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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> Cars kill 40k+ people in the US each year

Not quite. 8k of those are motorcycles. 8k are pedestrians. Half of those are drivers who had drugs or alcohol in their system. One quarter are male drivers under 25. Most fatalities happen at night.

> and speed (really momentum) is a large factor in the lethality of crashes.

Not quite. It's mostly lack of seatbelt usage.

> Most speeding issues do not occur on highways, but on local roads.

Not quite. It's about 50/50.

To add to all of this, more people die on Texas roads than California roads. Not per capita, but TOTAL. California has 10m more people in it than Texas. This alone should give pause.

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> Not quite. 8k of those are motorcycles. 8k are pedestrians.

I don't know if you know this, but if a car kills someone else not in a car, they still die.

https://twitter.com/VisionZeroYVR/status/1650630980062052353

> Not quite. It's mostly lack of seatbelt usage.

I said "speed (really momentum) is a large factor in the lethality of crashes."

"For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles." https://www.emcinsurance.com/losscontrol/insights-d/2020/08/...

> but if a car kills someone else not in a car, they still die.

I don't know if you know this, but sometimes pedestrians die due to bad road design or walking on unlit highways at night. Just because a car was involved does not mean the car was the primary reason the death occurred or that speed had any hand in the fatality.

> "speed (really momentum) is a large factor in the lethality of crashes."

Except we have safety systems which are designed to ameliorate this. If you don't use them, that's when the _fatalities_ occur, as opposed to just _injuries_.

> "For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles."

"Risk of dying in a crash" is a nonsense statistical statement. Crashes are not identical. "For every 10mph of increased _sudden deceleration_" you might be able to make the case for, and it highlights the exact issue with single minded focus on speed.

You could increase the safety factor by much wider margins if you just focused on the _other problems_ first.

> Except we have safety systems which are designed to ameliorate this. If you don't use them, that's when the _fatalities_ occur, as opposed to just _injuries_.

The people you hit with the cars like pedestrians doesn't have this, they get saved by reduced speeds.

I love this extra detail. I would still think a car going slower is going to improve outcomes of drunk, distract, high, and un-belted drivers.

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