Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

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A city bus ran over a 17yo girl during a right turn, in ljubljana, slovenia, and killed her a month ago.

It's been multiple decades of dozens of city bus routes being driven by bus drivers in buses, accounting for millions of left and right turns, in sunshine, in the dark, during snowstorms and hot sunny weather, and we had was one dead girl in a freak accident.

Reading the online comments the day that happened (and a few days after) was exactly as you said... the buses are the problem, the crossroad is the problem, the traffic lights are the problem, too many people on the bus are a problem, not enough sensors is a problem, the mayor is a problem, the driver certification is the problem... everything is a problem, everything needs to be changed, "the government has to do something", and worse. And the media pumped it all up and made it worse of course.

I think the biggest thing that people refuse to accept is that the optimal number of accidental deaths is non zero

And this carries on for all the other sources of injury and other "bad" things. Provided, of course, the cause it's explicit and direct.

And that the cause can be addressed by regulation. There's no regulation that will protect from bad actors so designing the system to cater to them in extremely specific ways just creates more red tape for normal people.

Said another way, mandating safer intersections will apply to all motorists and pedestrians equally when they interact with each other at a crossing, but if the bus driver forgets to take their crazy pills that morning and the voices in their head say to run someone over, there's no amount of safety systems or auto-stop that are likely to really prevent harm from being done.

In most Western European nations however, we are fully capable of designing and enforcing travel networks that should rarely produce fatalities when it comes to interactions between cars and pedestrians. The reason many countries don't is a matter of political will.

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