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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> The conclusion argues that the designation of individual responsibility for crashes preempts collective responsibility, preventing wider adoption of design interventions as well as systemic changes to the processes that determine the built environment of US roadways.

I don't quite understand (based only on the abstract): Are they suggesting that we alter the data (re: who is responsible) to achieve a certain outcome? Do they want to 'prevent wider adoption of design interventions'?

I expect the answer to those questions is 'no', of course, but I don't understand their argument or conclusion.

@luu: as submitter, what did you see in this paper?

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If the situation is that a car skidded down an icy hill and killed a pedestrian at the bottom, what are the contributing factors?

- the driver's skill

- the driver's decision to go out in that weather

- the driver's sobriety

- the car's maintenance state

- the car's tire traction on ice

- the weather conditions (normal? extreme? unexpected?)

- public notice about the weather conditions

- the treatment of the road surface by public works to increase traction

- the maintenance of the road surface (neglected or perfect)

- the decision of the city to build a road on that hill

- the general design of the city that requires people to have and use cars

- the pedestrian's decision to cross the road at that time

- the pedestrian's decision to be outside that day

- the design and availability of public transport encouraging the pedestrian to cross that road

and so on and so forth. If you ignore all of that in order to apportion blame in some percentage between only the driver and the pedestrian, you are not gathering evidence on all of the other factors.

Fixing the other factors would be "design interventions" and "systemic changes to the built environment".

Thanks. I know about all the factors, but I didn't quite grasp their argument. I see what you mean.

Here’s how I read it: in pedestrian conflicts with cars, we tend to over-assign responsibility to the individual pedestrian (“they should have been more careful”) and under-weight larger-scale cultural issues, like building unwalkable suburbs.

A long time ago, we decided that the city is for cars, not people.

It makes sense that it's the pedestrian's fault when the city is for the car, not the person.

Until the thinking changes, nothing else will.

It's working as intended.

Also, changing that will require major cultural and infrastructure changes. Cities need to be gutted and rebuilt to the urban ideal of walkable space.

Socially, you will need to convince people to swap their 2000 sq ft on a 5000+ sq ft lot for a 1200 sq ft flat with no land, backyard, gardens, or privacy.

Urbanites must accept that many of us truly detest cities and want to live semi-independently. Urban and non-urban people can't be genuinely independent of each other, but we need to respect each other's choices of how we want to live.

> Cities need to be gutted and rebuilt to the urban ideal of walkable space.

That's not going to happen. They might be slowly reshaped over 50 years.

There's a reason London never evolved to look like Los Angeles, and that's the same reason Houston is unlikely to ever resemble Paris.

The intended outcome of so-called "road safety" campaigns, always addressing the victims instead of drivers

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