The first thing and the most obvious is that for 99% of people, you need a car to live. I've been able to work around that issue, but you simply cannot exist anywhere without a car. Our public transit networks are terrible, our roads are terrible and our commutes are even worse. Half-hour to an hour commutes are normalized among a lot of people. I don't see a need to hammer this point any further as I'm sure almost everyone who has tangential knowledge of the US knows.
The more insidious problem is that Americans are also incredibly afraid and incredibly self-serving, and our law system is set up to benefit that. Drivers can very easily get away with vehicular manslaughter because our system is tilted in favor of drivers. This is why we see larger and larger cars, because people want to protect themselves at the cost of everyone else. And if they do hit a kid or murder a pedestrian it was an accident and not their fault. This is also why Americans drive like absolute maniacs. Our police also rarely enforce traffic laws and drivers have only gotten worse as a result.
So we have a bunch of people that should not be allowed to drive on the road because they have to drive, where they rarely get punished for breaking the law and where the law is set up to benefit them when they do break it. This has been a universal constant across every state I've lived in, though notably Virginia was worse than both Texas and Washington in terms of drivers.
I also see a lot - and I mean a lot - of people holding a phone while driving, even in dense city traffic. Add to that non-walkable streets in some places and unsafe rules like legal right turns on a red light. Cyclists often have to squeeze into a narrow bike lane that is level with the car lanes instead of raised onto the sidewalk. That adds up to a much higher amount of latent dangers than in Europe.
I'm now a father so one cannot discount the amount to which my tolerance of bad actors has changed, but my experience has been that the lack of enforcement for violations (right-turn red lights in SF are rarely obeyed) is definitely taken advantage of by many drivers. However, the collisions report does make it somewhat clear that a non-trivial amount of the new fatalities are due to new traffic modalities: people now have the stand up OneWheels, and there are many more food delivery drivers on e-bikes.
But one gratifying thing is that the newer parts of town where people are having children have a lot more safety construction. I was walking home from the gym here in Mission Bay when I saw a group of kids between 6 and 12 on their little scooters.
[0] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/San-...
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/car-traffic-pede...
We had the political will to solve it around schoolbusses so we could enforce more, but we don’t.
And while I call them "Brodozers" to be derogatory, a significant number of really tiny females are driving them as well in the name of "safety". And they REALLY can't see anything over the hood.
The combination of gigantic blind spots and complete energy transfer is good at killing unarmored people.
https://images.sanoma-sndp.fi/98ad49728452bf5d3e1c9d1d90d899...
And if the incidents of vehicle/pedestrian collisions are directly attributable to reduced visibility, then they should be resolved (the "school bus arm" in North America). But if the collisions would have occurred even with a perfect visibility bike, then changing the vehicles won't solve the desired issue.
For example, there is no way to have any vehicle traveling safely through a school yard at 70 miles per hour; no change to the vehicle makes that work. You have to separate or reduce speeds to crawling.
No one is advocating for this.
> And if the incidents of vehicle/pedestrian collisions are directly attributable to reduced visibility, then they should be resolved (the "school bus arm" in North America). But if the collisions would have occurred even with a perfect visibility bike, then changing the vehicles won't solve the desired issue.
Which is exactly what you were responding to: a massive vehicle with low to no visibility of pedestrians in front of it.
> For example, there is no way to have any vehicle traveling safely through a school yard at 70 miles per hour; no change to the vehicle makes that work. You have to separate or reduce speeds to crawling.
This is false. Smaller, older vehicles were designed with exactly these issues in mind. That's why pedestrians would be lifted over and on top of the hood, which would reduce the total surface area of impact and prevent pedestrians from being pulled under the vehicle (which is drastically worse). And even worse, some designs of cars will outright shear pedestrians when they hit them at high speeds.
American regulations created a dichotomy where there's no middle ground. Big car or sour cream dollop with no space and no power.
Americans want big because big means "safety". An SUV feels safer next to the semi than a Smart car. They also want big to haul the occasional furniture between moves, go on the occasional road trip, bring all the gear when camping, or bring back a massive shopping haul.
American housing is way less dense outside the cities. There's no reason for a compact car if you live in the burbs apart from gas mileage.
At the same time, more and more people want to build bike lanes and people infra near roads. "Strong Towns" movement, etc.
We're putting more bicyclists on the roads next to big cars now.
I know. Sold my Tesla, now drive a Land Cruiser. A small car is just an exercise in pain when you have kids and need a car to get everywhere. If I had safe bike lanes to get the kids to school and practice and the grocery store, I’d just have an urban arrow… but I’m not contending with the aforementioned kindercrushers that aren’t looking for cyclists and risking my kids with the way our streets are designed. I would happily support changes that fix this, but this is the world we’re in as parents.
You're right though, if we hadn't moved to the Netherlands, we'd have bought something like that too, to make sure we'd win in any crash. Luckily we do, indeed, use an Urban Arrow instead.
Ironically I can hold more kids on the Urban Arrow than I could in my last car - 4 small kids can ride on the bike (3 in bucket, one on a seat on the back), plus the rider of course.
Trunk based 3rd rows were eliminated at the behest of the 30yr ago equivalent of people like you because they performed very poorly in rear end crashes.
The death of it has more to do with the death of station wagons than safety (I imagine sitting backwards is actually MORE safe)
And even a minivan is quite large (usually SUV size without the height).
The average weather pattern of the region a person lives in plays a part, the amount of public transportation avaliable plays a part, how densely packed cities near you are plays a part. What car is avaliable is obviously a big part. All that stuff will be probably be considered before the "overall safety" of the car you want (and can afford) to get.
The people who can afford to think about safety will most likely be considering "passanger safety" rather than at the societial level. The more big cars around them the more someone concerned about safety will feel the need to own and drive in a big car. Sometimes you need the bigger car for the larger range a bigger gas tank allows. There are still places where you can find around 400 km between gas stations, especially if you are driving outside normal buisness hours.
One topic for the American car market has been how the "mid-sized" or "mid-range value" car space has been vanishing. That the options are increasingly moving towards either minimal passanger/storage Eco-Cars or the larger Trucks and SUVs. That plays a part, the used car market plays a part, and other world events play a part.
So at least from one point of view here all that leads to a lot of topics like this where there are people who have only lived in the US (and often not even moved around to other parts of the US) pushing their world view on others. You also have people who "have been to the US" claiming qualified expertiese based off their point(s) of reference, valid or not. The "US needs better public transportation" crowd will usually come out as well with sometimes more militant views against car use and ownership.
But all this circles back to the idea that the "normal American" has time to think about this or try to act on any of this. Some do, some don't, most won't really think about this unless a headline prompts something from their brain. The hard thing for the "normal European" to understand is the economics of distance and scale at play in the US given just how much space between cities and towns there can be.
People can blame the "American Dream" or the auto-industry, or whatever else you might want to imagine has contributed to the damage done in the last century of road construction and sprawl. The end result is that most Americans don't have a choice but to own a car, and may be far too tired to be trusted at the wheel of a vehicle. Multiple people driving less than a few miles to work may be involved in an accident with someone who had driven hundreds. Miles driven in a year is part of insurance calculations for a reason.
This was much more comment than I intended to give.