Safety between cars, and within cars, has improved. However, due to the increasing size of the average vehicle on the road, among other factors, car safety for pedestrians/cyclists has decreased.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...
It's also decreased for anyone NOT willing to buy a "light truck" (e.g. a modern SUV). There's a loophole that makes it so that light trucks don't have to be tested against the same safety standards as other vehicles. Basically they just have to prove they're safe to crash into other light trucks but do not have to be tested against regular passenger vehicles. This loophole is credited as one of the main reasons car fatalities have been rapidly growing in the US but falling in most other nations. And also for the massive recent explosion in size (again, mainly observed in the US).
But size is just one factor that's reduced safety. Another one is reduced visibility. One of the contributors to the rise in fatalities has been due to parents literally running over their own children in their driveways. These are low-speed, suburban vehicle fatalities that are not happening in other countries
My saving grace was that the truck was so light that even at age five I managed to survive being crushed under one of the wheels thanks to my aluminum frame bike wrapping around my ribcage. Even a modern-day Tacoma is much larger and probably would have killed me.
Side note, the Wikipedia page has a section about how SUVs get away with less stringent emissions standards
The best thing you can do is drive in a way that even bad drivers expect. Be a speed-limited, blinker-indicating, cautious log in the river. They will parkour around you and you will be fine. Greatly limit your reactions to things. If you freak out, others around you will freak out. Bad drivers cause okay drivers to perform worse. Herd mentality.
(Obvious disclaimer: The best defensive driving in the world won't prevent all accidents)
It's gotten to the point where even defensive driving doesn't do much. How do you defensively drive against someone just blasting through a red light 15 seconds after it turned red and cross traffic is moving steadily? Or the guy in a lifted truck who decides to force you into the shoulder because he thinks it's funny?
Probably upgrading to a tank at some point. Or bringing a gun. Or bribe politicians, that they urge the police to focus on maintaining sanity on the roads and take away the licence(and at some point the cars) from those drivers eagerly.
Honestly, if I can, I drive a bicycle, even now in wintertime. But I often indeed wished for a gun, to bring awareness to my fragile self. To express, that I also have rights on the road, despite being lighter. But I am aware, this might not be the best solution overall.
Meanwhile there is a million equally bad drivers out there. We can't be doing "a purge" every weekend. It's either policing, or self-driving cars. I am looking forward to the latter.
It's counter intuitive on one level, but making the road feel less like a racetrack causes most drivers to slow down and treat it less like one:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/11/8/public-health-...
Making the corner tighter helps solve this.
I walk to work in the suburbs. I have to cross a 6 lane highway. It's signaled properly. But the one thing that nearly kills me every few months the road has very smooth radius corners. Drivers can easily carry 40mph through the corners. Between red-on-red being legal, right-on-green-even-though-pedestrians-crossing-is-active, and generally driver fuckery, I'm amazed nobody has been killed at this intersection.
Of course car lobby makes it sound like impossible task because of "think about all the edge cases" while even making the most crude system would save tens of thousands of lives and hundred of thousands of injuries per year.
As it is we can even force car manufacturers to implement max 140km/h speed limit in cars even though driving faster than that is criminal level behavior and illegal about anywhere in the world. Like we can't even force them to make the least controversial safety check imaginable already written into law because "driving a car fast boost my ego and you are not taking away my freedom to do so".
Drive an older car from the '90s with a mechanical throttle adjusting a mechanical throttle body and you'll realize that it barely responds until the pedal's about halfway down. Drive a newer car and you'll realize that it's already putting nearly half throttle through the electronic throttle body when the drive by wire pedal is a tenth of the way down. The brakes react like this too, which is a completely difference annoyance. It's a result of manufacturers gaming for fuel efficiency regulations and it manipulates the way people drive into being more aggressive with their acceleration.
For decades never needed speed limiters aside from the gentleman's agreement of 155MPH over tire safety reasons because most people couldn't get above 90MPH, and most cars didn't want to go above 45MPH without stomping on it. Since the early 1990s as a side effect of emissions regulations making engines much more efficient cars have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled their power output. A 1995 Chevrolet Lumina made 210HP from a 3.8L V6 at the very top of the rev range, meaning for most driving you were at 150HP or less. Right now you can go and buy a low trim Chevrolet Blazer with a 3.6L V6 that makes 305HP about a third of the way up with a flat horsepower curve from there. Just holding speed without accelerating you're at peak horsepower in the Blazer and it feels that way.
https://youtu.be/r11j5yo8BhM?si=NnDDZtmiyNAHkqvQ
This neighborhood has brutal speed bumps with a warning sign on a 30mph road. This double bump just hammers cars.
Couldn't they find a more silent way to slow down cars?
The only thing narrow streets and turns do is make it harder for parents to check for oncoming traffic before crossing. No amount of "traffic calming" will protect us from these rotten drivers. We need at least a modicum of enforcement.
Some of us have children, and some of us will hopefully always going to have children, so sorry, but we won't go away with our safety concerns as death on the road is the number one safety issue in everyday life.
But till they are there, policing is the only other option to self justice (aside from changing the road environment like the sibling commentor mentioned). There are drivers who intentionally drive close to cyclists - if one of those will have his tyre shot (without him then crashing into other bystanders, or crashing at all) he likely will have some respect in the future. He also might invest into a bulletproof design, further escalating the whole thing, so like I said, I am not advocating for road warfare. Just expressing my anger.
At what point did we lose our ability to enforce our own desires through violence? The one real tool we have for making any tangible change, just stripped away from us at some point.
You can even today join a gang or the mafia, you will find that this is still a very common use case.
If you do, you might also find out that it's not a lifestyle anyone wants, thus realizing why most of civilized society doesn't work that way.
Dueling, boxing, and so on used to be common among the upper crust. I still get into fights with some of my immigrant friends whenever we reach some total impasse on conflict. We're all civilized, educated, and generally good people. But violence always seems to be the quickest way towards a resolution to certain problems, where simple communication will not do.
Judging by reports of violent crime, it would be a stretch to say that the “right” to exercise violence when your individual will is otherwise thwarted is very much still possible. I mean if someone wants to gun down their Amazon HR person or manager, there is little to stop them. It won’t end well for anyone though.
Complete failure of government to regulate and enforce headlight position and brightness.
Since I don’t drive an 8ft tall truck with permanent high beams, I eventually got forced off the road.
In my state the only thing they check is the diagnostics to make sure your car isn’t polluting too much otherwise you can drive around just about anything that starts…
If I’m wrong and their lights are always like that, my assumption is that they would appreciate someone letting them know anyway. If it happens a lot, maybe they’ll figure it out and correct their embarrassing problem.
And if they’ve jerks who know they’re blinding others but just don’t care (or savor it) oh well they should still hear about it.
I don't have a level spot with the recommended distance so we went with some tape on the garage door as a reference. We got them a tad low the first time and raised them up a bit. I can still see and apparently everyone else can too because nobody is flashing their lights at us.
Our other vehicle is a 2014 3/4 ton Ram pickup. Nobody ever flashes me in it.
Either way, it’s genius. I don’t know why that isn’t offered in more vehicles.
That is exactly the purpose and required (or via dashboard electronics) in most vehicles in the EU after a certain date (don't know which exactly and also I do not know the exact rules but every car i've ever owned had those). Automatic is also fine. They are not meant for "Alternative High beam" as what some people use them for.
The "clip" on the rear view mirror is also not meant for looking at your kids in the rear. It's meant to flip the mirror up so the reflection is not by the mirror but by the refractive index of the glass any you see a "dimmed" image of the high beams behind you.
Usually it is supposed to be calibrated so that the highest position is the default no load in the back position, but you can recalibrate so that it is in the middle if you want.
I wouldn't call them shopping carts either but if you come from the US you might have different size expectations.
And I say it is insane because in many, many cases I just have to slow down when encountering those lights coming from the opposite direction, for the sole reason that I get blinded by them and I can't see the road for one, two, God knows how many seconds. It's insane, from a safety perspective, that we're allowing blinding devices out there on the road.
Which is the same pattern as your eyesight gradually degrading. But no, the lights really are blinding everyone. It’s utterly stupid.
What exactly are government safety agencies for exactly, if they can't even sort this obvious problem out?
That distraction didn’t exist 25 years ago on the scale it does today. I wish cell phone use penalties would be promoted closer to those of alcohol use while driving.
It doesn’t matter what distractions you remove - ban eating and drinking (even water) while driving, impose ruinous fines for those caught… none of it will work.
You need to address the root cause, not the symptom.
The root cause is unspeakable. You will face extreme repulsion if you choose to openly discuss the root cause in this society because it would mean tough questions for our cultural identity.
The human nature isn’t going away, and although the environmental factors are technically under our control, they’re just getting worse.
The fact that technology only made a pre-existing issue worse does not mean that technology is not the problem.
Unspeakable, unimaginable, impossible to write in a sentence on HN?
To me the root cause is that 2-ton metal bricks shouldn’t be propelled at 50 kph, much less 140 kph, by tired hairless apes with tired ape reflexes, ape kids in the backseat, listening to other apes on podcasts, or talking even hands free with ape friends or ape spouses.
We were never designed for this. It’s guaranteed to be a leading cause of death and life-changing injury, so long as we keep it up.
Is that unthinkable or unspeakable? I say it on HN all the time.
Cynical answer: Humans.
Slightly less cynical: Cars.
We've built an environment (in the US, at least) where driving a car is basically a requirement to participate in society. So, people drive, whether they want to or not. And they drive whether they're physically or mentally capable of doing so successfully.
And we're so entrenched in this design that discussion of a change is met with derision and scorn.
They're good apes brant
On a more immediate time frame, road engineering can work really well which is why deaths are like 5x lower in places like Holland. Put bends and obstacles in the road and drivers will either have to pay attention or hit them.
This kind of exaggeration undermines any point. An invention as useful as the cell phone was a mistake because people (ab)use it while driving? Any invention is used and abused but the benefits of this invention far outweigh the drawbacks. I'm sure more lives were saved by the mobile phone, and even more were made better, than were taken.
No unga-bunga is speaking here. NixOS-loving Rust-writing software dev. Read some Ted Kaczynski folks.
By opening a window?
Maybe faraday cages should be mandated in cars, in addition to rear-facing cameras. :)
Interestingly is to see police officers and transit officers also distracted inside their cars doing the same.
The number of drivers using the bike lane outside my house to make illegal passes has also increased. As has the amount of tailgating and excessive use of horns on the same road.
It objectively got worse in my country of origin for example.
With the roads deserted people went faster and more carelessly. When things recovered and roads got crowded they didn’t tone their driving back down.
I do insurance things. It’s well known in the field.
Want ZERO fatalities? ISOLATE the Pedestrians from the cars entirely. Build it like Disney World does.
If the point was the reduce the flow, why wouldn't you make a roundabout?
story: An out of state tech visiting our job site greeted us with "What the hell is wrong with the traffic lights in Florida!?" This was SW FL and I was a little confused because he had driven thru one of the most benign counties. I might be conditioned though.
Just north of Tampa is a county where most traffic lights are timed to insure you reach the next one on the yellow. I've traveled thru it regularly for 30 years. Between 20 and 15 years ago it reached ~as bad as possible status and there it remains.
Adding awful to bad are the drivers who've realized they can defeat much of this timing with sufficient speed.
Roundabouts have far higher throughput than junctions with traffic lights.
It didn't help that most, maybe all, governmental authorities were improvising their COVID response, some other percentage of people lost their fear/trust in authorities that way.
Ha, societal breakdown indeed...
There's noticeably more serious accidents too, although the data won't be available until mid-2024 to confirm.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_traffic_acciden...
Certainly, when I lived there Ireland was a terrible place to bike or walk.
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6c...
Driving culture has changed, at least in this area.
Ticketing dropped. Also the quality of policing in general (and officers specifically) improved dramatically. We had way better cops than under the previous sheriff.
No longer bothering to turn off long beam headlights, when there is oncoming traffic. And with the new bright led lights, the long beams are really bright.
Sometimes even the low beam lights feel too bright, especially if the oncoming car is big, and thus has its headlights sitting higher up.
I guess that's just always happening anyway. Except in a few cities doing proper bike lanes, roads are always getting widened, intersections expanded.
IMO the faster acceleration and heavier weight of electric cars will just lead to much more disastrous accident when people (for example) press on the wrong pedal. Long term the extra deaths are probably balanced out if the more dangerous cars displace enough fuel cars and lower carbon emissions and air pollution... but I wish we regulated acceleration (maybe with a different license category, like we do with trucks?)
It shouldn't be possible to kill someone 10 m in front of your car when leaving from a stop because the manufacturer wants to impress professional car reviewers.
Modern cars with huge pillars feel absolutely claustrophobic especially compared to those with wraparound windshields which were common mid-century.
If you want people to drive better, don't put airbags in their steering wheel, put a 6" metal spike pointed at their chest.
Cars without breakable steering column were pretty much this, so everyone had this before ~1990. Yet, deaths in traffic have steadily decreased since then.
It wasn't this study:
An Evidence Based Review: Efficacy of Safety Helmets in Reduction of Head Injuries in Recreational Skiers and Snowboarders (2012)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3989528/
from Trauma & Acute Care which concluded:
* The use of safety helmets clearly decreases the risk and severity of head injuries as compared to non-helmeted participants in skiing and snowboarding.
* The beneficial effects of helmets are not negated by unintended risks as their use does not appear to increase the risk of neck or cervical spine injury as compared to non-helmeted participants in skiing and snowboarding.
* The use of safety helmets also does not appear to increase the risk of compensation behavior as compared to non-helmeted participants in skiing and snowboarding.
* Therefore, helmets are strongly recommended during recreational skiing and snowboarding.
I mean, sure, there are BMJ Sports Medicine Opinion Pieces by Dr Paul McCrory who was prolific with his thoughts on the matter but short on evidence, not to mention that whole, ummm, thing:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/56/23/1327
(The investigation into his extensive single author pieces).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3989528/
> Helmets do not appear to increase the risk compensation behavior among skiers and snowboarders.
Nor has it been proven with a bunch of other activities
> Convincing evidence in support of the risk compensation hypothesis has not been seen with the use of the face-shield in ice-hockey, motor vehicle seat belt use and motorcycle helmet use.
Though the data isn’t the best but what we do have does not seem to support that hypothesis.
You still get concussions, and plenty of blood in rugby, but more serious amounts of concussions in grid iron because of all the excess padding.
People are more likely to charge head first with a helmet, and the helmet doesn't protect your brain from rattling about.
Are you saying that in Grid Iron there are no concussions? Hate to break it to you, but they are fairly common even before they broadened the definition last year.
Or are you saying that no player ever does a foul, or an illegal tackle?
If so, I'll link you to YouTube clips that disagrees with you.
They are constantly researching helmets and trying to reduce the chances of concussion, but ultimately wearing of a helmet introduces a risk factor, in the same way that that bigger cars make people feel safer so drive more dangerously.
We just pretend, that we care about environment untill we start speaking about our safety.
https://www.resources.org/common-resources/how-much-do-regul...
Increasing fuel efficiency standards has outsized impact on the price of small cars, so fewer of them are made.
Anecdotally, I have personally heard many people say they want to sit up higher, or have a bigger vehicle because it is safer for them.
That's true to a point. In the US there are regulatory loopholes for SUVs, so that's impacting what vehicles people choose.
I agree that fuel efficiency standards are pretty silly. Especially CAFE standards. They should just tax CO2 emissions (or fuel) directly, and let the market sort it out.
Perhaps also have a tax on the weight of the vehicle, because that's a negative externality: heavier cars are worse for other people in a crash.
But the US is a country that has effectively legalised running over cyclists, so I don't have much hope for them. See https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
It's similar to house prices. The more regulations you pile on, the more things cost. While those things are seen as "good", it removes choice and increases cost.
When CAFE standards specifically carve out an exception for larger vehicles (pickups and SUVs), thus forcing only compacts and sedans and station wagons to be subject to the new standards, of course there's some price pressure that nudges people into bigger cars.
If CAFE was applied across the board, there'd be no impact on choice at all. But it's not.
They are buying it because they like bigger cars, and the people that can’t afford bigger cars still want to sit up higher, hence the popularity of CRV/Rav4 type vehicles.
Yes, there are (largely misguided but in some senses game-theory justified) preferences for higher/larger/heavier vehicles. But from what I've read, these don't provide much (statistical) explanatory power for the actual numbers.
Given the choice between a $35k sedan and a $40k SUV the choice is going to be SUV for most people.
Given the choice between a $15k sedan and a $40k SUV, it gets a lot more interesting.
The US car market is incredibly restricted. You can buy a 300 mile range electric sedan for $25k in China. Why the fuck can’t we get that in North America?
Bare bones 300 mile cars like the BYD Dolphin cost $16.9k.
They also have a model called the Seagull that is 250 mile at ~$11k. I would buy either of those in cash, today, if I could.
- 1991 Ford Ranger 2WD
- 2016 Toyota Tacoma TRD OR (4WD + extra features)
The Tacoma is Toyota's smallest North American truck and is dramatically larger than the Ranger. The Ranger suited my needs perfectly except that it wasn't 4WD and would frequently get stuck in Canadian winter. I couldn't even buy good snow tires for it anymore because the rims were too small.
If there were a recently built 4WD truck available in the North American market that was the size of the 91 Ranger, I would have bought it in a heartbeat. It does not exist.
I don't think that in isolation people broadly prefer bigger vehicles, but in the context of other people having bigger vehicles, a circular problem exists, with people feeling like they're in ever increasing danger behind the wheel if they have a small car but are surrounded by behemoths. If it weren't contextually dependent, I don't think it would be a relatively recent phenomenon, since big vehicles have always been available, and I think you'd see people getting large vehicles despite what's common around them, in terms of both geography and what's on the road. I'd prefer a larger vehicle if I was driving around polar bear country, and I think every other car on the road in North America is a metaphorical polar bear.
in parts of Europe, vigilante groups are deflating tires of SUVs to discourage people from contributing to this trend. Not that I endorse the practice but it's interesting to consider how unimaginable something like this would be to Americans. Whereas in Europe people can probably at least understand why they're doing what they're doing
Many Europeans are bathed in US media. They see the huge cars constantly on US footage, and some are inclined to purchase these even if they are impractical in EU towns and cities. As these behemoths are introduced in the traffic mix, others in classic smaller cars feel threathened, and their next purchase will be a big tanky SUV to feel less vulnerable.
It self-reinforces from there.
Those standards are pretty silly, even without the loopholes. They should just tax CO2 emissions (or petrol), and let the market sort it out.
There's some formula between overall car area (the literal length x width of the vehicle) and the allowed mpg for the automaker's corporate fuel economy. Yay for second order effects...
Well, every economist (or anyone with half-a-brain) could have predicted these effects.
Because wankers gonna wank.
The Corolla? I don't think half of them would even have noticed if they ran it over.
Anyway - point being, I don't think we are anywhere near getting caught up in the giant car fad. Not yet, anyway.
Oh we definitely are, it’s nowhere near as bad as in the US yet because they are decades ahead in that mess, but around here mid-size and light-duty full-size are becoming more and more common.
They functionally didn’t exist a few years ago, nowadays it’s a good days when I don’t see one. And that’s not including the few I know of parked in driveways on the drive to work.
And the Tacoma is dwarfed by the larger pickups on the road. It's wild.