Traffic deaths are quite literally one of the two leading causes of death of children in the United States, so in this case, yeah, actually thinking of the children makes some sense.
Cars are very safe today and are getting much safer. Even basic cars come with many features to avoid accidents now. We will probably see deaths per mile driven go down on its own, without the need for malicious road design.
For their occupants, sure. For those outside cars (and remember, children can't drive) not so much: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar...
Also - this article is focused on data from 2016 to 2020 for front collisions. It mentions 744 deaths of children in front collisions on non public roads (where the blind spots it talks about matter more) in that 5 year period, which is frankly a small number. This is a country with a few hundred million people after all. Some number of deaths are inevitable and it isn’t a crisis.
Yet pedestrian deaths in the US have kept climbing over the past ten years or so.
I can tell you that as a lifelong pedestrian I do not feel remotely safe walking in North America compared to Western Europe, where I used to live, or Japan, which I've visited a few times.
Pedestrian deaths may have climbed in recent years because of increased smartphone use or changing behaviors. I see many more jaywalkers for example, especially by homeless drug addicts in west coast cities, many of whom just blindly step into traffic.
There is no rigorous way to attribute your claimed increase in pedestrian deaths to cars.
Walking in my neighborhood is objectively more dangerous than it needs to be. In the past decade there have been several instances where motorists have mowed down and killed pedestrians, sometimes when they were minding their own business walking on the sidewalk.
I'm sick of motorists only valuing their own convenience and using demeaning language to describe the pedestrians that they victimize.
Cars are getting less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not more safe. Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it? Easy to pretend the benefits of speeding outweigh the costs when the benefits accrue to you and the costs accrue to other people.
I’ve seen streets go from 45mph to 25mph, lose driving lanes to bike or bus lanes, lose parking, etc. It makes things far worse than you think. What used to be a 20 minute drive will now be 35 minutes. Now consider the drive in both directions, time to find parking, and other trips you might make that day. It forces people to stay confined and not make as many trips because it simply isn’t possible to fit them in anymore. That is a loss of life quality.
> Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it?
They don’t have to and by and large they don’t bear any cost for it. You’re exaggerating things - the probability of a pedestrian dying is incredibly low. I walk as well and am not in fear of cars just like I’m not in fear of other unlikely events.
Many of the people who insist that there is no safety impact from high speed local roads nevertheless choose to raise their kids in suburban cul-de-sacs with minimal traffic and curvy roads with low speed limits. They want the right to subject other communities to speeding cars for their own convenience while protecting their own families from them.
Take the 85th percentile rule.
If you take a neighborhood road and change it from 40mph to 25mph in an attempt to "save the children", you can easily make it more dangerous.
The 85th percentile rule figures how fast people go on a road, and sets an appropriate speed limit that people naturally follow. Attempting to set a speed limit too low or too high leads to a wide speed variance, which makes the road more dangerous.
And where roads need to be fast and move a lot of cars, separate them out from other uses.
see fig 4 on speed variance:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/17098/...
going faster or slower than average traffic speed shows markedly greater accident rate.
note that this can apply not only to speed limits, but things like express lanes going different speeds than other lanes
You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow. Generally, from a safety point of view, you want the slowest speed at which almost everyone will actually drive at, as large variance in speed between drivers is dangerous. I think this is what the parent post was getting at: a speed limit too fast OR too slow will increase the number of accidents, keeping in mind that there will always be at least some drivers speeding.
It's accurate to say that people driving too fast are extra dangerous when there are slower vehicles in the road. The danger is still caused by the people driving too fast, not by those driving slowly, though. Speed kills.
Last time I was in Edmonton, known for extremely car centric design, wide roads, ample highways, etc. I was shocked by how much slower people drove, and as a result, how much safer driving was in general.
You only have to get slapped with a fine a few times before you start learning to control your speed.
PS plants are expensive, they need very regular maintenance.
Any solution needs to be wide spread.
We already know it's hopeless to teach them so what is left are traffic calming measures, heavy handed enforcement and technology (automatic speed limiters in cars).
Setting speed limits to speed people choose is a terrible idea.
The point of the Solomon curve is specifically that that isn't true.
This proves it doesn't work unless you only care about safety of people in cars (which Salomon curve seems to based on meaning it's meaningless for road design with the exception of highways).
I agree that merely lowering speeds without changing the design speed is a bad move, though.