

But on the plus side, I do drive a low slung sports sedan so he got to tumble and walk away alive at least. Car was a write-off though.

If he'd been hit by a truck like the one my tenant drives (GMC Sierra 3500), the hood is about eye-level for me, and I'm 5'11, it probably would have been a lot worse.

every time I'm in the car I'm astonished by the number of people looking down at phones while driving.

Is my experience unique? Is anyone else surprised about metrics like these?

Nope. Anecdotal to me of course, but I did a little activity where I stood on a pedestrian island off a busy stretch of road near me. I did this a handful of times.

Over each 5 minute stretch, I'd observe at least 1/10 drivers staring down at their phones while driving through intersection

It's nuts. We are a distracted population.

It could also be the pedestrians looking at their phone, not where they’re going. Or both combined

ya you're right it's not the 2-ton hunk of metal hurling through space with teenager addicted to tik tok behind the wheel where a wrist movement of an inch is life vs death.

I was in Canada last week for work and it was shocking how few drivers were distracted by phones. I came to expect cars to drive away when their light turned green rather than waiting for the “wake up, dumbass!” honk from the car one to three cars behind. It was nice and immediately upon return to the US, I saw the red light scrollers back in force.

> Is my experience unique?

Not at all. When my wife and I go on longer trips, e.g. north to ski or west to where my daughter was at college, she likes to do most of the driving. Sometimes I amuse myself by counting how many of the drivers around us are using their phones while driving. It's often well over 50% and that's counting conservatively - e.g. phone actually visible in their hand, not on the dash or in their lap. If police would just enforce that one law with hefty fines and loss of license, I think safety would be significantly improved.

It would appear Vision Zero in the US is not working.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

Largely because it's still not seen as favorable by the public to prioritize pedestrian safety over vehicular parking/speed - even in liberal areas where this should be easy. We are a car-centric society, and I'm not sure when that'll change (unfortunately).

it's barely implemented in the US, and typically only in large cities... far too early to call it a failure, and I strongly suspect that the problem is that it doesn't go far enough (it does nothing to regulate the vehicles themselves or driving skills, for example... road design can't fix everything)

To add to this, many US cities adopted Vision Zero in the 2010s with resolutions to end all fatalities involving vehicular traffic in 10 years. Some as soon as 2024. Yet, I don't see any progress showing they have gone to zero for any of those cities.

Meanwhile road deaths per million inhabitants drastically decreased across the EU27.

https://etsc.eu/euroadsafetydata/

To make progress on answering that I think you'd want to compare the trajectory of traffic deaths in areas that adopted the Vision Zero approach to ones that didn't?

Well in my opinion, "Vision Zero" in the US will apply only to the peons. If you are connected with Law Enforcement or Politicians, you get a free pass unless you kill someone in such a manner that it cannot be brushed under the carpet.

It is about making road design safe by default, at least here where it started. It is a very car centric model of the world though.

In the sense that it's not been implemented, yeah, its not working.

> A core principle of the vision is that "Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society"

At least in Portland this has _never_ been implemented.

Vision Zero is a failure in US cities because it is pure virtue signaling and not a good-faith, focused effort to eliminate traffic fatalities.

Leadership doesn’t give a shit, which makes sense because most voters are drivers who accept that the cost of uninhibited motoring is measured in human lives.

People value their own metal boxes on wheels over other people's bodies. That much should be abundantly clear to anyone who uses the road as a pedestrian or cyclist. I can't begin to imagine how cars can be compatible with society when people are like that.

Does nobody else find it weird that in most of suburban America there are still no sidewalks? I was just driving around US1 in Connecticut and there were no sidewalks. Lots of people walking on grass beside the road to get to a bus stop. I guess if you're handicapped you just move.

I find it sad, but not weird, at least, not if weird means "unexpected". Sidewalks cost money, and urban sprawl is full of the kinds of cost-cutting decisions that cause long-term problems but look good on short-term accounting spreadsheets.

There are sidewalks on much of US1, but no, it isn't surprising that more highway-like roads do not have sidewalks.

The speed limit is 35mph, there are 1-2 two lanes, plus an occasional middle turn lane, there are street lights, the roadway isn't elevated, and connects directly to businesses and homes.

I don't think there's a less highway-like road, other than dirt ones.

I'm almost certain people do more than 35 on that road :)

Texting and driving have to be behind some large portion of this increase.

Touchscreen car control too.

This. None of our cars require it (we drive older used stuff) but every time I rent a car I wonder how people operate e.g. the climate controls without crashing.

The hands-free law was IMO, a failure. What used to be people staring at their phones while holding them up at the steering wheel now has people trying to be more discreet and placing phones between their legs or near the cup holders.

Hands-free! But also doubly dangerous.

This is my exact experience! People used to text with their phone in front of them, which is dangerous but at least they had peripheral vision. Now they hide their phone while they do it. You see it so often, someone not everyone looking vaguely at the road.

I thought this was a problem at first, but I don't see anyone trying to hide it anymore. "Driving" is just an app that people glance at while using their phones.

Walking and on their phones, too. In recent years I've seen people step into intersections while on their phone without even looking up.

Edit: anyone who disagrees and has downvoted me care to explain why? I wrote the comment from the perspective a pedestrian. I don't even drive!

Some cities consider it such problem they've talked about making it illegal to walk around in the street looking at your phone: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/20/us/new-york-walking-while-tex...

It's blaming the victim?

I see this very often as well, but you're not operating a several ton vehicle. At worst you run into some kid and knock his ice cream over.

It's the presence of cars, their prioritization in our infrastructure, and unenforced laws surrounding them that are the problem.

It takes two to not get run over. I'm deaf. So I really do not have the luxury of just hoping others see me. I have to be real careful in traffic. Is it fair? Not really. I care more about not being run over than whether it's fair.

> It takes two to not get run over.

Who thinks like this? Seriously what is wrong with you? Large SUVs have blind spots larger than people, and fatal crashes are generally happening in cross walks in cities. They often happen when vehicles are turning. Blaming pedestrians is just fucking awful.

[EDIT] I checked the data again most strikes are happening in urban areas in places where there is no crosswalk or on shoulders. So largely due t infrastructure placing pedestrians and cars in contention.

>generally happening in cross walks in cities

Do you have a source for this?

Excuse me I had to recheck the CDC data, the most common spots are actually in urban areas on shoulders or where there is no crosswalk. Basically in places where pedestrian infrastructure is poor.

Do you have a link to this data? I'd be curious to see it.

I've driven through/around the deadliest city for pedestrians and in my experience driving there, it seemed both drivers and pedestrians had a death wish. Many drivers were running red lights and many pedestrians were just crossing wherever they felt like it. Also, lots of people obviously on drugs vaguely aware of their surroundings.

So what you're saying checks out, I'm just wondering about the degree to which these things are a factor.

Laughably the CDC's site is down now! You can google "cdc data on pedestrian traffic deaths".

Someone who has been hit by a car twice. That's who thinks like that. I do not step into traffic without carefully looking every direction, to the horizon, for any vehicle that might move in my direction. Should I have to live like this? No. Do I live like this because I want to keep living? Yes.

Somehow the people in this thread have interpreted this observation as a justification that it's okay. Don't know why, really. Is it victim blaming to suggest locking ones' doors? Obviously we shouldn't have any thieves. How dare someone suggest measures that might reduce the ability of malevolent parties to harm you.

You're still victim blaming, having been hit by a car doesn't magically absolve you for have a rancid opinion. No one is advocating that pedestrians don't take precautions, this is a total straw man. People are calling for better, safer infrastructure and enforcement around unsafe driving and you're blaming walking while texting. Your claim is unsupported by evidence.

There's a saying with motorcycles: "you can be right, or you can be dead". If you want pie-in-sky thinking, sure victims are never to blame. But if you want to be realistic about safety, it doesn't matter who is correct or who has right-of-way, you do what have to be safe. We teach children to look both ways before crossing the street - not to blame them, but to keep them alive. You're being quite close minded on this.

It isn't pie in the sky thinking to say that major metros in Europe don't have the problems that NYC has in terms of pedestrian deaths.

I think his point is that the graveyard is full of people who had the right of way. I don't think he's victim blaming, only saying that following the rules is not enough, you have to make sure everyone else is following and react proactively if they are not. Using your phone around heavy machinery like automobiles is simply not enough, even if the pedestrian crossing light is green. You can say this is wrong and unfair and horrible, etc... but ignoring it is not going to help you.

I agree, but with the noted caveat that pedestrians who are completely oblivious to their surroundings are usually only a danger to themselves, whereas drivers who are even somewhat oblivious to their surroundings can be far more dangerous.

When I lived in SF, I saw this constantly btw. I probably saved on guy's life who saw a walk sign turn on at an intersection, proceeded to look at his phone, and stepped into the intersection. Meanwhile a car was running the red light at a fast speed (it was crossing Market somewhere up near 2nd Street), so I had to tug this guy by the back of his shirt to prevent him from getting creamed. And he actually gave me an annoyed look. This was sometime around 2015 though, so just an anecdote that doesn't have much to do with the data in the article.

Used to see them walk into lamp posts, sign posts, bollards, etc.

You're being down voted because of your odious victim blaming. Moreover, CDC data shows alcohol being the leading cause of fatal crashes where a vehicle strikes a pedestrian. Texting by pedestrians doesn't even register in the statistics. Furthermore, no city is making it illegal to text while walking, that would be fucking absurd. The law proposed in the article you cited was proposed by State Senator John Liu who is a joke, and it never went anywhere.

Blaming pedestrians for bad infrastructure and giant cars is a super dickish, car-brained take. European cities don't have the same problems and people are no less likely to text and walk in those places.

I am not American. I am not a driver. I detest car-centric urban design.

It's fascinating how many of the replies require you or other commenters to rely heavily on straw men and false assumptions (like assuming American nationality) to twist reading my comment from its anodyne straightforward interpretation (look where you're going) into some sort of apologia for "car-brained dickishness". It's quite amazing.

If everyone who stepped into traffic while looking at their phones looked up first, fewer people would be hit by cars. I stand by this dickish, car-brained statement.

There's no evidence anywhere at all as far as I can tell that cell phone usage by pedestrians is a driver of fatal crashes. People assumed an American perspective because you posted a parochial article abut New York state. And you're just being an asshole.

Personally, I’m a careful no-phones driver and an equally careful pedestrian especially in high density environments. But I’ve lost count of the number of pedestrians who are waiting at an intersection, and lose situational awareness while looking down at their phones and based on some incorrect cue in their peripheral vision step out into traffic. (Is that the most common scenario where a car injures a pedestrian? No; but it’s an empirical observation.)

I suspect your downvotes are coming from readers who interpret it as some kind of victim-blaming because of the asymmetry in forces involved. Let’s just acknowledge this is a multifactorial problem and that there are going to be interventions from both the pedestrian and driver perspectives that keep people safe.

Walking and texting isn't dangerous on its own. A person bumping into someone because of texting, while annoying, has close to 0 ability to cause serious harm when compared to drivers doing the same.

I think the downvotes come from the fact that this argument is used as a relatively dumb anti-pedestrian rant in a lot of places. Frequently the pedestrian is "stepping into the road" where they have right of way (which in a lot of cities is any uncontrolled/unlighted intersection, regardless of whether a crosswalk is painted), and the car driver is loathe to admit that they didn't want to stop or didn't know that the pedestrian has right of way.

As a pro-cycling and pro-pedestrian person, my feeling is that walking and texting is just a red-herring complaint that is not the cause of any sort of serious problems. Putting it into the same bucket as distracted driving, which is VERY dangerous, and has a death toll attached feels disingenuous. Its like comparing a scraped knee to cancer. One of those is a serious problem killing lots of people, one of them is not. Even though both should be treated medically, we shouldn't be talking about them in the same context.

Do you ever consider why the problem of rising pedestrian deaths is a US oddity? Or do you simply think that smartphones etc don't exist in Europe?

Pedestrian deaths have been increasing in many countries. It is not a US-specific phenomenon.

It's a combination of phone use, increasing size/weight of vehicles, and urbanization (more people to hit on the same streets).

I suspect CarPlay and Android Auto are incredibly dangerous, but there isn't great data on how they contribute to accidents yet.

I went out of my way to install CarPlay in our old ICE car and think it adds safety, especially with maps in an unfamiliar area. Trying to read the map on a 3” wide screen in a cup holder or clipped to an air vent is way worse than on a 7” screen mounted in an easily viewable area.

But "reading a map" is only one thing you do with CarPlay.

People also use it for music, messaging, finding/changing destinations, voice calls, etc.

The CarPlay UI in particular is so inconsistent and unpredictable that I can never just have a routine. Some Siri commands randomly don't work ("I can't do that while you're driving") when they just worked a few minutes before.

Android Auto is much better, I will say.

Everything you do in a car is a choice. I don’t think CarPlay leads people to riskier choices on average than they’d make without it and makes some things they’re already choosing to do leas risky. (I ack that I don’t have data either.)

I live in a smaller American city and ride my bike for most trips. I ride conservatively and am constantly watching cars tires or looking into the cabin to get early warning about sudden unsignalled turns or any other odd maneuvers. The amount of people I see just casually browsing Instagram or texting is insane.

I grew up in another country where it was illegal to hold a cellphone while driving and it was actually enforced. I'm just completely dumbfounded at the behaviour here and the lack of enforcement.

I occasionally have to drive a class 7 truck for work, which sits at about the same height as a semi truck (tractor/trailer). From that height you can see into most passenger cars. I'd guess 50-75% of people on the Interstate are more engaged in using their phones than driving their cars.

That could be the primary cause of the collision. The actual deaths come from the way cars are now designed.

.ay e texto g while walking is part of the problem too

Isn't it obvious? Distracted drivers and distracted pedestrians from cell phones. I was just rear-ended last week by a distracted driver, luckily I wasn't injured.

There needs to be a measure as to how distracting a car's interface is, and there needs to be regulations around this. Tesla's interface for example, takes far too much time and attention to do simply things like change the fan speed or temperature. I think we need a way to quantify this, and enforce regulations so that our 2023 mini-Batmobiles don't cause more problems than they solve.

In terms of pedestrians, that's a harder problem to solve because I've come across so many pedestrians that just walk out onto the street without looking, or even thinking of looking because they're on their phones.

There are a few more factors that drive this number up. First is the absolute reliance on cars for basically everything; anyone not in a car is a second-class citizen that can be killed at any time without much thought given by the public other than the typical "It's just unavoidable, these things happen. What can you do?" Another factor driving this number up is the massive increase in average car size, as SUVs and pickup trucks are pushed harder on average citizens by car companies so they can skirt taxes and make more profits.

Add on top of this huge roads and extremely anti-pedestrian laws and you have successfully created a death trap for people walking.

People in Europe have iPhones too, but their pedestrian death rate is plunging in compared to the USA. USA is an outlier and there's something else going on.

It's likely SUV related given that the most popular cars in the EU are small hatchbacks.

I think American drivers are much more selfish and more glued to their phones than Europeans. However I think your point about SUVs make sense too. I guess we could tell the difference between pedestrian accidents vs pedestrian deaths to see how similar they are between Europe and the US.

The size of cars (trucks really... SUVs are trucks) in the US makes me feel like we're slowly making Mad Max a reality. I've walked by trucks in parking lots that I can't see over the hood of... and I'm an adult man. We need some kind of regulation or tax on consumer vehicle sizes a decade ago.

Something happened around 2010, it seems. Followed by another big jump in 2020. We've had big SUVs and trucks a lot longer than 2010, so my thought is that something else changed. Smartphones maybe. And we all know what happened in 2020. Many people still haven't relearned how to drive sanely after that fiasco, though I'm not sure why.

There were 488 Pedestrian deaths in France in 2022, (pop. 57 million, 3 times less likely)

There were 57 in holland (pop 17 million, 6 times less likely)

I am not a fan of people needlessly dying. I guess I don't understand why automotive deaths are such a focus on internet boards. I am guessing because there's desire to push public sentiment towards self-driving vehicles? Self-driving vehicles would be interesting to implement/have regardless of anti-car/anti-human driving agendas; the demise of one does not necessitate the acceptance of the other.

Or if we care so much about people dying in some manner, then why not focus on preventable deaths from falls, or accidental poisonings, or other reasons? If the idea is to prevent unnecessary, accidental death then it makes sense to sort the data based on numbers of deaths caused annually by category. Otherwise the pearl cluthing is just that, inauthentic and disingenuous.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm

The constitution does talk about freedom of movement. I think being able to walk from one State to another (or within) without being killed by a semi is a reasonable and compelling interest of the government that promises such freedom.

If someone dies from cutting down a tree on their property or falls down a staircase in their own home, I am not sure there is as strong of an interest from the government to correct that situation.

That is my hot take. I think a prosperous society should move in the direction of being safer in all regards, but pedestrians dying from licensed motor vehicle operators seems like the government's problem to take seriously and not pearl clutching.

> I guess I don't understand why automotive deaths are such a focus on internet boards.

I don't know if it's the international nature of online discussion, or just that online discussion favors a certain type of personality, but there is a huge divergence between what appears to be a popular belief online, and what people are like in the real world.

Americans are slaves to cars. We treat the ability to drive a monster truck to the grocery store as a sacred right and anyone who would dare impede our progress for a handful of seconds (pedestrians, yes, but ESPECIALLY those rotten tree-hugging cyclists) are to be scorned and intimidated at best, summarily executed at worst. We've hollowed out our cities for parking lots and leveled neighborhoods and green spaces to make room for ever-expanding freeways, but god forbid we invest in public transportation - the domain of socialists and poor people. And so many of us have effectively brainwashed ourselves into believing that all of this is right and good and not, in fact, utterly insane.

More public transport - less pedestrian deaths.

Also stop making giant cars with low visibility

What, you don't like looking out the view slit in a tank as you try and drive down the road?!

I know it's supposed to be for increased impact performance, but surely being able to see out also reduces the incidence of accidents...right?

Stop inviting so many cars to everything - less pedestrian deaths.

So much USA urban and suburban land use is dedicated to cars. Massive wide stroads, enormous car parks etc.

It makes it so difficult to get anywhere without a motor vehicle, and it means there's way more cars on the road than there needs to be because lots of people just can't realistically do basic tasks without driving.

Seriously this.

If we assume that people are flawed and will fuck up and make random deadly mistakes, one of the most effective ways to make the deaths go down is to remove the cars from the road.

You might have the same mistake rate, but the total amount of cars going down will mean the deaths drop.

I wish we could have these discussions with actual data instead of emotions.

The top four cars involved in fatal accidents in the US (not exclusive to pedestrians) but all fatal accidents.

Chevy Silverado. Ford F-150. Honda Accord. Toyota Camry.

The first SUV on the list, the Ford Explorer is in 10th place.

The Silverado and F150 are also the most popular work trucks, so those drivers are on the roads more miles per day, I don’t have that data specifically but my point is that the data isn’t simply about “big trucks are more dangerous.”

The Ford Focus kills more people than a Chevy Tahoe.

In California the number one killer is the Honda Civic. In New York, it’s the Accord.

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...

IIRC police enforcement of traffic laws is at an all time low. That might be a huge factor into why this happens.

However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.

Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.

Here's a thread where residents of Albuquerque, the city with the highest rate of pedestrian deaths in the US.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Albuquerque/comments/123uyd3/pedest...

It seems that's mostly the consensus. A combination of bad design and distracted drivers/pedestrians. It seems J-walking is a real issue and I've driven through there and the speeds are pretty fast (which should be fine in theory but ofc not fine if people are J-walking).

Also seems to be a fair amount of people on drugs wandering into the street. Seems like a perfect storm.

A large issue in the US is that local communities have very little control over many of the roads in their communities. In addition to locally controlled roads, there are county roads, state roads, and interstates. As a result, even if a community wants to make their road safer, they have no power to do so. There is a county road in my town. The crosswalks make no sense and the road needs to be narrowed to force traffic to slow down. People have been complain about this for a long time. A teenager was stuck and killed a few months ago. Still nothing has been done because the town has almost no power over the county. And if this was a state road, there would be no hope.

> As a result, even if a community wants to make their road safer, they have no power to do so.

Visions of black-clad infrastructure guerillas working at night to install speed bumps on residential roads.

There is a great Nash Bridges side-plot around exactly that!

E.g., The People's CDOT (Chicago Dept of Transportation): https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/the-peoples-cdot-road-p...

Perfect example here is that Indiana has just created a law that explicitly forbids a singular targeted city from adding _any_ new restrictions against turning right on red in _any_ intersection.

https://legiscan.com/IN/bill/HB1050/2023

Picachu face oh wow, making an suv the among the most popular cars in a country and designing 80+% of that country for car use exclusively ignoring a lot of research related to pedestrian safety can lead to this??? Truly surprised!

The article states the cause as more SUV's without real evidence... My guess is the real cause is simply people using cell phones while driving. Or the great reduction in law enforcement the last two years.

In Europe the view is that bigger vehicle = bigger responsibility. In the US the attitude seems to be bigger vehicle = bigger right of way. The party who stands to lose the most is expected to yield the right of way.

Are trains required to stop at level crossings in Europe, because they have the bigger responsibility?

No. There's a big song and dance here (one country) every time someone is foolish enough to cross when the barrier is down. So much that the govt and rail network want to eliminate them when it is just a handful of people a year. Now road vehicles getting hit is dangerous to train and track but I am talking about pedestrians.

The railway's responsibility is having a ten-nines reliable (or whatever it is) signalling system, to be practically certain that the lights, alarms and barriers of the level crossing work correctly every time. (Or fail safe, i.e. fail to the barriers lowering.)

I’d be interested to see if there is any breakdown in these statistics between the types of vehicles involved (truck vs car vs SUV) and the number of fatalities per mile driven. Road safety seems like it’s just not an issue that captures much public attention. People seem to care in theory, but get mad every time someone actually wants to do something to make somewhere safer (like introducing traffic calming hardware).

one variable to take into consideration that I hardly see mentioned, ever - legalization of marijuana in California and other states: there's been a few times on my commute to work where I drive through distinct smell cloud of someone's exhaled pot smoke, and this is in the morning! People might be thinking weed is 'ok' to use while driving and that it's better than alcohol or something...

Most roads don't need through traffic, at least in densely populated areas. We should focus on making it so cars do not drive where people want to be walking.

In my small town, there are a lot of aggressive drivers. Of course there are many ways to get where they are going, they just end up on a street where there are people crossing the road. Then they are super aggressive about it.

I don't understand the claim that SUVs are the cause of increased pedestrian deaths.

I understand that SUVs are more damaging to pedestrians when hit, but it doesn't look like SUVs are contributing to pedestrian deaths any more than other vehicles. From 2012 to 2021 the percent of pedestrian deaths caused by SUVs went from 17% to 24%, but the production share of SUVs also jumped from 21% to 45%. The share of SUVs on the road will lag production, so it would be better to compare number of vehicles or miles driven, but it's difficult to find that data. I did a few estimates and I keep getting the surprising result that fewer pedestrians are killed per registered SUV than registered sedan, pickup, van, or truck.

There's a lot of other good data. Deaths are largely increasing in adult populations (20-69 years) while children are safer than ever. (Pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people by age, 1975-2021: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes... ) Deaths are most likely to happen when it's dark (77% from 9 pm to 6 am, more deaths in winter than summer), and from 2010 to 2021 deaths during the day increased 30% but deaths at night increased 86%. Increasingly deaths are occurring in urban areas (84%). And most of those killed are men (75%).

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

https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/explore-automotive-tre...

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

https://www.bts.gov/nts/50th

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/m...

I have my own opinions that I don't want to share because I would rather comment that both the content of this article and the top comments found here are a Rorschach test.

There's practically zero data provided beyond "pedestrian deaths up" yet the article and each comment seem to be confidently stating (various) different primary causes.

I would be most curious to see the data. From my reading of the news in my surrounding 30 miles the details are almost always: 1. downtown or country road late/nighttime driver hits transient 2. daytime freeway driver hits transient 3. rural biker/runner gets hit by drunk or early morning commuter

We need cameras that enforce actually stopping at stop signs. It would force more people to pay attention.

Too many people push back against cameras with arguments like "how do they know who was driving at the time?!"

I don't care. The car has a registered owner. The registered owner needs to be responsible for the actions of whoever they delegate access to the car. Start sending tickets, send that information to the insurance companies, let their rates skyrocket.

Be responsible for your shit!

That's the argument after someone is ticketed. That's not the argument before they are installed.

This article seems to be based on a butchery of statistics, for the sake of a headline. It's referring to total deaths, not per capita, let alone per pedestrian. The article breathlessly claims that, "...more than 7,500 pedestrians were killed by drivers last year — the highest number since 1981."

Not only has the population increased by more than 100 million people since 1981, but the number of pedestrians has increased even faster than the number of people has, with ever more people going carless - especially in some of the largest and most densely packed cities, like NYC.

That these values are staying so low seems to be the real story, as it would seem to indicate that cities are doing a great job of adjusting to an increasing pedestrian population. But, if it bleeds - it leads, I suppose. Perhaps with the modern addendum that if it doesn't bleed, then just splash some ketchup on it.

The number was 4,109 in 2009[1]. In 2022 the number is 7,509, per TFA.

We are in the middle of an alarming rebound that has significantly outpaced population growth.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/pedestrian-deaths.html

Like mentioned it's not just population growth. It's population growth alongside the fact that there's more pedestrians than ever. And unfortunately I missed probably also perhaps the single biggest factor: smart phones. Not only do you have more pedestrians than ever, they're also now going to be walking around with their faces shoved into a smart phone instead of paying attention to their surroundings.

That pedestrian deaths were higher at some point in the past is what's the real story here.

> That pedestrian deaths were higher at some point in the past is what's the real story here.

I deeply disagree with this take. I am living in a world in which boxes of metal fly around my unprotected flesh at high speeds, and "will I make it home safe today" is not only a dice roll for my life, but one in which the odds are getting worse by the day. One thing that keeps these numbers comparatively low is a pervasive culture of fear among people who walk, since they need to keep their head on a swivel and be prepared to save their lives at a moment's notice from someone else's negligent behavior in a motor vehicle. Another thing that keeps these numbers comparatively low is that many people in more walkable areas choose to walk less, or not at all, due to that danger. Another thing that keeps these numbers comparatively low is the proliferation of exurban developments in the past four decades in which walking anywhere is an absolute nonstarter.

It is interesting, perhaps, that pedestrian deaths used to be worse. It is not a consolation, nor is it the "real story."

I would say the "real story" is that pedestrian deaths are rebounding in the U.S. even though in European nations pedestrian deaths continued falling significantly after 2009.[1]

[1]https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/10/exactly-how-far-u-s-s... (one of the images appears to have had an image link break, so refer to https://web.archive.org/web/20201101012509/https://usa.stree...)

I can definitely see your perspective. It's hard for me to respond here because I tend to be obsessed with data, and data is surprisingly hard it is to find this topic. Even something as simple as a real car ownership rate over time, and not registrations / population (which is about as meaningful as guns / population in terms of ownership), is surprisingly hard to find.

>It's referring to total deaths, not per capita, let alone per pedestrian.

What exactly does it matter? Deaths per capita is a stupid statistic anyway. The pedestrian deaths are at least 3 times as numerous in the USA than, for example, the Nordic countries. (in terms of pedestrian deaths/driven distance)

If anything, the article is trying to make a point that the car centricism in the US is bad, and steps should be taken to make it less so.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

The amount of just reckless driving I see on a daily basis is staggering. People patently don’t pay attention. One hand on the phone and another eating.

Even without phones, speeding is basically expected in the US.

It is weird that the sidewalks are built right next to the road, with no green space between them. That makes it much more stressful and unsafe to walk in North America. The older communities still have the divider.

THIS is why so many parents in the USA are afraid to let their children play outside alone.

Seeing a BMW fly down a sleepy suburban street is enough to scare the shit out of you as a parent, especially if your children are inattentive.

Thr article lacks numerical context, or at least makes it more difficult to find than necessary.

Is this a 1% increase over 10 years or a 10% increase over 1 year? Is it normalized by population or an absolute number?

It's easy to blame the drivers, but in the era of the smartphone, I suspect that there's a massive decrease in the ability of pedestrians to actually look where they're going...

It's Phones ... everywhere I go I see people using their phones while driving.

Source: as an avid runner, whenever I cross streets I make eye contact with drivers to ensure they see me.

I feel like drivers have gotten exceedingly bad at awareness and it then absolutely baffles me that Byrd and other similar products are mandated to be on the road.

We only spend $50B on infrastructure related to roads.

Double or triple that on safety measures and making it 100x more enjoyable to walk (bridges, art, etc.) would be a huge ROI.

And why? TEXTING.

Until states make texting while driving a DUI-level offense, with the same penalties, this isn't going to get better.

I'm so tired of seeing people bellyaching about "speeding" when in fact the real problem is texting. Whining about "speed" lets politicians and law enforcement off the hook for not addressing the glaringly obvious threat to everyone on the road. And instead of cracking down on it, they waste taxpayers' money to destroy taxpayers' roads with ridiculous third-world impediments, stealing from 100% of drivers 100% of the time.

Love how someone actually down-modded that. Yeah, up with stealing from others and putting their lives at risk!

Incredible.

Aren't bikers considered "liberal elite woke". And in places like Texas, it is considered just good sport to run them off the road?

Do these numbers make any sense unless they are put in perspective of "deaths as a percentage of population" ?

I see the thing about "Oh it is SUVs" holds up to any level of scrutiny when compared against other places?

In London at least there are a lot of SUVs now. Granted they are not all as huge as your quintessential escalade or Tahoe (which incidentally you do see the odd imported one) but there are more larger cars on the roads these days. Are pedestrian deaths also increasing as a result too?

Are roads/drivers actually worse? Or is this a heatmap of pedestrian frequency.

The U.S. population is also at a 40-year high, so this was fairly likely.

Need basic stats to make sense of this. The most hopeful interpretation is that there are more pedestrians than ever.

Alternatively maybe there are just too many big vehicles or maybe people are bad drivers. Or maybe both.

But without more granular data it's all just-so stories.

Has anyone looked to see if there are more or less pedestrians?

It's not just pedestrians. I think I'll never ride motorcycles on public roads again. I just don't trust drivers. They're all talking, texting, watching a fucking YouTube video or TikTok reel. I've seen people eating spaghetti with a fork and knife while driving! It's insane how selfish and unaware drivers are, and it got way worse after Covid. Lax licensing standards and the average U.S adults abysmal literacy levels (read: the average driver neither knows nor can they comprehend the very basic laws governing driving) contribute to turning streets into a chaotic carnival.

Combined with the massive size of vehicles, ridiculous amount of illegal modifications, and nonexistent enforcement of traffic/vehicle laws, there is absolutely nothing surprising about this news.

This number is adjusted for population, right?

Oh wait it wasn't.

i like how the chose sun belt instead of bible belt

California is in the sun belt.

Arizona and New Mexico would not be included in the bible belt, and are two of the biggest offenders in this case.

NPR presents, speculation but little facts. Can I get a racial demographic of the drivers and pedestrians? It says that the largest increase of accidents was in the Sun Belt and Florida, could the large influx of new Hispanic drivers since 2020 be the cause? I have no idea there’s not enough data presented to make a determination one way or the other.

>>> Norton said installing speeding and red light cameras can also be effective if they work properly. Adding bike lanes can also keep drivers more alert on the road.

You know what else works? Making learning how to drive a requirement for getting a drivers license. Other countries that have tried this have had good success.

And consistently revoking driving privileges from those that fail to observe the rules.

> You know what else works? Making learning how to drive a requirement for getting a drivers license. Other countries that have tried this have had good success.

Where is “learning how to drive” not a requirement?

Everywhere I have lived in the US.

Weird. Everywhere in the US I’ve lived one must obtain a permit, behind the wheel hours, a driving school (private or public school). Then there is a test for permit, and then another 2 part test before a drivers license is obtained.

I’ve lived all over the US and it appears to me to the be standard. Where have you lived within the US that deviated from this standard?

"Walking without looking where you're going" needs to be a ticketable offense. Extra fines if you walk into a street.

Sometimes I'll see someone heading right towards me, not looking, and I shout "Hello!" Frequently there isn't even an apology.

Makes sense: as pedestrians you are at much greater risk so it is your responsibility to make sure psychopaths driving dangerous lifted trucks don't kill you at every turn.

> psychopaths driving dangerous lifted trucks

whoa. You got some anger issues there, pal.

You might be projecting a little bit. There's a reason we say that people with trucks like that are compensating; it's because they are.

> projecting a little bit

way to turn it around! But you're the one with the psychobabble rhetoric.

The southern states, which I travel often, i loaded with trucks with front ends that are higher than the top edge of the driver side window of my minivan.

And also, they drive like Grand Theft Auto - Work Edition.

The greed, ego and selfishness in this country is depressing and frightening.

Just a few moments ago, two pedestrians just jumped out in middle of a four-lane residential street that has no crosswalk for at least 400yd in either direction from behind a hedgerow. Didn't see it but lucky i was traveling 10 below speed limit (in a 40mph speed limit)

My "S"pecially "H"igh "I"ntensity "T"ooter emitted a 142 dB sound and the glee of watching both pedies startled and scurrying faster across the street barely brought a small measure of satisfaction.

But it is a sobering reminder that i need to get a dashcam because one of these days, I may not be able to have the response time to press the bullhorn (or worse, to brake) in a timely manner for a later court trial is not going to be a pleasant thing to go thru, death or not.

I see that anecdote as a sobering reminder of the state of our roads and drivers. That sounds like inappropriate infrastructure (a 4-lane residential stroad?) combined with a person who prioritizes their ability to drive as they wish over others' lives, and who takes glee at their ability to dominate others, and a legal framework that empowers them to do so.

Nah, the reaction time for drivers are getting shorter as pedestrians are getting bolder.

Must get a dashcam, due to increasing legal burden and riskier pedestrians being placed on the driver.

Not only do you have a 4 lane residential road but there's no crosswalk for 400 yards in either direction and you think the problem is your ability to drive uninhibited is at risk. Not only that, but you think the worst part about your potentially hitting someone with your car is not serious injury or death, but that you might have to deal with it legally. Good fucking god, there's so much wrong here.

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