Comment by vr46 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vr46 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Having largely moved out of the UK to Germany, I can see that the UK has a care for human life and safety that is unrivalled so far. (Despite the literal shitshow of the last few years as water companies dump sewage)

The UK has so much good design in all the systems where humans are concerned, from clear signage to walking surfaces, plus checks and balances to provide for redundancy, that you start taking it all for granted.

India on the other hand - I'm of Indian heritage - is a chaotic hellscape where life is cheap. I have an apartment there and recently smooke started pouring out a water pump, somebody mentioned it on the Whatsapp group and eventually someone went to investigate and found it burnt out. You can see so many problems here:

1) Response time slow 2) Problem not treated urgently 3) No electrical cut out 4) No temperature cut out

Basically the sort of thing that you would find sixty years ago in the UK, a malfunctioning device can simply carry on malfunctioning to the extent that it could cause a fire in an entire apartment block. The UK is not immune from this - see Grenfell fire where bad cladding caused many deaths - but we have a full-scale public inquiry and legislation and a lot of very pissed-off people in comparison.

I've only visited the UK once, but I was very weirded out by how obsessed they are with fire prevention.

The person I was visiting lived in a student dorm / residence hall at the time. They had special fire doors in the middle of most long hallways, they were wired up to the fire alarm system and would magnetically shut down if an alarm was raised. When shut, they separated different parts of the hallway from each other and prevented the fire from spreading, and you had to hold them open if you wanted to pass through. There were also some extremely strict rules around what electric devices you were allowed to have, with staff being authorized to enter people's rooms with notice and do compliance checks.

Here in Poland (which is an EU country presumably following all EU-mandated safety rules), the regulations in such buildings are usually along the lines of "do whatever as long as you don't cause property damage and/or permanent changes, we might do a check if you do something really egregious and other residents complain." No fire doors of course, although smoke detectors and PA systems for alarms do exist.

Smoke kills, the things you’re describing are a lot to do with stopping smoke spreading. The UK shares a performance based approach with the Netherlands whereas the German and Italians do things in a prescriptive way. There’s no “EU way”.

Sometime between WW2 and now, human lives started to be valued significantly more. I have only a vague idea about this process. Was it continuous, or through several steps? I have a feeling that the invention of three point seat belts played a role, in showing that small measures can have huge impact. But when I grew up (Sweden in the 70s) seatbelts were only mandatory in the front seats, and me and my brother sat in the back seat without. I think this was common and not parental negligence at the time.

Yes, same in the UK, I grew up without seat belts and then in the 1980s, they became a thing - "clunk-click, every trip" - and then only much later, compulsory for rear passengers.

It's step-by-step, building on top of the previous thing, slowly inculating into the population the respect for life and how it's the responsibility of every person, company and government. You belt up, cars add airbags, the government improves roads and traffic management. If all of those things are in place, things get better. In India, it's very much "god will protect me".

My own attitude changes so bizarrely when I'm in India. In Europe it's belt up, put your helmet on, and in India, let's all get into this Autorickshaw and hurtle through traffic. I must be mad.

What was the reasoning behind that. In the front seats you could fly out the window? But not in the rear seats?

I imagine people thought that the back of the front seat would stop the rear-seat passengers. You should also remember that dashboards were every hard, and that windshield glass would rip you to shreds.

You can also fly out of the window, but especially you will hurt whoever is in front of you. See for example https://youtu.be/9_Af8w2SAT4

I’m sure you know that the Swedish company Volvo released its patents on three point seatbelts so that all auto companies could use them. Pretty amazing.

It was actually around World War I that these kind of safety issues became well known to the public. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the books of Upton Sinclair, and the muckrakers started to bring awareness to a lot of formerly ignored problems like this.

Yes that I am aware about, and it actually happened earlier. So cars had three point belts when I grew up, but they were not mandatory to use in the rear seat. (Actually, I think they did not have three point belts in the rear when I think about it, but they had in the front)

To your point: I was in HYD for a consulting gig a few years ago and it was ABSOLUTELY WILD seeing downed and probably hot power cables just lying there on the street waiting to fry some poor soul. They looked well-shielded but some of them were cut open!

Are you suggesting safety standards are higher in the UK than in Germany? Where do you see the differences? From what I read, safety standards in the UK seem to be lower than in Germany but what do I know.

So my general observations, for example, on roads:

the lack of speed limits on many highways, or only two lanes on others, which leads to many more lane-changing manouevres between high- and low-speed lanes; or very short-throw entry and exit lanes with extremely sharp curves and abrupt changes of speed; lack of organization and coordination around road-works to provide safe alternatives; the multitude of badly-designed junctions; terrible signage blocking traffic lights and visibility of oncoming traffic; the lack of ice and snow clearance on roads and pavements and cycle lanes; And I say this as someone who rides my bicycle every weekday to get to class. It's been a nightmare and I've just fitted studded tyres which has massively helped. In the UK, these routes would have been cleared.

I mean, both countries are pretty safe on the global scale of things, so we're complaining about things of a high standard to start with, but the figures kind of bear this out:

(ODS file: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65143a89b1bad...)

And the UK (or Great Britain which is just the mainland) had 706 car user deaths in 2021 compared with 1118 in Germany which is quite considerable. Injuries are harder to compare because of the variation in severity and the scale by which they are measured, but a dead body is a dead body. Fatalities means deaths occurring within 30 days of an RTA.

So when you get to Road Deaths, as opposed to car users, Germany jumps to 2562 deaths in 2021 vs 1608 for the UK, and that is 31/million pop vs 24/million pop to normalize things (no normalized figures on the sheet for car users).

Thanks. I did not read your main comment for being mainly road related. In non-road related areas I am pretty confident Germany has more safety measures than UK. The non-existing speed limit and the German love for car(lobbies) appear to be quite similar to the love of weapons in the US. I am not comparing weapons with cars here. Just their lobbies and public relationship with them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com