Drunk driving in suburban areas is rampant and feels almost inherent without real public transportation options at last call. I think most of Seattle's public transit options stop right around midnight.
Still, with Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, and 5+ cab companies at your disposal there is no excuse for being drunk behind the wheel.
Before I moved here I was a pretty obsessively responsible driver. Now that I live here, I have to keep my irresponsible drinking in check because I never have a driving obligation to convince me to stay sober...
Hanging out at a place within walking distance of home really is the best bet. Sadly a lot of American cities don't seem to have bars anywhere near where people live, unlike European ones where you can throw a rock from your window and hit a pub.
But I agree, it depends quite a bit on distance between where you are and your destination.
The GP probably talked about a somewhat bigger trip, maybe (sorry, miles isn't something that feels natural) on the order of 10-15+ km.
Now, driving drunk is absolutely no excuse. But I do agree that the price of getting home by Cab-Or-Replacement-Service is probably not in the 'one more drink' range. A bus ticket though..?
Maybe the problem is not cabs or walking but knowing your limits.
"Drunk" by legal standards when driving and drunk as in can't see straight are typically two different things. You can be technically too drunk to drive but have little trouble getting home walking.
Don't Uber and Lyft have carpooling options now too? There are different ways to cut the cost. It really comes down to a question of responsibility.
I'm not sure what foresight is lacked in this kind of situation. Most likely you know beforehand drinking enough to not be able to drive safely. Occasionally that won't be the case.
Seattle's public transit may be better than many American cities, but it still isn't great.
http://seattletransitblog.com/2014/07/08/metros-night-owl-al...
http://responsibility.org/drunk-driving/drunk-driving-fatali... http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
Thankfully, the CDC has done that, and here it is in an easy graphic:
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_deat...
Unintentional injury dominates deaths in ages 1-44, and indeed the biggest killer of people ages 5-24 is traffic:
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inju...
I'm not from the US, but over here (Finland), drink drivers are generally most dangerous to themselves. Of course there are some innocent people who are killed and injured by drink drivers, and these cases are particular tragedies, but most deaths resulting from drink driving are either people who kill themselves by stupidity, or at least consent to be in a vehicle where the driver is DUI.
Another thing I could bring up from analysis of traffic deaths is the large number of suicides we have -- about 20 % of traffic deaths; this is becoming a burden on truck drivers because they carry a lot of the emotional burden when someone decide to smash their car at high speed to an oncoming truck.
And yet another astonishing factor is deaths of "natural causes" (heart attack, stroke etc) while driving. These make up something around 10-15 % of traffic deaths here.
> ...over here (Finland), drink drivers are generally most dangerous to themselves. Of course there are some innocent people who are killed and injured by drink drivers but most deaths resulting from drink driving are either people who kill themselves or consent to be in a vehicle where the driver is DUI.
You can't argue that problem is being overly focused on condemnation of the person who drinks and drives and then ignore our responsibility to keep them from hurting themselves either.
That number is highly biased towards the elderly. "Falls" are basically another kind of "died of old age". If you exclude people over 55, you get about:
- ~6,700 deaths from drunk driving
- 2,459 from falls
If you look at all driving fatalities (because we fleshy humans can be impaired by more than alcohol and often make mistakes), you have
- 25,499 deaths
Cars are deathtraps.
There's some interestin brain stuff going on for some of it. A person with failing vision (and dementia can cause some loss of vision even though the eyes and optic nerve work fine) will learn the layout of their home. A care worker comes in once a day and moves something? That person falls over.
Someone from my local MH trust realised that people with dementia in hospital could not see (because dementia) the zimmer frames and weren't using them. He painted them red. This means people can see them (red is one of the last colours to go) and thus they use them. This simple measure has reduced falls and the associated deaths and injuries.
The population of the US is roughly 310 million people. Using your figure for driving fatalities, 3.1x10^8 / 2.5x10^4 = 1/12400 chance of dying in a car accident. This tracks reasonably well with the admittedly outdated information in [1], which gives the odds of dying at home as 1/7875.
By your reasoning, then, my apartment is about 33% more deathtrap-y than my car, and I should probably consider living out of doors, as well as giving up my car and staying away from roads.
Except that, from the same data, my odds of dying at the hand of another person are about one in sixteen thousand. I live in a large city, so my options are starting to look pretty limited! Subsistence farming may be the only way. (Or perhaps hunting and gathering -- this is prime whitetail country, and there are few enough hunters for deer to've become a serious pest through overbreeding.)
All life is risk, and the outcome is known ahead of time - the probability of dying of something, given long enough, eventually reaches unity. Maintaining a healthy sense of perspective seems warranted.
[1] http://www.riskcomm.com/visualaids/riskscale/datasources.php
And almost everyone has a home every day, whereas people who drive/ride cars more are at mich higher risk of car dying than less-frequet riders
Getting to near zero drunk driver deaths is attainable once we change behavior. That's the acceptable number.
And waiting until the problem occurs is obviously not the time to try and change the behavior.
We can measure blood alcohol so we can estimate the degree of impairedness. Furthermore, it is already illegal.
(Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...)
Also you have to consider a bunch of other variables such as the difference in the traveling distances between work, home, and play.
And take into consideration things such an increase of X in volume of traffic might increase deaths by kX. With k being 2 or 5 or 10.
And then the gap narrows.
Not the 10x difference, but still 2x.
The default mindset is so heavily dominated by the assumption that you'll drive that the building codes in most of the country require bars to have significant parking available for customers, even if the bar is in a heavily urban neighborhood and the owner would prefer to use the space for seating.
Not to mention, why are cars dumb machines? If someone is going crazy fast in an area where there is no safe way to decelerate, then the car should not allow that speed to be reached. Freeway speeds should not be allowed when you're not on the freeway.
The self-driving car isn't the solution here. Its too sci-fi, too out there, and no one can make it work with snow and rain right now. We middle a practical middle-ware nanny and we need one quick. We need a new Ralph Nader focused on intelligent safety systems and advocating for them to be law. We'll never stop drunks, but we might be able to stop drunks from performing fatal strikes. Its great that they caught the drunk, but that doesn't bring Mike back to life.
Personally, I dont think we're getting to these self-driving cars without these kinds of baby steps. Best to start advocating them now, which will give us public support when fully automated cars are truly here.
Rather than autonomous cars, we should be focusing on Taleb's antifragile solutions like walking and biking. This means the design of dense housing and walkable streets, and the removal of two-ton bullets that massacre children every day.
I grew up in Los Angeles, so I'm aware of how alien the concept is of a walkable city to Californians. It wasn't until I moved to the East Coast and Europe that I realized other people don't need to drive ten miles to see friends or pick up dinner.
If HN types don't recognize and question these car-dependent assumptions, there's no chance the rest of the country will. Nor would most Americans want to address the question. To accurately price vehicle traffic for real infrastructure costs (much less negative externalities or pigovian taxes) would absolutely devastate the value of car-dependent real estate... which is most of the country.
I guess we'll just continue letting children and geniuses be killed. At best, self-driving cars will continue this horrible urban planning and somewhat lower the body count. It's a goddamn shame.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
However, not everyone wants dense housing... Suburbs exist because people do not want to be that close to each other. Some people want to own their own yards/property/houses, have open space, and are willing to trade driving significantly more (with its associated dangers) for these features. People are going to create the kind of environment they want to live in, and we should figure out ways to make that environment better/safer, rather than dictating that everyone must live in (well-planned) urban environments.
That said... if someone wants to live in exurbia, he should pay an appropriate amount to access amenities downtown. It's absurd that someone can pay $1500/month for a studio downtown, but only a few feet from his front door, anyone can drive a similarly-sized vehicle at hazardous speeds for free.
Driving is essentially free in the US, despite enormous costs in terms of infrastructure and public space. That needs to change. If car-dependent exurbs must continue to exist, then we should at least make those exurbs responsible for their own costs rather than forcing urban residents to have their neighborhoods destroyed and then pay for the privilege.
Wait: downtowns are dying all across the country, and you want to solve that problem by charging people more money to go there?
Some of these cities are now beyond repair, not least for the overarching national trend of capital concentration in Silicon Valley/Silicon Alley, but these reforms would still help enormously. For example, Bloomberg's plan to toll bridges into New York City that was vetoed by car-dependent Albany. It's absolutely ridiculous that exurban commuters are allowed to devastate NYC every day, for free, because they're too entitled either to live in the city or even to commute via less destructive trains.
I would really love to hear your explanation why New York City should be required to spend billions on bridges and roads crushed by automobile traffic for commuters who don't even pay taxes into the repair fund. Much less why NYC residents should be forced to give up enormous swaths of precious road real estate at peril to their health and quality of life.
They don't. They can stop doing it any time they want.
I don't think the result is going to be what you expect, though, especially now that no one has to live (or even visit) the city to do most types of business.
And so much of the sprawl in the US is not about residential housing taking up lots of space, but about separating shops and other essential parts of infrastructure from housing in a way that is only tolerable because of the car culture.
E.g. I used to travel to Palo Alto and Menlo Park a lot for business a few years back. I don't have a drivers license, so I experimented with how possible it was to stay at various hotels while walking as much as possible (didn't want to depend on co-workers or cabs to get everywhere, and I like walking).
At one point I stayed in Atherton and walked to/from offices in Menlo Park. People probably thought I was pretty crazy, but to me the distance was no more than what I'm used to, and the "commute" length was shorter.
But what got me was the structure of these - by US standards - quite reasonably pedestrian friendly small towns. If you lived right next to Menlo Park or Redwood City or Palo Alto town centres, a lot of things would be within walking distance. But basics were missing. Such as grocery stores. I soon learned to pick hotels in suitable locations to be within walking distance of somewhere where it'd be possible to actually find a decent selection of food nearby (eating out every day gets boring surprisingly quickly).
On top of the distance, the pedestrian friendly areas were "islands" not linked in any reasonable way. E.g. from Menlo Park to Atherton or Redwood City it seemed to me I had the choice between walking down El Camino Real, including a long stretch with pretty much no roadside lighting (fun walk back late evenings) and no sidewalk (for those unfamiliar, El Camino Real is one of the main roads in the area and heavily trafficked), or taking a huge - 3 times the walking distance or so - (but scenic) detour through back roads past Atherton estates.
(Amusingly, as I tried the backroads through Atherton, everyone I met greeted me as I walked past. It seemed like people assumed I must belong there, because why else would I be walking there? (I'm used to people being more friendly in California than I'm used to from London, but this was a huge step up).)
This is not about density, though density helps, but about a culture where everything is centralised because everyone drives, and where everyone drives because everything is centralised.
Let me guess: you're in your 20s-30s and in perfect health, that you live in an urban environment, and that you don't have a family to shop for.
Just because it doesn't now exist in the United States doesn't it mean it can't or should not.
Increase the population of the U.S. to a billion or so, then maybe it will work.
Do you believe that the existence of exurbs and rural areas is what's preventing cities from pursuing less fragile means of transit? Why?
Places where the population density is high enough to have it (New York, other parts of BosWash, Chicagoland) by and large do have it.
The OP was complaining about Los Angeles. Five minutes with Wikipedia and a calculator will demonstrate why mass transit sucks there, and always will. And LA is dense compared to most of the country.
Because...
Living in the city can be fun when you're a 20-something with no dependents. Most people change their minds once they have families. That's why suburbs exist.
And I notice that you didn't answer my questions.
Still living in 1980-s?
Meanwhile poverty in subarbs growing faster than in cities and crime is also quite a bit growing. Safe area of Brooklyn is a lot safer than in Elyria, OH, although Elyria is a suburb of a big city.
http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Elyria-Ohio.html
There are "safe areas" in Elyria that have a crime rate of 6 (national average: 286, according to this site's measurment methodology)
2) Elyria has over 50,000 people. That's hardly a representative suburb.
Do you understand at all how big Brooklyn is? A safe area of Brooklyn is at least 250,000 people; actually perhaps 400,000 or so.
> There are "safe areas" in Elyria that have a crime rate of 6 (national average: 286, according to this site's measurment methodology)
Where? Cannot see anything like that on the map you linked.
> 2) Elyria has over 50,000 people. That's hardly a representative suburb.
Please, educate me how to (cherry)pick a representative suburb.
Fine. Show me a "safe area" of Brooklyn that has a crime rate of 6
"Where? Cannot see anything like that on the map you linked."
I should have said other suburbs in the same area. For example, Westlake.
"Please, educate me how to (cherry)pick a representative suburb."
Well, for a start you don't pick out the one with the highest crime rate.
That map demonstrates that Elyria is an extreme outlier, even for the area, much less for the country as a whole.
You got busted, dude.
But according to city-data, overall crime rate in NYC was 256.1, so in the safer parts of Brooklyn it should be not more than this number; and it is lower than average for US.
And 6 is actually an artifact , erroneous number because...
> http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/c...
...according to FBI report, Westlake does not report offenses anymore to FBI (ad city-data uses the FBI report).
> Well, for a start you don't pick out the one with the highest crime rate.
> That map demonstrates that Elyria is an extreme outlier, even for the area, much less for the country as a whole.
No it is not. Extreme outlier is East Cleveland, a suburb of Cleveland.
> You got busted, dude.
No I am not, because 325 is slightly above average crime level in the US.
No matter how you bend data, cherry pick data, preferentially choose tiny white affluent suburbs, NYC, a quintessentially big American city is not crime-ridden, especially if you do not venture into the hoods.
Besides crime, people want to have yards for their kids to play in, rather than some littered public park full of drunks and discarded hypodermic needles.
They want their kids to be able to have bedrooms of their own.
They want to own a car (with the concommitant freedom to travel as they wish, when they wish) without paying outrageous parking fees (if parking is even available).
They want to have a kitchen and dining room for family gatherings.
They want any number of things that are either exorbitantly expensive or flat unobtainable in urban environments.
The key takeaway here is that you don't get to choose for other people.
They move to the suburbs because that's where they want to live.
I realize that this conflicts with your opinion on how people ought to live, but that's how it is. Sorry.
It works well in the Netherlands because the density is high but "not that high," and bikes are given good infrastructure. Even then, self-driving cars will be a big win for those times when you really do need to drive somewhere (e.g. to go shopping, fill in gaps of good transit, and so on).
They were able to build this infrastructure due to a popular protest movement, 'Stop de Kindermoord' (Stop the Child Murder) which was in reaction to exactly the problem we face in the US of deaths and injury caused by motorists.
There is a great video about the protest movement and the transformation of dutch infrastructure here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
Self-driving cars are an enabling technology for lower-cost, more-readily-available, on-demand transport, which is a wedge to dismantling the car-ownership-necessary society, which itself is a route to get to public support for community planning that better supports walking and biking as primary modes of transport for able citizens for tasks for which they are suitable, with automotive transport as a secondary form for situations and individuals for whom walking/biking are not suitable.
The two approaches are complementary, not opposed.
Some of us do. If you hang out on HN when Europe is awake it helps.
I used to live in California, now am in Dublin, and indeed it's remarkable how much life fits in a 2 mile radius. More than I had within 40 miles in LA.
Unfortunately the US has a culture which is positively allergic to change, and a generally ignorant populace, so it's hard to imagine it changing substantially. It is, though, slightly. City centers are becoming more popular and the suburbanite boomers are starting to die off.
Why is it even possible? Because a car that can't do 100mph is going to have terrible performance 0-75
There's long stretches of highways in rural areas with speed limits higher than 75
>Not to mention, why are cars dumb machines? If someone is going crazy fast in an area where there is no safe way to decelerate, then the car should not allow that speed to be reached.
There are sometimes legitimate reasons to be going quickly. I have, at times, needed to have bursts of speed into the 90s to safely get around a drunk driver going 70.
You're now asking for cars to behave unpredictably based on their determination of the road conditions.
And you set the limiter to 75. Now someone is driving 75 in a 25.
Most highway deaths are rural[1] and involve a single car - they veer off of narrow lanes into a ditch or trees, or hit a large animal. The difference in reaction time needed to avoid said animals or other obstructions is not that different from 75mph to 90mph - low visibility is the underlying problem there, not speed.
The idea that we're suddenly safer on roads if we limit speeds is also not necessarily true.
In 2013, German autobahns accounted for 31% of the countries traffic, yet only 13% of the deaths. They had a rate of 1.9 deaths per billion kilometers travelled, while urban roads had 4.7, and rural roads 6.6.
I don't think there's really evidence to support the idea that limiting our cars to lower speeds will be beneficial.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2009/11/29/120716625/the-deadliest-roads-...
Not convinced by this one. Surely reducing the kinetic energy in this scenario is the safest course of action?
It's easy to second-guess.
I have no desire to ride fast (I rather enjoy doing 40 mph on a park drive), but I need my bike to be able to go 100 mph so that when the person next to me going 55 mph starts to merge into my lane, I have the choice of slowing down or very rapidly accelerating out of danger. It's the same with cars. Having the "headroom" means you can speed up quickly in emergencies.
Contrariwise, if I speed up and pass him, I have to keep worrying about him. What if he decides 70 just isn't fast enough? He's both more willing to drive fast, and willing to drive faster, than I am, so if I make it about who can stay ahead of whom, I lose. But I, being neither drunk nor proud, am both more willing to drive slowly, and willing to drive more slowly, than he is. So I make it about who can stay behind whom, and I win.
(None of this, I hasten to note, is intended in support of mandated governors on cars, nor should it be taken as such; I've seen enough to know that trying to make something foolproof results only in a lot of annoyance and a better fool. But it makes anyone a better driver, and safer to be around, to understand that faster doesn't always equal better.)
How is remaining near an impaired driver vs. leaving them behind the safer option?
It isn't always practical or possible to find another route, and staying behind a drunk driver and thus near them, or running the risk of running into the results of some sort of mistake on their part is certainly more dangerous than putting them safely behind you.
I don't think I've ever been in a situation where a drunk driver has been speeding around at 100mph - they almost universally go near the speed limit, but controlling their vehicle poorly.
I do not want to be in a situation where I am behind them. Even if I let them put a fair amount of distance in front of me, roads are not always well lit. If they crash, or hit something, I might now be having to deal with debris on the road that I won't be able to see easily, or potentially at all until it's too late.
I fail to see a safer course of action outside of just not driving at all, which, as I live in Texas, is distinctly not a possibility.
I don't think anyone is recommending that. I think they're recommending staying behind a drunk driver, and slowing down enough that you're no longer near them and have plenty of time to react to the results of any sort of mistake on their part. I think we can all agree that tailgating a drunk driver is an absolutely terrible idea.
(In general, I try and leave enough space to react to a sober driver's mistakes as well.)
> putting them safely behind you.
"Behind you" means you're in front of them. This is literally putting yourself in the path of danger. If they're relying on cues from traffic, speeding past them may let them know "they need to speed up" - and now they have some nice tail lights that are much easier to follow than those road stripes...
> I might now be having to deal with debris on the road that I won't be able to see easily, or potentially at all until it's too late.
You might have to deal with that whether or not a drunk driver wrecked in front of you. And even if you've left one behind you, what are the chances there's not one in front of you too?
You'll have more time to react going slower. If you keep your windows clean, your prescription up to date, your headlights in working order, and put down your phone - and I'd wager most debris you can't see in time to avoid is going to be much smaller, and as a result much less dangerous, than an entire car threatening to collide with you going the speed limit.
So.. you reasoned that it would be safer to be /in front/ of the drunk driver?
Yes? In one scenario I am stuck behind them and potentially having to deal with the results of any sort of screwup on their part, or having to find a completely different route, which isn't always practical.
In the other I leave them behind me and am no longer having to deal with them.
In what world is it more advantageous to be near a drunk driver than away from them?
When you're behind them you iust need to leave a suitable braking gap. They're unlikely to come backwards.
Certainly. For that short time, rather than the extended time if I'm driving behind them.
>then when you're in front of them you risk their poor brake control amd distance judgement until you get far enough away from them.
Thus why I get away from them quickly.
>When you're behind them you iust need to leave a suitable braking gap. They're unlikely to come backwards.
Until they run into something. Even if they manage to not completely wreck, they very well might leave behind debris.
If I stay near them I am going to constantly be having to react to their actions, which are extremely unpredictable by nature. Even with a suitable breaking gap, I can't account for every possible outcome, and any lapse in my concentration is many times more dangerous than it would be otherwise. The longer I am behind them, the more fatiguing it is to be on a hyper state of alert, increasing the chances that my focus will slip.
If this is a concern, you are following too closely. You should always be far enough from the vehicle in front of you that you have ample time to stop without hitting them if they stop abruptly or hit something.
On the other hand, I can kind of see why. According to Metro's statistics, almost all riders on the 280 were using it as a mobile shelter instead of transportation to a specific point. (Judgment on whether that is good or bad is left as an exercise; I personally had no problem with it.)