> It’s often remarked upon, in boosterish circles, that American society allows about forty thousand road fatalities a year but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death.
We shouldn't tolerate that either!
But, people don’t care so much about a “small” car or even a “small” plane crash. Even if they add up to an insane number as high as 40k per year!
That isn't to say we shouldn't always try to make them safer. But if you put every passenger in a pod like the president in "Escape from New York" you'll make planes safer and still cause more death
I think we can demand the same from cars, or at least something better than 30,000 deaths per year.
- Licensing and renewal requirements are extremely lax
- Many states have extremely lenient DUI punishments
- Road conditions and design are often extremely lacking (e.g., stroads with high speed and high conflict points make up an outsized proportion of fatalities, there could be more emphasis on traffic calming than traffic flow and high average speed).
- Lack of safer alternatives (e.g. public transit) despite generally having the population numbers and density to support robust public transit.
- Too many safety loopholes for popular passenger trucks where the differences in regulations were intended to accommodate commercial activity with professional drivers, but the market has shifted to regular consumers driving large heavy vehicles with poor pedestrian safety like full size pickup trucks.
We now have the technology to have very realistic driving simulators. (I've seen what they give snow plow drivers) We should require drivers spend several days per year in a simulator to make sure that they can do things right in the weird situations. Pilots rarely fly in the worst weather (they will fly above, around or stay on the ground - though they will fly through what looks like bad but isn't - I don't know how to tell the difference), but they get lots of simulator time in the worst case situations.
(It was fine when I moved in… all the roads were empty due to the pandemic).
Why should we allocate scarce infrastructure land for marginal increases in bike-lanes (that are chronically under-used), for perhaps uniquely the worst form of transit?
If someone told you that they wanted you to provision funding/space for a new form of transit that was:
* Slow/short range
* Impractical in all but basically nice weather
* Requires parking
* Not family-friendly
* Not friendly for the elderly or anyone who is disabled to almost any definition of "disabled"
* Unsafe
* Has low to no cargo capacity
You'd call them crazy. But somehow we've got the meme that bikes are good.
Just visited philadelphia. Used to be clogged with cars. Now it's still clogged with cars. But also has great new bike infrastructure with lots of bikers (that weren't there 15 years ago)
The city is better for it, more mobility options, less noisy, less degraded. So awesome!