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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Until the US government isn't deadlocked and is able to pass new laws, this isn't going to get better at all.

The huge hoods/bonnets on SUVs and trucks need to be regulated to make future cars smaller. I'm not an expert (I'll pontificate anyway) but could external airbags help at all?

One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.

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The difference between Europe and the US is fairly simple. Euro NCAP has a pedestrian collision test as part of the safety rating and NCAP does not, only pedestrian avoidance.

If you could not get a five star safety rating because your car mangles somebody when hitting them at 30mph the tune would change pretty quickly. See all the things tested in Euro NCAP in section 2.2. https://www.euroncap.com/media/80156/euro-ncap-aeb-lss-vru-t...

5 star safety rating only matters inasmuch as it impacts insurance costs. And pedestrian risk should already be priced into insurance costs, independent of whether it’s in the safety rating tests.

If they change the standards and a truck doesn’t get a five star rating, the manufacturer will just not mention the safety rating in their marketing materials, and astroturf online forums with opinions undermining the value of the safety rating (‘they changed it specifically to mark down trucks’; ‘it doesn’t test the safety conditions that really matter anyway’; etc… heck you already see people raise these talking points about NCAP) so customers can rationalize themselves into ignoring that the truck they want to buy only scored 3.5 stars.

What's weird is IIHS (a non-government nonprofit) is publishing articles like this [1] and yet AFAIK doesn't incorporate pedestrian safety into its new-car ratings. One would think insurance companies would also be interested in the safety of the people whom their insured collide with.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/designers-must-make-vehicle...

Changes are coming, although I'm skeptical of their impact.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-proposes-new-cras...

Unfortunately, Euro-NCAP ignores some of the most important factors, such as ground contact.

Oh does it? Where can I read up on that?

I don't know of anyone who's written about it, unfortunately; I discovered it in the course of my own analysis of Euro-NCAP standards as part of a work project.

The test protocol is here:

https://www.euroncap.com/en/for-engineers/protocols/vulnerab...

I used to be very excited about Euro-NCAP but when I actually researched it, I became fairly critical. It only measures AEB, and leg impact and head impact against the car, with very little consideration put into how the general profile of the car affects the collision kinematics. Whether the car pushes pedestrians onto the ground or throws them up in the air, it doesn't matter -- only the initial contact between the car and pedestrian is measured. (And while representing the pedestrian by a disembodied leg and a disembodied head).

It's had a good influence in some ways, most importantly by testing head impact at various points on the hood, which has forced automakers to reduce stiffness and add more space for deflection between the hood and the engine block. I think in other ways, it's helped accelerate a trend towards brick-shaped vehicle fronts, because they perform better on the leg impact tests. I personally believe this will result in fewer leg injuries but more deaths.

> One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.

There are school busses--need to penalize people driving children to school as long as there are busses. The 'school run' needlessly increases traffic and danger and causes expensive decisions in school design.

Most districts have actually done the reverse because school buses are really expensive.

If anything we need to bring walking to school back to historic levels. In 1969, 48% of children did so, but in 2009 that had declined to 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...

To be fair, I used to live like two or three miles from school, and we would've had to pay for the bus because I was "too close". So mom dropped me off at like 6:00 AM because we were poor as shit. If we cared about education at all, we wouldn't make families pay for something that I'm pretty sure used to just be free.

Smart school districts make each school's main driveway bus only.

There's a parallel between driving behavior and internet behavior. Both isolated, inspiring recklessness.

All the most important issues are local and state and have nothing to do with US federal government.

The problem is that there is a whole generation of road engineers taught to use federal interstate standards on local roads, but there isn’t a more appropriate local road guideline.

When people use these standards for local roads it’s because it’s the same mindset as “no one ever got fired for picking IBM.”

Except road funding, huge chunks of which come from the federal government (because, big surprise, cities and states can't afford thousands of miles of stroads and highways without invoking a government that can print its own reserve currency).

The road standards do actually allow for quite a bit of freedom. Its harder if the state DoT (Department of Highway building) is not on board. But fundamentally nothing stops engineers from doing better work. Its a matter of education and political cover.

Political will alone goes a long way, engineers are capable of self educating quite well.

A simple example is the town in Indiana that has lots of roundabouts. They are operating under the same standards but is much better in lots of way.

Engineers can do a lot by themselves and with local political cover they can do much more. If the state DoT is onboard, there is a lot of freedom.

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