Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice
asteriskmag.com
asteriskmag.com
Yes, we can and should improve the design of the roads. However, we also need to improve the driving skills of the young and elderly.
In the US, at least, an 80-year-old driver is safer than a 21-year-old.
Additionally, the least safe group of female drivers, females aged 15-20, is only marginally more likely to be operating a motor vehicle that causes a fatal crash (25.5 per 100k licensed drivers for teenaged girls) than the safest male cohort (23.8 for males aged 65-74).
The gender gap is not even close. Males aged 15-20 are 60.3, my cohort is in the mid-30s, and retiree males are in the mid-20s.
Female retirees are 7.5, geriatrics 10.1. All other age groups are in the mid-teens.
It doesn't matter how you massage the data.
Driving for work vs. not, crashes per hours driven, crashes per number of licensed drivers by gender, crashes per 100 million miles driven, highway vs. surface street, at all times in every instance women cause fewer single vehicle, multi-vehicle, pedestrian-involved, injurious, and fatal, crashes.
Crashes involving a female driver are also less likely to have passenger fatalities, due to the greater likelihood that all passengers will be wearing their seatbelts. Females are less likely (by a LOT) to drive intoxicated, less likely to drive distracted, and are less likely to speed.
Actuaries working for insurance firms and rental car bean counters have known this irrefutable and unquestionable truth for at least 30 years.
Whenever I suggest that males receive additional training and oversight until their crash rates fall to those of the typical 16-year-old girl, people get irate.
edit: I can't find the numbers but it is fact that CDLs (commercial driver's licenses) both lower and level the statistics so training and oversight is almost certainly the answer.
One fun example of this is gay bars versus lesbian bars. Lesbian bars are exceedingly rare. Some previous owners have talked about it, but it boils down to:
1. Women don't have the same rate of alcoholism as men. Gay bars are fueled in large part due to men's substance abuse issues combined with higher rates of substance abuse in gay men.
2. Women don't seek sex with people they barely know like men do, and particularly gay men. Well, there goes the allure of the lesbian bar.
Women die less, drink less, smoke less, do crime less, everything.
Women making more rational decisions about alcohol, being less impulsive in emotional situations might be other factors ... but again, a solution might involve teaching men to control impulses better, more like women do.
All those are influenced by culture and societal expections. Ration of women vs men drinking/smaking changes with time and culture.
That being said, 100% of women die, just like 100% of men die.
It doesn't, I never said it does. In fact I'm just adding on, not arguing.
> but again, a solution might involve teaching men to control impulses better, more like women do.
Yeah I agree that will definitely help.
> Ration of women vs men drinking/smoking changes with time and culture.
Somewhat, but I don't believe there was ever a time where women were ahead of men. I think pretty much for all of human history, on the topic of "stuff that can kill you" men take the lead. With the exception being pregnancy, but that's pretty self explanatory.
I think there has to be some hormonal component to this. It seems testosterone is not so good for addictions or impulse control. I don't have any evidence, although maybe some exists. It just seems... more than cultural if this has been a problem for as long as human history has existed.
I gave up driving a motorcycle when I got married, because I no longer enjoyed putting myself and others at risk. It fascinated me how instantly I lost interest in it, because I hadn’t realized that risk had been the prime motivator.
Maybe the sensation of risk is an important vitamin for the spirit of a man. Anyway, you don’t know that it isn’t.
Old people aren’t bad drivers because of “driving skills”. They’re bad drivers because driving is incredibly dangerous and they’re old.
What we need to do to prevent this is eliminate driving as a lifestyle. Treat it as the dangerous act that it truly is. We don’t let 75 year olds operate heavy machinery, we shouldn’t let them operate cars either.
You link doesn't say that. It says they are more likely to die in accidents because they are old and don't survive, not because they cause them by bad driving.
Unfortunately, this safety measure is usually torpedoed by other drivers. People (usually driving a 'light truck' (an SUV or pickup)) will drive at a single car length behind me. Even on multi-lane roads. If I had to slam on my brakes, I'd be at risk in my sedan.
I absolutely would support wide proliferation of speed cameras. It would be easy, profitable, promote safety, and we could do it today. It would take zero extra policing (in fact, it'd probably reduce workload on police).
I acknowledge that you can fight this kicking and screaming with speed enforcement measures—but I think there's two things that are causing people to drive faster: Wide, straight, flat roads that allow no speed reference, and large sealed vehicles that reduces perceived speed. Change these, and I think that will be a great step to reducing "pedestrian fatalities" (or to call it like it is: people getting murdered due to carelessness and impatience).
The ones causing danger are the drivers attempting to pass dangerously, not the person driving slowly. Do cyclists cause danger by using roadways? Or is it the people driving multiple-ton vehicles?
There's a reason tractors get triangles and oversize stuff gets highly visible signs.
> Do cyclists cause danger by using roadways?
They are also expected to move with traffic if they are taking up a lane. This is among the reasons non-motorized vehicles are not allowed on freeways.
Anyone moving slower than expected are intrinsically an impediment and a hazard, just the same as anyone speeding or otherwise driving recklessly.
Unless you can find some laws that specify that driving below the speed limit is illegal?
It ought to be just as lucrative for a cop to nab someone who's unreasonably stopping at a merge as it is to nab someone who's going a few over.
If you are moving a large item that is fragile, are you allowed to go 35mph in a 45mph zone to reduce the risk of damaging the fragile item? Or is that illegal too? Or what if one of your passengers gets car sick easily?
In fact, there are some winding mountain roads in California where the speed limit is 55, but if you go that fast, you’re suicidal because there are no guard rails and very sharp turns. Occasionally, someone mildly suicidal will come up behind you. Is it illegal to drive 15mph in that 55 zone?
Safety is prioritized above speed, suggesting otherwise is unhinged and antisocial.
https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/346/ix/59...
Other states have something similar on the books as well.
Addendum: the margin of error on speed radar generally tends to be in the region of 2mph. You'll need to be a good deal slower than the speed limit before a police officer is likely to consider your driving to be an impairment.
If a cop thinks your slow driving is dangerous they can absolutely write a citation. There are a bunch of laws that allow them to do this in most states.
It's reasonable to talk about which party should be the one to change their behavior, and that's essentially the same thing as assigning blame.
It's a very frustrating social problem. Obviously we can't let ourselves be held collectively hostage by bad actors in all situations. But I would still predict that there are some situations where the bad actor population is so large and "mildly-bad" that indefinitely giving in to their implicit demands is the right game theoretic choice.
Game theory is quite a big thing, that's for sure. And it's no surprise that actors will tend towards these situations where you're tempted to think "eh, letting them do this bad thing with impunity feels like the right game theoretic choice, because it's right at the limit of not being bad enough to illicit a response." And yet, there's a reason for things like territorial behavior in the animal kingdom, where an animal will defend minor territory disputes at great personal cost even when the cost of losing a small amount of territory seems much smaller.
Its the speed limit. Its not the speed that everyone has to drive at in all circumstances and conditions.
The menace are drivers not adjusting to the realities of the road.
if I were to go even the posted speed limit during my morning commute, I would be causing a hazard. it's 5-10 over just to be safely part of the flow
same road in the evening and doing the limit or even a bit under is safe
imho, the dangerous drivers are those who for whatever reason do not base their speed on the flow of traffic around them
I'm also in Europe and here it's completely normal to drive the speed limit. The motorway speed limit in my country is 130 km/h (81 mph). I drive an EV, so I usually stay around 110 km/h (68 mph) for efficiency, which is still faster than all trucks (limited at 90 km/h (56 mph)) and quite a few passenger cars and vans. Most cars drive a bit faster than me (at or around the speed limit) and very few drive faster than the limit (mostly the usual suspects, german luxury cars or sports cars).
I honestly can't imagine being forced to break the law every day just to get to work safely.
1: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/05/veil-darkness-redu...
This subthread is discussing highways with prevailing 75-80 mph traffic and some road users driving less than the posted 55 mph limit in a belief that doing so adds to road safety.
Nah dude, your intolerance is the menace here.
It is perfectly legal for me to drive in a traffic lane. It may be OK to drive on the sidewalk, with significant restrictions. But it is usually not.
I typically opt to drive in traffic: the limit is going to be around 35mph. You can perhaps predict the sort of reactions I endure from motorists when I’m hogging their precious lanes at ½ their speed. Would you believe spitting in my face?
Nevertheless, I persist carefully, because I’m right, and I drive with scrupulous safety, and I hope and pray that others follow my lead, because electric scooters at 17mph on the sidewalk is fucking dangerous to pedestrian me at all other times.
* - I did an internship for Mercedes in the early 90s and we had testing access to a section of ex-A8 near Stuttgart that was retired because it didn't meet the modern autobahn requirements and so had been replaced with a re-routed A8. To my American college-student mind that seemed incredibly wasteful, but it sure was convenient for our testing. I can't find it now on Google maps, but it's been 30 years so may have been demolished by now.
Edit: There's a hiking area called "Alte A8" which is probably it/related: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1SyBPKNie1x13AYy8
IMO the only reason that it's acceptably safe is strict German driver's licensing requirements and fairly strong enforcement of traffic laws. If you had the same regime but American style speed variation, I think you'd see considerably safer roads in Germany.
Driving slow also creates road rage around you, which reduces safety.
Be predictable, follow the flow of traffic. Stop trying to be the safety police because you're just making things worse.
On my way to work there is a long stretch of road with great visibility, two lanes in each direction, physical separation between directions, very wide shoulders with virtually zero pedestrian traffic, but the speed limit is 50km/hr. Nobody drives 50 on that road. The traffic generally flows at 70. Similarly there are many semi-industrial areas with wide roads, no traffic, few pedestrians with a 50km/hr limit. We also have highways with 80km/hr limits where traffic generally flows (safely) at 90-100.
Guess what, all those places are where police hangs out looking for speeders.
Contrast that with small streets in dense urban or suburban areas where despite the limit being 50 most people drive closer to 40. Or when it's foggy or raining heavily and you want to drive slower on the highway than the speed limit.
That said there is a question of balancing the somewhat improved safety of lower speeds to the improved efficiency of driving a bit faster. I'm not sure how you balance that. There are other options like moving people to mass transit or closing some city streets to car traffic completely.
This requires the most enforcement in front of NYC precincts. I truly don't know how such a corrupt organization could be reformed.
Since the US is huge and sprawling - it'd probably be better to use Death / km driven.
I checked this: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/road-accidents.html?...
Which paints a very different picture than what's stated in the article.
Even in sprawling suburbia, most trips a person takes are under 3 miles, eminently bikeable, but the bike infrastructure and built environment sucks for that. So people drive, from parking lot to parking lot.
The fact that the US is huge doesn't mean that the majority of miles driven are on long trips.
That is surprising to me. Is that factoring in trips to the neighbors or to the mailbox or something? Because the average US driver drives over 39 miles per day.
hmm. fair enough. I have heard the short trip stat bandied about a lot. Having spent time with people in the suburbs, even close in suburbs, the stat makes sense... if you exclude commute to work. When I visit my parents in stroadville, a trip to the store is 2 miles each way and should be easily bikeable, but bike infra is non existent so everyone drives.
One note about the framing. The average US Driver excludes everyone who isn't a driver
That's true but traveling by car is so overwhelmingly common that it doesn't swing the stats much. Only about 3% of people travel by public transit (most of which is a bus on the road anyway) and another 3% under their own power, with most of that being people who walk (mostly those who work/live in the same place).
There should be a well-defined unitless quantity that's real-valued across human history, say normalizing by population size and total human travel. I am not claiming that fixes the NaN, just that the NaN is a smell.
Another smell is that everyone being horribly maimed but never killed would not be a victory for safety though the above metric says it'd be great.
They do show supportive evidence of some gun laws having a meaningful effect on violent crime, so I'm not sure what they're referring to. For instance, it appears that child access prevention laws, specifically, are associated with a significant reduction in firearm homicides.[2]
RAND does complain that there is insufficient or limited evidence in a lot of areas though, like effect on mass shootings.
[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/key-findings/what-s...
[2] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/child-acce...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
Half the definitions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_... don't even exclude gang violence, drug violence, or organized crime. Statistically if you're not involved with gangs or drugs, you're not going to be involved in a gang or drug related shooting. The majority of those killed or injured are at least peripherally involved. So you should immediately question to credibility and motived of any organization that wants to talk about "mass shootings" which by definition are scary because they're random and unprovoked but then want to include a huge number of incidents are driven by crime, drugs, and gangs, none of which is random or unprovoked.
If your states were like real countries, they could just ban guns, set up border controls, and turn away anyone bringing guns in. But they can’t, so they’re not countries.
Plenty of countries have states with distinct laws and cultures. Canada, Brazil, England, Italy, etc. That doesn’t mean those states are countries.
Sounds like you’re letting US exceptionalism cloud your judgement.
Not even half.
Canada is slightly larger, plus there's Mexico and a bunch of smaller countries, which share the North American continent with the USA.
The US being "50 countries" was sort of the original idea, but over time things changed significantly. Many aspects of life are controlled federally and have been for almost a 100 years. Yes, there is also state government but there is nothing special about that: many countries have some type of sub-national government with varying degrees of power. In the US state governments tend to have more power than average, but that does not make it "50 countries".
Everything is stuck in a weird dysfunctional limbo where none of the major institutions work as was intended at all. Endless discussion and navel-gazing over what some comma could perhaps have meant 250 years ago is not a serious way to govern a country.
Yes, but this is hardly unique to the US. Various European countries and the EU as a whole often suffer similarly.
It's not like the EU took one look at the Draghi report and immediately started to fix things; often the cultural and policy issues causing the problem also make it harder to implement new fixes to the problem.
Two examples:
1. "Police violence." What violence? Against whom? In a year approximately 50 million people have a police interaction (not the total number of all interactions). About 75,000 people are taken to a hospital following police use of force and about 600 people (0.001%) are killed. Of course the ideal number is zero but 0.001% doesn't seem like there is an epidemic of police violence sweeping through the country.
2. "Alternative (public) transportation." Again you're not being particularly clear on what the fix is here. Most major cities have some form of transit, be it busses, subways, or above-ground rail. If you're talking about major city-to-city high speed rail an LA-to-NYC rail system would be like putting in rail from Paris to northern Kazakhstan. San Diego to Chicago would be like London to Kazan (845km east of Moscow). Iowa is a medium-sized state most in the US never visit and never think about, and it's almost twice the size of Austria. Europeans who rail (pun intended) about how it's so dumb the US doesn't have high speed rail haven't taken the requisite 5 minutes to understand the difference in scale when you're talking about connecting the east and west coasts of the US.
What's more likely? That the US with ~350 million people just decides to ignore these "issues," or that there's something the average person who doesn't live here is misunderstanding?
Now, if it were .001% for situations where the police are actually dispatched as the result of a call I think that'd be pretty ok.
There is this tone in a lot of these discussions that the police are going out and hunting young unarmed black men and it simply doesn't line up with reality.
Because the millions upon millions of traffic stops water down the fact that the police go guns blazing into petty BS way too often.
>There is this tone in a lot of these discussions that the police are going out and hunting young unarmed black men and it simply doesn't line up with reality.
Worse, they're hunting us all. Anyone who isn't a cop is at best a mark to be shaken down to them.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124039/police-killings-...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...
Of course some killings might be reasonable (very dangerous people, etc.) and violence is more than killings, but there does seem to be some signal there.
The reality and the laws are what people ask repeatedly. Maybe if they don't think it can be different they will not ask.
I think the first step to discuss a topic is to understand what is there. If the statement would have been "I am fine that police in the USA being (potentially) more violent than in Western Europe", I wouldn't have checked anything because everybody is entitled to an opinion. I did check though because I wondered "is it true that there is not much violence in the USA compared to Western Europe?". I can't say I am sure after searching 5 minutes, but it does look like there is a probability that it is the case.
I find these "but it's so big!" excuses really lame when the crown jewel of our rail transit network, the Acela, in a large and very dense region... still kinda sucks.
Who cares about coast-to-coast when we can't even get Boston-DC to reach the lower edge of the same category as what's considered good developed-world passenger rail? This is clearly an area we could improve on significantly, and the excuse of "it's not dense enough" doesn't apply there.
Probably couldn’t get it done the exact way they do in Europe, but no need to give up before starting. LA to San Diego? Portland to Seattle? Or a slightly harder one, Chicago to Austin TX?
Lots of different interest groups in the US have lots of different issues they care about, including traffic safety. Said interest groups compete in various political contexts to get their issues addressed.
We have great potential to save lives but we're willing and eager to exchange safety and control for individual liberty. Risk taking and individualism is also a reason why America has dominated many fields for so long. Silicon valley doesn't exist in Europe for a reason.
It's also impossible to argue with some people about safety because they're never satisfied, no risk can't be reduced, no risk is ever balanced with what you have to give up in exchange for safety. An argument about where one should set the balance is fine, but plenty of people want to set the risk to zero and that kind of extremism has no limit and runs into a paperclip problem where the only purpose of life is to preserve and extend it and as long as you're breathing it's a good life... or something like that.
But they do not care about liberties or freedom as such, not for anyone except the top of the hierarchy. They are consistently voting for politicians that restrict those and want to return back to times when average person was considerably less free. They are good at using freedom as a slogan, as an excuse to enact anti-freedom agenda, repeatedly, again and again.
Society has chosen traffic fatalities because at a certain level we've decided that we're okay killing N people if we get XYZ outcome.
I think about that a lot.
Making everyone use something like Waymos might work though.
> No pedestrian crossings.
Everywhere is a pedestrian crossing when you know that every vehicle sees you and will slow/stop if it anticipates you will enter its path.
> No bike lanes.
I'm an urban bike commuter and would be delighted to share the road with autonomous vehicles instead of human-driven ones.
> No escape from the noise of thousands of tires going at high speed.
I live 60 ft from a highway and would trade the noise of 1 speeding, honking, revving, modified-exhaust having human driven car for 100 well-maintained speed-limit obeying Waymo's.
> No escape from the air pollution of eroding tires and brakes.
Gentle starts and stops from a well-maintained (e.g. proper tire inflation) autonomous vehicle will create less of both of those than the average human-driven vehicle.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0
I like a diversity of viewpoints, and glad there are people advocating for pedestrian and cyclist use of roads, but I find very little I agree with in Not Just Bikes pessimism.
The speed limit will certainly be increased if only autonomous vehicles are allowed. It's an easy sell in the city council meetings.
I suggest you watch the video. It may be pessimistic but it makes valid arguments worth keeping in mind when considering that future.
If the vehicles are safe enough to be allowed to drive faster than humans did on the same roads, why not?
Road noise? My concern about road noise from higher-speed EV AV's is much lower than ICE human-driven vehicles at a lower (posted) speed.
[0]https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-may-12-hy-wheel...
There's still a chance that net tire noise would be same or less: "Tires running higher inflation pressures generate lower noise levels compared to those with lower inflation levels." https://www.tirereview.com/the-fight-against-tire-noise/
I suspect that other design choices (e.g. fender skirts like on the Honda Insight) could be made that would further reduce tire noise.
not true. I always drive on American roads and I never drive on Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan roads.
The math checks out.
* or whatever the 85th percentile speed is, rounded up to the nearest 5 mph.
In NYC at least, they are set for speeds that make the roads safer for other users, such as pedestrians. They are not set in order to please the perception of drivers.
If self driving cars do nothing better than on par with alert and sober human drivers, that might cut half of those deaths by itself.
Self driving probably fixes the fatality rate entirely once most people use self driving modes.
Self driving will be the US' economic superpower. We've got so much vehicular infrastructure and it's practically sitting latent waiting for this opportunity.
When most of everything transits this way - food, goods, packages, people, instant fulfillment - it'll be one of the biggest unlocks of the century.
Anything we lost due to underinvestment in rail will be dwarfed by the returns from self driving.
From the article:
> Whereas the Netherlands clearly differentiates roads and streets — as do Germany, Spain, and France — the US is known for having “stroads,” roads where cars reach high speeds yet must also avoid drivers entering from adjacent businesses and homes. The majority of fatal crashes in American cities happen on these “stroads,” and impact pedestrians and cyclists in particular.
I think this will be _more_ important with autonomous driving. We've developed a built environment where car through traffic and destinations are co-mingled which leaves very little room for people to actually experience their destinations when they get out of their vehicles.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but my expectation is that the problem of "stroads" will only become more apparent if less focus is placed on getting from point A to B and more on where a person is trying to go which is my current long term expectations of the impacts of autonomous vehicles.
I lived in the Netherlands and infrastructure was great now and I am sure it will be great in 10 years, because they constantly think on how to improve given the situation. It will not be perfect in 10 years (and neither is now) but that's just life.
If we start focusing on making alternatives to cars the most attractive options now, they can still be the most attractive(and efficient and safe) options even with self-driving cars everywhere.
> It does so by expanding pedestrian areas via curb extensions or bumpouts, narrowing crosswalks, and removing parking within 20-25 feet of an intersection. [...] This not only slows traffic, but permits turning cars fuller visibility of the crosswalk.
Classical zero-sum thinking would suggest that drivers loose value to pedestrians, with more pavement and less road. However, you don't even have to think about pedestrians to understand why everyone benefits from this: in some American cities (I'm looking at you, Seattle) you have to edge absurdly far into intersections to see perpendicular. Broadening sidewalks improves driver-driver visibility too.
Should this not be measured in terms of fatal accidents every million of km driven? To normalize by how much people drive on average, and by the average vehicle occupancy.
(Not saying this is easy.)
I rarely drive the car because I can reach by walk any place required by my daily necessities... of course I don't risk a fatal accident as much as somebody that drives daily for work and has to take the car for any kind of shopping.
Put in another way: if are considering ways to lower traffic fatalities, lowering the time that people need to spend in their car is one way to do it.
Safe infrastructure can be fully separated bike paths - a road network that minimizes intersections with car traffic. And stoplights that have a separate right-of-way which allows bikes to go when no cars are allowed to go. Fixing that will mean that more people feel comfortable riding a bike for trips within a couple miles. And more people riding their bikes for short trips mean that drivers have more empathy for bikers, etc. And it means that more people advocate for allowing denser zoning near them since they get the benefit of more amenities.
It’s a virtuous cycle that starts with making lots of safe infrastructure, so safe that even grandma and young children are able to bike safely.
Why would you do this? (See also: cycling without a helmet.)
It's baffling to me too, especially cyclists without helmets. Part of why I don't cycle is because, yes, helmets are annoying, but it's too dangerous to do it without a helmet.
There was a recent video about this that summarized my thoughts on helmets
This would dramatically reduce injuries, fuel consumption, and air pollution. It would also reclaim concrete spaces for nature.
You go by behavior:
- I need to go to library, store (walk or bike) - I need to go a business or house (cube it) - I need to leave the city for long-distance travel (now we connect to mass-transit)
“ Pickups also tend to be more dangerous in collisions between differently sized vehicles — car drivers are 2.5 times more likely to die when colliding with a pickup as compared to another car” [0]
Pickup trucks’ weight increased by 32% between 1990 and 2021 [1]
As a bonus laughable fact, the first generation of F-150s was 36% cab and 64% bed by length. By 2021, the ratio flipped to 63% cab and 37% bed. So much for the “rugged” weekend warriors.
0: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2019.1...
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02760-8#ref-CR1
Suppose it could take a gooseneck hitch for a giant camper trailer.
""" (with the paragraph broken up into bullet points and some bold text)
The U.S. model typically encourages wide lanes and corners to increase driver visibility, but this has the unintended consequence of encouraging cars to go through intersections faster, and and thereby decreasing the peripheral vision they might have retained at a slower speed. Instead, the Safe System intersection is designed to
limit car speed and facilitate eye contact between users.
It does so by expanding pedestrian areas via
* curb extensions or bumpouts,
* narrowing crosswalks, and
* removing parking within 20-25 feet of an intersection.
The crosswalks and narrowing of the lanes encourages cars to slow and to stop well ahead of the crosswalk, while bumpouts shorten the distance pedestrians must be in the road.
"""
While I agree Eye Contact is important, I think it should not come at the cost of increased driver or pedestrian conative load, but instead in the form of better safety engineering / design.
Crosswalks : Take the extreme version of UK's solution. Crosswalks should be either half way along a road segment, or at least half a block from the vehicle intersection. These should include 'bump outs' to disrupt any parking area and LOW, half meter or less tall, shrubs or features should promote HIGH VISIBILITY and Eye Contact between pedestrians and drivers in a dedicated pedestrian / vehicle interaction area.
Vehicle Intersections : Should have ZERO interaction with pedestrian features, no pedestrians should cross here. Roundabouts, free inner corner turns, traffic control systems and drivers all interact better in an environment that is less chaotic and more predictable. The optimal engineering safety choice is to remove pedestrians from such danger zones entirely. Yes remove parking within 15 meters (45ft) or better within 2 seconds of vision at road speed.
Road Speed : Mark roads at their engineered speed. Do not lie to drivers. Do not intentionally make safety worse by adding distractions and hazardous elements ('traffic calming'). If a road speed IS indicated slower than the conditions appear to permit, time the intersection to intersection speed and post a _suggestion_ to 'lights timed for X speed'. If that's too slow drivers will figure out a more optimal speed within the range of what seems safe.
You are thinking of them as "distractions" but counter intuitively it might better to think of them "focus holders". Imagine your job is to sit in an empty room with a single button and at random times, a light turns on and you need to push the button within half a second. If this happens every several seconds or so, this is pretty easy, but if it only happens after an hour or so your mind will be wandering and your reaction time will be shit. Now imagine instead you are given a platforming video game like Mario or Hollow Knight, and every time a certain character appears on screen need to push the Y button. This sounds like something that is easy to do for hours, even if the specific character appears infrequently, it would even be enjoyable. Adding those elements like trees, turns and bumps are the same idea, it ensures the drivers focus is always on the road where it needs to be.
Also some people just don't care and race down wide straight roads as fast as they can. The only way to slow these people down is to make it impossible to go extremely fast. I can think of this play ground near my house which is across the street from a school. In orders to stop people speeding down this straight street, the placed large rocks in the middle of the road, so you have to dive this zig zag pattern. I sure this can be somewhat frustrating for drivers but it's now impossible to navigate this road at more than ~20 mph which is what we want.
As for moving interactions I think the idea of not having pedestrian crossings at intersections is infeasible. Though it might work if you were building a new city from scratch. When you are walking in a city you are going to cross multiple blocks. Walking ten+ blocks to get somewhere is so normal it’s not something you even think about. Crossing in the middle of the block would at least double and could triple or quadruple the length of the of a walk and city dwellers would simply not do it and cross at intersections. They already universally ignore traffic lights, and aren't going to walk out of their way dozens of times a day.
I could imagine a city that was designed around walking and all the shops and homes were on car free streets, with streets behind the houses, like alleyways or underground. That I could see working, but the problems with implementation are obvious.
> Crosswalks should be either half way along a road segment, or at least half a block from the vehicle intersection.
Great, so it'll take pedestrians 3x as long to get anywhere.
> Do not intentionally make safety worse by adding distractions and hazardous elements ('traffic calming').
When drivers feel confident, they drive fast. When they feel wary, they drive slow. I do not believe evidence shows that when drivers must navigate more complex arenas, they become more dangerous. They may feel less safe, but that's the whole point — to reduce drivers’ confidence and force them to act safely and cautiously.
This could be fantastic, if the city was designed around it with a pedestrian grid half a block out of phase with the car grid. Without other changes, this would likely be a huge pain, so at that point we might as well work to make the whole thing far less car-dependent.