[HN Gopher] Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
___________________________________________________________________
Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
Author : oftenwrong
Score : 429 points
Date : 2022-07-21 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.strongtowns.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.strongtowns.org)
| eesmith wrote:
| > In fact, if we ask safety officials, as a group they officially
| blame driver error and reckless driving for fatal car crashes. In
| other words, don't look at them.
|
| My understanding changed radically when I read about Sweden's
| "Vision Zero". Quoting Wikipedia:
|
| ] In most road transport systems, road users bear complete
| responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship
| by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation
| system designers and road users
| youamericanloo wrote:
| well, because we can. I mean, we have some mental buffer to
| accept the conseuqences.. check deep inside!
|
| I think reacting to amtrak crash makes sense since it moves on
| rails! how on earth something moving on rails could possibly
| crashes? doesn't make sense... but cars are different.. if you be
| honest with yourself you should always wonder how on earth we can
| get to a point without an accident with cars! think about that..
| sorry this is just harsh reality.
| umvi wrote:
| I think there's another reason too we "ignore" car crashes: loose
| coupling with politics.
|
| Say a DUI driver kills a random family of 5. Is that going to
| make national headlines? Probably not. Very little to be gained
| politically. It doesn't really enrage us because we love and
| celebrate alcohol too much to be capable of villainizing it like
| guns. So as a result, it doesn't spread very far on social media.
|
| Now say a raging incel shoots 5 people at a mall (2 die, 3 are
| injured). Is that going to make national headlines? You bet. It
| easily enrages at least half of us since guns are a wedge issue.
| Hence, it spreads like wildfire on social media. As it's
| spreading, it is further coupled to politics whenever people use
| the story to further political goals like mobilizing peers to go
| out and protest, drum up support for a preferred candidate, and
| more.
|
| You won't see a public reaction to car accidents similar to guns
| until the media decides either alcohol or cars are villains that
| need to be eradicated from society.
| Willish42 wrote:
| I think the car deaths vs. gun deaths asymmetry with
| representation in media can more reasonably be explained by how
| "terrifying" that news is to viewers, more likely to get web
| traffic and broadcast viewers, etc.
|
| Healthcare expenses is a similar political wedge-issue that
| causes tons of deaths (Medicare for all, etc.) and doesn't get
| nearly as much media coverage because it's less terrifying.
|
| You can see this even irrespective of how many deaths there
| are, like when there's a really big fire/explosion/storm that
| gets news coverage but casualties are zero or very low. Those
| are more likely to get coverage than a single car crash that
| killed more people
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > It doesn't really enrage us because we love and celebrate
| alcohol too much to be capable of villainizing it like guns
|
| I hear a lot more ads on the radio informing me about all the
| ways a DUI will screw over my life, even if I don't kill
| anyone, but almost nothing about guns.
|
| Now, at a national level, sure, guns dominate. But I'd say the
| larger differentiating factor is intent. The killer on a
| shooting spree sparks terror in a way that a stupid drunk
| driver does not, even if the latter is more of a risk.
| Bhilai wrote:
| Well, comparing guns and cars is just absurd. Many kinds of
| restrictions like age limits, requiring a driver license,
| requiring liability insurance, seat belt restrictions, speed
| limits, NHTA safety regulations that car manufacturers have to
| meet, speed traps by traffic police and so on... none of that
| exists for guns.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Growing up, my state only had a multiple choice exam for a
| license. The age limit is the only _real_ restriction you
| listed. Everything else is just to keep the honest folks
| honest.
| S201 wrote:
| In all fairness:
|
| * Age limits: There is a similar age limit to buy a gun as
| there is to drive a car
|
| * Driver's license: Pretty much anyone with a pulse over the
| age of 16 can get a driver's license and it's nearly
| impossible to revoke permanently
|
| * Insurance: The legally required insurance limits in some
| states is so low that it's effectively useless
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| This is just reframing the point of the article. Diffuse harms
| are ignored unless they're useful for pushing an agenda.
| eckesicle wrote:
| Here's an interesting factoid:
|
| The annualized mortality rate of a US soldier is ~100 per
| 100,000.
|
| The annualized mortality rate of the average US man between the
| age of 25-34 is 177 per 100,000. (It's 199 per 100k for ages
| 18-24).
| lief79 wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Note, soldiers are initially filtered for health conditions.
| It's not the same starting point.
| theptip wrote:
| What's the annualized mortality rate among US men fit enough to
| pass the PFT (Physical Fitness Test)?
|
| (Put differently, I don't think there are any morbidly obese
| people in the military which skews the comparison you're laying
| out here.)
| eckesicle wrote:
| Yeah, of course this is probably the big differentiating
| factor.
|
| It's part selection bias, part staying healthy, part not
| being exposed to accident prone environments.
|
| Still though, as a lifestyle choice it's really safe.
| smm11 wrote:
| July 18, 2022: 196 Covid deaths in the USA
|
| 2020: 1909 deaths daily from heart disease in the USA
| marsven_422 wrote:
| wahern wrote:
| > No NTSB team is going to mobilize to investigate those
| tragedies. Nobody is going to seek the underlying causes or
| ponder the multiple contributing factors. In fact, if we ask
| safety officials, as a group they officially blame driver error
| and reckless driving for fatal car crashes. In other words, don't
| look at them.
|
| Perhaps a touch too hyperbolic? Here's what the NTSB has to say
| about the matter:
|
| > The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent
| federal agency, has the authority to promote motor vehicle
| safety, determine the probable cause of motor vehicle-related
| crashes, and make safety recommendations aimed at preventing
| crashes. Over the years, NTSB has made recommendations to
| NHTSA.... Below is a list of open recommendations.
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/ntsb-open-recommendations-nhtsa
| ladyattis wrote:
| It reminds me of how here in the US we often overuse signage and
| other markings on roads to 'prevent' accidents but roads with
| less markings that are obvious and direct tend to have less
| accidents by comparison. I wonder if part of the problem with
| American roads is the fact we assume people need information they
| don't need or use. I know that roads here aren't actively calmed
| by changing the quality of the road (roughness, width) and that
| often people ignore or outright get confused by whatever signage
| and markings are put up.
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| A couple years ago I saw a video of a guy filming himself
| talking to a road maintenance worker. In an angry tone he said
| they didn't have enough pylons and noone can see them when they
| drive uphill and they're causing accidents. The worker said
| policy says to use 3 (or 5 or something) pylons. As the worker
| was saying it you can hear someone slamming on their breaks.
| The guy turning his camera and catches a guy who swerved into
| the fence so he wouldn't hit the workers car or anything
|
| The guy filming immediately says (something like) "you see.
| That's what I said".
|
| The problem is also policy is made for typical situations and
| people are trained to ignore problems because its a pain in the
| butt to deal with policy makers
|
| Under using is probably more common but I wouldnt be surprised
| if some places used too many that people started ignoring it
|
| -Edit- I think it was this. Apparently my memory isn't very
| good because I forgot all the cuts
| https://youtu.be/sCEzEVJkO1U?t=20 Actually at 1m 18s guy says
| "there's 5 cones". Maybe my memory isnt terrible lol
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| My kid sister died in a car accident two weeks ago. Now I find
| the numbers unfathomable. How can 40,000 families be suffering
| like this, every year?
| djmips wrote:
| I agree, it's one of the things that I think of often... it's
| not logical. My condolences to you and your family... :`(
| closewith wrote:
| I'm sorry for your loss.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Because even 40,000 people is only a lot relatively. It is just
| 0.012% of the American population and 0.00051% of the world
| population.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Still, it's an order of magnitude above what we see in Norway
| for example, around 12 per 100k population vs around 1.8 per
| 100k population.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in.
| ..
|
| https://www.ssb.no/transport-og-
| reiseliv/landtransport/stati... (car fatalities)
|
| https://www.ssb.no/befolkning/folketall/statistikk/befolknin.
| .. (population)
| notch656a wrote:
| Fatalities are more usefully measured per mile not per
| person. For instance, in many 3rd world countries the roads
| are notoriously unsafe but the average person covers few
| enough miles that their road fatality rate per capital
| looks better.
|
| Note this applies to OP posted above you as well.
| lkbm wrote:
| The 40k is US, not worldwide. If you want a % of world
| population, you should look at world traffic fatalities.
| Balgair wrote:
| I'm not saying you're wrong, but ... dude... have some
| sympathy.
|
| To OP: Sorry for your loss. I can't imagine what it's like.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| No even on that scale it is a lot of harm when you consider
| it as it actually is. As the person you're responding to
| notes, a preventable death touches many more than just the
| individual killed.
|
| You can argue that this cost is worth bearing, but you can't
| dismiss it as "just" .01% or whatever. Over a period of years
| this is almost every family touched by unnecessary death:
| people growing up without a parent, careers ended because of
| disability, spiraling into depression or addiction because of
| losing a child, all the second and third order effects of
| grief and loss and suffering.
|
| Again, maybe it's worth it. Make a point for why it is
| though, if you find it to be. Pointing at the numbers isn't
| enough.
| lief79 wrote:
| Relatedly, that's just the fatalities. There are far more
| none fatal injuries, some of which are permanently life
| altering without bringing in the costs of health care in
| this country.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| A couple thousand people die every day. About 90 from car
| accidents. What fraction of the rest are preventable?
| Probably most of them, if we're being honest.
| [deleted]
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Never owned a car of my own until two years ago. Our car has been
| hit three times in the last two years. Once totaled on the high
| way (another drivers fault) and twice while parked. Roughly 50K
| in damages across the two cars and 3 months in the shop doing
| repairs. We spent 20K on a new car after the old one was totaled
| and insurance paid out a fraction of what a similar car would
| cost. We've paid close to 2K in deductibles, way too much for car
| insurance from a company that doesnt give a shit about us, and
| close to 1k on car cameras and backup batteries.
|
| Thankfully we havnt been hurt but we got lucky. When the car was
| totaled it was in heavy traffic going 40+ mph and caused a 4 car
| pile up. I know people who have died in accidents or had their
| kids die. My immediate family was incredible lucky to not be
| killed by a drunk driver in a very bad accident early on in my
| life.
|
| Driving sucks.
| thecatwentup wrote:
| Another anecdote on the other side of this: I've been driving
| since I was 15 for many thousands of miles and have only been
| involved in two incidents. Both my fault involving icy roads,
| but both where so minor that only paint damage occurred (no
| insurance involved). I live in the north-eastern United States
| for reference. Edit: I wouldn't say that my driving style is
| cautious either, I do drive attentively though.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Where do you live? West coast or South?
| drc500free wrote:
| My money's on mid-west, honestly.
| yreg wrote:
| Is there no mandatory insurance to cover damages to others in
| the US?
|
| In my country if I want to drive a car it has to have this
| insurance so if I crash into someone all of the damage I do
| to them is covered.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| It is mandatory but not everyone follows the rules. Our car
| has been hit three times in the past 4-5 years and only one
| of the drivers was insured. (One didn't even have a
| license!)
| gjs278 wrote:
| meowtimemania wrote:
| Where do you live? Driving should be safer, but being involved
| in that many accidents in only 2 years seems really unlucky
| theptip wrote:
| > It is widely recognized that there is an epidemic of suicides
| among current and former military personnel, especially those who
| have been on active duty in a combat theater... There were 3,481
| combat deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since 9/11, there have
| been over 30,000 military suicides. Over 20 soldiers a day take
| their own lives.
|
| Pet peeve: while I really like the general point of the article,
| I wish the author had actually provided statistics that support
| the claim they are making here. 30k suicides sounds like a lot,
| but what's the base rate in the general population? The numbers
| provided don't actually tell you whether the rate of military
| suicides is higher than civilian ones, and that kind of
| undermines the point. To be concrete I'm looking for something
| like "the base rate of suicide is X% chance per year, whereas
| amongst soldiers it's Y% chance per year, suggesting a risk
| factor of (Y-X)% caused by military service."
|
| A quick search finds some research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /United_States_military_veteran....) that suggests the rate of
| suicide among veterans is 1.5x the base rate, which is
| substantial. Using those numbers suggests that 10k of those
| suicides quoted above were specifically attributable to military
| service (and 20k would be "baseline civilian risk of suicide").
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Roadside bombs were Iran-sourced, and played into political
| actors desires to 1) stay in Iraq 2) invade Iran. Well and 3)
| actors who want us out of Iraq.
|
| Suicides of soldiers work as a deterrent to military action. No
| political actor wants that tool to be removed from their
| toolbelt. They want their "Defense Department" to be deployable
| at will with no hesitation from the American Public.
|
| Traffic deaths are a necessary evil of transportation, economic
| activity, and the profits of the oil industry.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| This article presents one facet of automobile risk that is
| interesting. Essentially there is no governing body tasked to
| analyze and mitigates these risks to the same degree as with
| public transport. Rather, general consensus (maybe not majority
| but still some level of consensus) must be reached before safety
| measures begin to see widespread adoption in a very distributed
| system.
|
| > For auto crashes, we're talking about block level
| interventions, the kind of fine-grained design details that
| transportation departments are not able to perform.
|
| To point out an alternative, transportation departments, if
| endowed with the authority, could mandate centralized control of
| all motor vehicles. There is no technical (nor practical) reason
| you couldn't turn over the whole thing to properly engineered
| centralized computer control. It would be incredibly expensive
| but it could certainly be done in such way to reduce the risk by
| orders of magnitude. And that is exactly the kind of top down
| intervention transportation departments are capable of
| implementing, at least structurally, if not with their current
| budget levels.
|
| And I think the question of _why_ we haven 't done this, and
| probably won't any time in the foreseeable future, is a
| fascinating way to explore our approach to risk.
| Sevii wrote:
| Centralized control of motor vehicles is tantamount to
| centralized control of all human movements throughout the
| country. Even if we could do it, I don't think we should.
|
| Right now driving is a situation where you take your life into
| your own hands and have to accept some risk. But in return you
| have the ability to go anywhere anytime.
|
| Centralized control inverts that. Now you need permission to go
| anywhere. Does the government approve people like you going to
| a particular neighborhood? It becomes trivial to enforce
| basically anything you want. Especially, since people will not
| have any other options.
|
| Digitization enables new levels of control that we haven't
| really explored ethically. In the 1980s building a central
| automobile control system was unthinkable because it was
| impossible. Today it could be accomplished in a couple decades.
| So now we have to answer the question of 'do you have a right
| to go wherever you want on the public roads without government
| oversight?'
| TylerE wrote:
| NHTSA?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It does, but as Strong Towns is wont to do, they do so in a way
| that aligns with their agenda in a borderline disingenuous way.
|
| Every traffic fatality is documented and investigated by a
| trained police officer. The techniques are trained, data
| collection is standardized, and transportation planners have
| access to the information and use it to guide engineering
| processes.
|
| Does the NTSB investigate car accidents? Mostly no, but they
| have the authority to investigate bus accidents and other
| livery vehicles like limousines. And the USDOT/FHA extensively
| regulates motor carriers with a scientific approach that
| removes bad operators. That's because of the law and resource
| limits - but that doesn't mean society closes its eyes and
| ignores everything.
|
| For all of the vague critique of transportation departments,
| they are evolving and improving safety on the roads imo.
| There's no question that the roads I drive on today are safer
| by any measure than the roads I was driven on as a child in the
| 80s.
|
| Strong Towns is like the EFF. They have a compelling message,
| but slather enough bullshit to undermine it.
| sonofhans wrote:
| > There is no technical (nor practical) reason you couldn't
| turn over the whole thing to properly engineered centralized
| computer control.
|
| This is an extraordinary claim for which IMO you must provide
| extraordinary proof. I see zero evidence that this is
| technically possible today, regardless of expense or politics.
| It would be at-minimum a decades-long effort to computerize
| every car and develop central control for them.
|
| Putting aside the tech, we're talking about a world where many
| people refuse to get vaccinated due to mistrust of government.
| How on earth will you talk these people into government-
| controlled vehicles?
|
| From my POV, the answer to "why" is not a mystery: (a) it's
| literally not possible, (b) most people would be vehemently
| against it.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| Mythbusters set up radio control for cars all the time.
| There's a GPS, compass, and accelerometer in your pocket. The
| FAA seems to be pretty good at directing airplanes through
| airports. USAF has pilots operating drones on the other side
| of the world. It seems like all the tech is extant. It'd be
| hugely expensive like I said....
|
| But that claim wasn't really the point I was trying to make.
| Pick some other more plausible (but still radical) safety
| measure we could take with cars. Way more stringent
| licensing, speed limiters, self-driving, or massive increases
| in public transport.
|
| > (b) most people would be vehemently against it.
|
| Why is that? 40,000 people die in the US every year. Why
| don't we allocate more resources to solving that? That's the
| question I think is interesting.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| FAA still relies on humans, particularly for super manual
| areas like takeoff and landing. And ATC is notoriously
| stressful, overworked and understaffed. We'd need a lot
| more bodies to manage all road traffic.
|
| There is a world of difference between the reliability you
| need for a one off experiment, and the reliability you need
| for something expected to operate 24/7/365, in all weather
| from -40C to 40C, in a complex real world environment, and
| where legal liability gets involved in the case of an
| incident.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I think my years of cycle commuting has made me a better driver*.
| I operated for so long under the assumption that if I get hit, I
| could easily die, so its become second nature to not assume a car
| wont yield evening I have right of way. Saved my ass a few times.
|
| * well it's also probably to blame for my excessive head checking
| and poor parking skills, but swings and roundabouts.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| quality of life improvements make it so most people are okay with
| the risk. just like skiing, let people decide what risks they
| want to take. covid has emboldened the authoritarians. stop
| trying to tell other people how they should live.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > covid has emboldened the authoritarians
|
| this is an important point. When the lockdowns and things were
| being talked about i thought it would never happen. I thought
| there's no way people will stand for it. I was shocked how many
| people would just do what they're told. I think it surprised a
| lot of people in power and now they're seeing how far they can
| push it before the people push back. I wonder what the response
| would be if someone in power just went on TV and said they were
| mandating no more driving between the hours of 9Am and Noon
| across the nation. I bet 60-70% of the people would comply with
| no more reason than "that's what they told me to do".
|
| To re-iterate, covid has emboldened the authoritarians
| bpye wrote:
| What about other people that don't drive, pedestrians,
| cyclists, etc. They are also paying the cost of increased road
| traffic deaths, except they are no part in the cause.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I have a simpler explanation: people collectively are quite
| willing to let thousands of people they don't know when the
| alternative is any form of even mild inconvenience to themselves.
|
| Sensible gun regulations like red flag laws for those with mental
| issues or convictions for domestic violence or even just
| background checks? Well that might make it slightly more
| difficult to buy a gun so that's a "no".
|
| More than a million Americans died of Covid, at a peak of over
| 3,000 a day. For reference, that's basically a 9/11 every day.
| Mask mandates to reduce transmission rate? Getting vaccinated to
| hopefully reach herd immunity? Nope.
|
| American corporations routinely outsource activity to other
| countries that frequently use effective if not actual slave labor
| or otherwise horrible working conditions? Nope, we're OK with
| that too.
|
| How easily we trade convenience for the lives of people we don't
| know says a lot about human nature.
| sk8terboi wrote:
| elil17 wrote:
| The NTSB actually does investigate car crashes. Typically police
| do the actual footwork but if the cause is unknown NTSB agents
| will put boots on the ground. Unfortunately most of the causes
| are shared across many cases (speeding, distracted driving, drunk
| driving), so the cases end up getting lumped together into
| reports which can include tens of thousands of cases.
|
| However, they are performing root cause analysis. For distracted
| driving, for example, they break it down into distractions by
| other occupants, distractions by moving object inside vehicle
| (such as a fly), cell phone use (with hands), cell phone use (no
| hands), using component integral to vehicle (climate or audio),
| using component integral to vehicle (other), smoking, and many
| more.
|
| The problem is that decision makers don't do anything about it.
| flaque wrote:
| Human error isn't a root cause.
|
| Why were they able to speed on that road? Why did they feel
| safe being on their phone?
|
| Every software engineer understands intrinsically that blaming
| the user does not improve outcomes. You cannot get folks to
| click the right button by putting "you must click the right
| button" into the terms of service, and then suing the users who
| click the wrong one.
| kiba wrote:
| There's just more opportunities for things to go wrong when you
| give million of people across all walk of life the ability to
| control deadly vehicles and forced them to do it as a matter of
| daily routine.
|
| In contrast, public mass transit just have less things that can
| go home. Trains can be really safe if we wanted it to be.
| chociej wrote:
| I think Strong Towns would suggest they should include the
| infrastructure involved as a point to analyze when determining
| root cause. For example, if a driver was speeding, could the
| street or road have been built in a way that better discouraged
| speeding?
| slifin wrote:
| Cars are glorified and incredibly ingrained in culture
|
| Some people can't even imagine walking anymore and are blind to
| even how much road furniture and infrastructure they litter
| everywhere
|
| Some of the biggest structures we have are roads created in the
| last 100 years
|
| Absolutely crazy
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| I think the real issue is that people are just incredibly lazy.
| My area isn't "walkable", but its what I could call "walkable
| enough" -- you can get a meal and a hair cut and lots of kids
| could walk to school. Of course, the sidewalks are empty here.
| Just an occasional cyclist. Even areas around here that are
| much more walkable like a grouping of shops, people all seem to
| prefer driving shop to shop! We're talking like maybe 100 meter
| walk max. Cars are the default, and if you suggest walking, you
| get looked at like you're nuts.
|
| These same people don't even like cars or driving. I think they
| just like a comfy seat and air conditioning.
|
| The car is basically a mobile sofa to the population. Shove
| them into the crappy cars of the 60s and 70s with no A/C and I
| think they start walking a bit more.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It just comes down to time. I can drive to the store in 5
| minutes, or walk there in 20. Then I have to carry it home.
| You can call that lazy, but there are only 24 hours a day and
| a third of them are spent sleeping, a third working, and so
| that last third is precious.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Cars are arguably one of the most important inventions in
| recent history. So much of what we have today would never have
| happened if we still had to walk everywhere.
| dannylandau wrote:
| I had two friends that were killed in a car crash inside city
| limits. One guy was turning left, and the other guy going 90
| miles an hour in a 40 mile zone. Happened around midnight. Hit
| them perpendicular, and killed two friends and critically injured
| driver who survived and is recovering.
|
| Have become much more sensitive about car crashes and speeding as
| a result obviously. Forces you to re-assess your life.
|
| Realistic solution - Install speeding cameras everywhere, and
| most intersections. And levy heavy fines if a person is speeding
| 20 miles above speed limit, possibly even revoking driver's
| license in that case.
| ladyattis wrote:
| Another thing we can do is force city and state government
| transportation departments into rebuilding roads as they wear
| down into more actively calming roads. Making them narrower,
| put in raised pedestrian walkways (basically turns the
| intersection into one speed bump for cars), reduce the signage
| and markings to the essentials, and even make residential or
| high density roads physical rougher as to make it feel worse to
| drive fast. All these could help with residential/non-highway
| accidents.
| leroy_masochist wrote:
| My theory of why we ignore car crashes as a source of deaths
| boils down to a basic reality of American politics: old people
| vote.
|
| I'm a volunteer firefighter in a rural town in the Northeast. We
| handle a fairly large area and go to about 80 motor vehicle
| accident calls a year, of which about 20-25 require patient
| extrication and about 5-8 involve one or more fatalities.
|
| More of these MVAs involve a non-intoxicated elderly person who
| made a driving error than involve an intoxicated driver (that's
| including people who nod off on heroin, not just drunks).
|
| If we had a clear-eyed view of risk mitigation, we'd make people
| over, say, 75 take a comprehensive vision and neuromotor exam to
| keep their drivers licenses current but we don't, because old
| people vote.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Nationally, close to 30% of all traffic fatalities are caused
| by drunk driving. About 20% of all fatalities are elderly.
| ip26 wrote:
| There's more to it, elderly who can't drive wind up stranded &
| isolated which is a problem in itself. If we look the other way
| when they slowly become unfit to drive, we aren't forced to
| solve those other problems.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| (Un)friendly reminder that it's tautologically impossible for the
| general public to be bad at a subjective task like risk
| assessment or a subjectively assessed task such as driving
| because the general public is what sets the baseline for the
| subjective assessment.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What's required are actually very significant structural changes.
| Veterans suicides are the result of war, which is mass killing
| normalized by false mythology. And it not enough to just say
| that's a bad idea, the problem is deeply rooted in the core
| global paradigm which is fundamentally uncivilized. You can't
| just say that hegemony is bad, you need an alternative, which is
| a very difficult task.
|
| The problem with traffic deaths is again, structural. You are
| mixing 3000 pound vehicles, most of which contain only one
| passenger, with pedestrians in the same space. You have humans
| driving them.
|
| The solution is small autonomous vehicles completely separated
| from pedestrians. This is very hard, but possible, and the
| materials wasted on oversized vehicles that are underutilized,
| office buildings that are mostly empty, incredibly poor density,
| etc. can also be used for that purpose.
|
| Cities should actually be entirely redesigned.
| languagehacker wrote:
| I think J.G. Ballard said everything that could be said about
| this in his 2004 Academy Award winning film "Crash"
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought
| that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells
| me that public transit is unsafe.
|
| If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have
| banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture,
| _while simultaneously_ handwringing over every incident that
| happens on public transit.
| js2 wrote:
| It's like a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect where everyone
| believes they're in control of their fate in a car, but not on
| public transit. People must think they're exceptional drivers
| and that they can dodge any accident.
| pbuzbee wrote:
| If I've learned anything from watching "Idiots in Cars"
| videos on Reddit, it's that you can go from "driving
| normally" to "in an accident" much faster than you think.
| Most people have very little experience reacting to imminent
| accidents on the road. Overall that's a good thing, but it
| certainly seems naive to think that simply being an attentive
| driver is enough to keep you out of accidents.
| djmips wrote:
| It's a good thing, because yes getting injured or killed in
| a car accident is horrible but it's not a good thing that
| they don't have any training at all. If driving was
| something done only in industry there would be proper
| training and a lot more safety precautions. I think about
| this every time I walk down this narrow sidewalk in my town
| that's 4 feet from the roadway. A friend of mine was
| recently in the crosshairs of a straying van and he was
| only saved by the luck of a telephone pole intervening.
| rustybelt wrote:
| Yes, but if half of all accidents involve idiots, not being
| an idiot is a legitimate way to reduce your risk of being
| in an accident. Meaning drivers do have some control over
| their level of risk behind the wheel.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| half of all accidents involve an idiot, but there only
| has to be one idiot in a two car collision.
| rustybelt wrote:
| Reduce risk, not eliminate it. Do idiots and non-idiots
| have the same risk of getting into an accident?
| hackernewds wrote:
| That's because you believe you won't be affected since you're
| driving. While transit would be someone else's responsibility.
| Same standards apply to why autonomous driving has to clear a
| much higher bar than beating the averages.
| TylerE wrote:
| The difference is _control_.
|
| While a careful, attentive driver in a well-maintained vehicle
| certainly isn't immune, their risk is much lower than someone
| who drives tired, drunk, or high in a car with bald tires and
| bad brakes.
| userbinator wrote:
| Control, freedom, personal responsibility. Public transit
| offers none of that compared to driving. Thus it should be no
| surprise that many find it better to die or be injured as a
| result of one's own actions, than those of some faceless
| bureaucracy, regardless what the actual rates are.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| I'd say that it is blame rather than control. We tend to
| focus more in finding the responsible to point the finger at
| rather than the cause. If 1000 drivers die in car accidents
| it's easy to shift the responsibility at themselves but if 2
| die on an Amtrak derailment, the responsible is Amtrak or
| American Airlines, Airbus, Boeing or whatever.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| So how do the pedestrians that make up a sizeable part of
| road deaths control the situation then?
| TylerE wrote:
| By doing things like not walking in the middle of the
| street at night in a poorly lit area wearing dark clothes.
| Has happened several times times in my town recently.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The same way drivers do. Avoid the handful of behaviors
| that seem to lead to the bulk of the deaths. Be attentive
| and maintain situational awareness. Cross your fingers.
| otikik wrote:
| But the drunk driver can still invade your line on a split-
| second and frontal-crush you.
|
| If you're in a bus instead of a car, you will be much more
| protected against that kind of thing.
| wahern wrote:
| > While a careful, attentive driver in a well-maintained
| vehicle certainly isn't immune, their risk is much lower than
| someone who drives tired, drunk, or high in a car with bald
| tires and bad brakes.
|
| You could have just stopped at "control". That's the
| fundamental dynamic by which we can explain this differential
| public sentiment--a _sense_ of control or lack thereof,
| independent of whether that control actually exists, or
| whether that control translates to reduced risk. You went off
| the rails trying to link it to some objective reality; it 's
| unnecessary, and in any event even the best of drivers takes
| on more risk while on the road than riding passenger rail.
|
| Control also figures into notions of ethics and justice.
| We're much more willing to accept losses when we attribute
| the proximate cause to "nature", "god", "chance", etc. But
| our moral calculus shifts dramatically when the decision of a
| particular person or group can be fingered (reasonably or
| not) as a primary factor. You already subtly did that by
| insinuating blame upon many traffic victims. (I'm not saying
| the insinuation was improper or impermissible... we all
| frequently do that; it's a staple of public discourse and
| even personal reflection. Just highlighting the extent to
| which notions of control color our views.)
| roughly wrote:
| What's interesting here is that it's a very specific,
| narrow form of control. The driver of the car feels in
| control, because they're operating the motor vehicle, yet
| on the macro scale, they're operating a motor vehicle
| because of a whole host of other decisions outside their
| control. For most people, they don't have the option to not
| operate a motor vehicle and still live where they do, work
| where they do, etc. Likewise, the road construction and
| design operates a powerful influence on how they drive and
| how others drive around them, as well as how safely they
| can navigate to their destination - this too is out of
| their control. Regulations on the construction and
| maintenance of vehicles they and others on the road drive
| are also out of their control, but affect the environment
| in which the driver operates, and rules around who can
| drive and under what conditions similarly are not in the
| driver's control. The driver of the car exhibits control
| over only the narrowest and most immediate circumstances of
| their condition, and yet that veneer of control is
| sufficient for the majority of observers to put the blame
| nearly entirely on the driver for the outcome of their
| trip, absolving or ignoring the numerous other systems and
| decisions made which put them in circumstances in which
| accidents are alarmingly frequent.
|
| The article covers suicide, and here too the veneer of
| control at the point of action hides the entire complex
| environment in which someone dies of suicide - the social,
| economic, and political landscape that creates the
| conditions in which a former service member takes their
| life is not strictly personal, but we insist on treating it
| as such, because at the point of action, it is indeed the
| individual who commits the act.
| zip1234 wrote:
| It is definitely a veneer of control. People's brains and
| senses have all kinds of strange blind spots that make it
| a more dangerous activity than it seems. The whole
| 'zoning out' while driving down a stretch of road for
| example.
| ericmay wrote:
| If only we could take this further. What's more in
| "control" than driving? Walking and riding a bike. That's
| ultimate control.
| whakim wrote:
| Yes, but the GP wasn't talking about some objective
| notion of "control" - they were talking about some
| subjective "feeling" of control and how that translates
| to perceptions of risk and danger. Driving a car feels
| like you're in control because you're the one doing the
| driving and are isolated from your environment even
| though (as a sibling comment notes) you're at the mercy
| of a huge number of factors that you don't perceive.
| That's why folks don't perceive driving as risky.
| (Consider airplanes as a contrasting example - extremely
| safe, but you certainly don't feel "in control".) In that
| context, cycling doesn't feel like you're "in control"
| because you're surrounded by large multi-ton vehicles
| moving significantly faster than you. Walking in urban
| areas feels safe because of the incredible amount of
| infrastructure that exists to support pedestrians and the
| normalcy of walking in those areas.
| danaris wrote:
| This is why, when I have to visit a city, I much prefer
| to park my car at the first convenient opportunity and
| walk. Having a car is pretty straightforward and
| definitely a must in the rural areas where I live (sadly,
| public transit is effectively nonexistent), but driving a
| car in a city is difficult and often terrifying,
| specifically because of the limited control (you're stuck
| going _forward_ at a particular speed, and if you realize
| too late that the GPS /map/printed out directions/copilot
| navigator was indicating _that_ street to turn on, you
| just have to keep going and hope that you can loop back
| around somehow without losing too much time...or you risk
| permanent /exorbitantly expensive damage to your car,
| someone else's car, and/or one or more humans).
| gottastayfresh wrote:
| Exactly, but it's not ultimately convenient. Control ends
| where convenience begins (that's not to say its totally
| accurate, but the phrase looks nice).
| ericmay wrote:
| > Exactly, but it's not ultimately convenient
|
| Strictly by design and active and reinforced choice. Not
| for any other reason. Period.
| kelnos wrote:
| Exactly. There are many places in the world where getting
| around by transit is much faster and more convenient than
| driving. It's just rare to find a place in the US where
| this is the case.
| egypturnash wrote:
| When I am on a bike I am definitely not in control of all
| the people in cars around me, especially the ones who are
| drunk, are assholes, or are badly-programmed robots who
| barely know what a "bicycle" is.
| ericmay wrote:
| Which would be true of any form of transit, including
| driving or riding a bus or walking down the street. So
| I'm not following your point here.
| kipchak wrote:
| You're unfortunately either more vulnerable to other
| cars, less able to take action to avoid them or some
| combination of both. A motorcycle for example is nimble
| enough to attempt to avoid a collision but is more
| vulnerable if a collision occurs, while a bus might be
| sturdier/larger but your presence can't avoid a collision
| at all.
|
| As a group the safest option would be smaller vehicles,
| but individually each person is better off (in terms of
| safety during a collision) with something larger.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Wow, could not agree less! In a bike you're at the mercy
| of the bikers and drivers around you, with laughable
| safety features to protect you.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Yep. We don't fear things under our control. Do I fear
| driving my car? No, because I can control my safety (to an
| extent, anyway). I can drive defensively. I can stay
| focused. I can avoid dangerous intersections. I wear a seat
| belt and have a big safe SUV.
|
| Mass shootings are terrifying because there's no sense of
| control.
|
| Animals are scary (spiders, snakes) because we can't
| control them.
|
| Disease is scary when we can't control it (cancer); less
| scary when we can cure it, even something like appendicitis
| seems tame because most hospitals can get it under control.
| It's also why COVID is less scary to the general public, as
| it gets more under control (via vaccines and treatments and
| prior infection immunity).
| mwint wrote:
| > Mass shootings are terrifying because there's no sense
| of control.
|
| For anyone here concerned about this, it doesn't take
| very much money in HN-terms to become reasonably well
| trained. You can:
|
| 1) Carry your own weapon, following your state's laws in
| all but a few. 2) Learn to use that weapon very well, but
| more importantly: 3) Learn to use cover and move
| defensively or offensively 4) Learn to administer basic
| medical attention to yourself and others 5) Learn to read
| people and know when something might be about to happen.
|
| After enough training, you will at least probably not
| freeze in an active shooter scenario. Even if you're not
| into carrying your own weapon, doing some training will
| teach you how insanely hard it is to hit any moving
| target (or anything at all when the adrenaline is going).
|
| Re. 5), many people in my state carry and I never used to
| notice them. Now I can pick out who is and isn't, and
| usually how long they've been doing it (newbies will
| subtly check their weapon is secure every time they
| move).
|
| The Secret Service is trained the same way; someone not
| used to carrying who is about to do something bad will
| send off all kinds of weird body language signals.
|
| ----
|
| No, you don't need to learn this because shootings are
| exceedingly rare. But if you're nervous, learning these
| things will give you a sense of understanding about the
| threat, and the basic tools to do something to keep your
| loved ones safe in that one-in-a-hundred-thousand-
| lifetimes event.
| clairity wrote:
| no, if you want to survive a mass shooting, you don't
| need to do anything, _especially_ not buy a gun, and your
| likelihood of not dying by mass shooting stays the same,
| basically zero. your chances of dying by gun increase
| much more simply by having one than you could ever hope
| to reduce the risk of dying by mass shooting by having
| one. if you were in the exceedingly unlikely scenario of
| a mass shooting, brandishing a gun increases your
| likelihood of dying in that situation several-fold,
| rather than materially increasing your chances of
| stopping the mass shooter or even saving your own life.
| powerhour wrote:
| And if the rhetoric is true and stolen guns are
| disproportionately represented in violent crimes 6) learn
| to secure your gun when it is not in use so it doesn't
| get (easily) stolen, FFS.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > We don't fear things under our control
|
| yeah, this is it. This is why people will drive through a
| blizzard in the middle of the night but will have a panic
| attack trying to board an airplane. In their car they
| feel in control but in an airplane they feel helpless and
| at completely dependent on the pilot/crew/airplane.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _No, because I can control my safety (to an extent,
| anyway)._
|
| Part of the problem is that this control is much more of
| an illusion than most people realize. In any car crash
| where there's at least two vehicles involved, often one
| driver is at fault, and the other is (or others are) more
| or less an innocent bystander, who may have been
| exercising all the care and attentiveness in the world.
| That person was certainly not able to control their
| safety in that situation.
|
| And even when not involved in a crash, I don't think it's
| reasonable to say that one's safe outcome was caused even
| _mostly_ due to their control over their vehicle. Much of
| it can be attributable to luck, traffic conditions, and
| the imperfect, but often sufficient, control that
| _others_ were exercising over _their_ vehicles.
|
| But I do agree with you that the _perceived_ threat
| /seriousness of these various bad things does have a lot
| to do with the _perception_ of individual control,
| whether or not individuals actually do have much control
| over them. I know a surprising number of people who get
| anxious flying on a plane, but don 't think twice about
| getting in a car, despite there being a higher
| probability of injury or death from a car trip.
|
| Something I just realized: I feel like _passengers_ in a
| car are also similarly not that concerned about the
| possibility of crashes, even though they are not actually
| in control of the vehicle. My first thought would be that
| they presumably know and trust the person who is driving,
| but that doesn 't explain why people feel safe in taxis.
| I guess maybe people _do_ feel less safe in taxis,
| though.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Your details really erase control though;
|
| To stick to the legal ones;
|
| Tired. 40% of Americans report not getting 8 hours of sleep a
| night. An only partially intersecting group reports they are
| regularly tired during daily activities. Is a driver's self
| actualization of tired accurate?
|
| Attentive; bad news, most drivers aren't attentive, hence
| we're still seeing deaths from texting while driving. Self
| actualization doesn't exist here either. Add in passengers
| (children, dogs, friend, partner) - deep thoughts on work,
| relationships - combined with doing something that is mostly
| mundane.
|
| Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure in
| tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving oils
| on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or untrained
| weather, check engine light (25%), potholes impact tie rods
| and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading. Very few drivers
| do this or pre-drive check every drive.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure
| in tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving
| oils on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or
| untrained weather, check engine light (25%), potholes
| impact tie rods and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading.
| Very few drivers do this or pre-drive check every drive.
|
| Your list started off good and then quickly went straight
| to bad faith BS.
|
| Nobody is getting in a crash because their worn out gas cap
| is causing the emissions system to pop a code.
|
| Furthermore, it's pretty clear from the statistics
| available and the widely varying conditions across the US
| with regard to vehicle inspections, weather and road
| conditions that these factors pale compared to human
| judgement related causes.
| djmips wrote:
| Not to derail but the lack of control of self driving cars
| could be one reason there is a big reaction when someone dies
| as a result of an accident.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Do you mean this is an actual important difference, or that
| it is a difference in how it's perceived?
|
| My gut is public transit is still safer than even the most
| attentive and sober driver. So it's the feeling of control
| that determines perception rather than an actual materially
| different risk profile.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Sure. I also won't claim that driving is dangerous, in the
| abstract: human beings take all kinds of risks, lots of them
| for fun, and I'm not interested in restricting others'
| behavior _on that basis_.
|
| It's merely thought provoking: every HN thread on transit
| will have the same half-dozen comments about violence and
| danger on public transit, when the reality is that two orders
| of magnitude more deaths occur each year on our highways.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > human beings take all kinds of risks, lots of them for
| fun, and I'm not interested in restricting others' behavior
| on that basis.
|
| No but we do have a strong, though admittedly weakening,
| tradition of restricting the fun of others when the danger
| posed is not solely to themselves. For example building and
| setting off bombs is fun as hell but we're not allowed to
| do it because it's pretty unhealthy for the neighbors.
|
| Driving cars is pretty dangerous not just for the driver
| but also for other people around _who have not necessarily
| consented to being put in danger_. When pedestrians and
| children are routinely getting killed (as they have been in
| my city this summer) we should shift the danger assessment
| a little away from the skydiving end of the spectrum and a
| little more to the backyard bombs zone.
| cgriswald wrote:
| You can build and set off bombs. It's just heavily
| regulated.
|
| However, many people haven't really _consented_ to
| driving. They drive out of necessity. Where they live and
| work is only marginally in their control and there are no
| other transport options. When I was poor, I would have
| loved to not have to pay for insurance, gas, maintenance,
| and the vehicle itself. I couldn 't really afford it. But
| without it, I couldn't get to work to eat. There weren't
| other options. When I made a little more money I could
| finally afford to live close to work and public transport
| was an option. The trip was 5 minutes by car, over an
| hour by bus.
|
| I'm on board for heavily regulating driving and shifting
| that danger assessment as you suggest. But first I think
| there is a moral obligation to provide alternative modes
| of transportation. (This should not be interpreted as
| excusing drivers from their obligation to be skilled and
| safe.)
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yes, agreed. Driving at least in the american context
| should be understood as basically bimodal: at one end a
| regressive tax on the poor and at the other a luxury that
| allows the wealthy to live in the segregated enclaves
| they value.
|
| Both ends need to be addressed and it will make for a lot
| of changes in the middle too. But there's no solution
| that doesn't involve completely rewriting transportation.
| cgriswald wrote:
| People feel better protected in their cars. They're in a
| private rolling cage with all kinds of safety features and
| a built-in ability to get away from danger. They can also
| avoid more dangerous areas, practice defensive driving, and
| otherwise mitigate their chances of being one of those
| statistics.
|
| Being confronted by a knife-wielding drug addict on public
| transit is just a scarier proposition all around even if
| the numbers suggest it shouldn't be. And it feels _random_
| where death in a car doesn 't, even though for the victim
| it often is.
| dwighttk wrote:
| >the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths
| occur each year on our highways.
|
| What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? I
| wouldn't be surprised if it was two orders of magnitude
| greater person hours on roads in non public transit.
| masterj wrote:
| > What is the throughput of highways vs public transit?
|
| Regardless of what the US does, throughput is much higher
| on public transit than it is on highways. You can fit so
| many more people on buses and trains than in automobiles.
|
| For the actual numbers, compare deaths-per-passenger-mile
| in-city and deaths-per-passenger-mile between cities
| (highways vs buses, trains, etc), and you will see huge
| difference in fatality rate.
| trothamel wrote:
| You're right. According to
| https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles , in the
| US in 2020, there were 4,935 billion passenger-miles on
| highways, versus 32 billion passenger-miles on transit.
|
| The highway mileage includes 306 billion passenger-miles
| on non-transit buses.
|
| Amtrak (6 billion passenger miles) isn't considered
| transit.
| clairity wrote:
| the difference is the illusion of control. you can't talk
| yourself past raw statistics that way. you might make a
| marginal difference in risk, but the bulk of the risk is
| beyond personal control. even with attentiveness, if you're 1
| of 100 drivers on the road, you're at best controlling for 1%
| of that one risk.
|
| and i'd argue attentiveness (anti-distractedness) is the most
| important mass mitigation we could make, but it's also
| practically impossible to maintain over a driving lifetime
| and nearly as impossible to enforce (without significant
| rights violations).
| rustybelt wrote:
| Are you arguing that drivers don't have any control over
| their level of risk on the road? Sure they can't eliminate
| 100% of risk, but not speeding and not driving drunk
| absolutely influences a driver's likelihood of being in an
| accident.
| clairity wrote:
| no, speeding hardly changes risk at all, but _reckless_
| driving certainly can, but that's beside the point. the
| point is that changing your own behavior (i.e.,
| "control") has a negligible _marginal_ effect on
| _reducing_ your overall risk. nearly all of the practical
| risk is external and therefore out of your control
| (unless you manufacture additional risk by being
| distracted, reckless, and /or impaired).
|
| you can't really lower risk, which is what "control"
| implies. that's simply a falsehood some folks choose to
| believe that's unsupported by a basic application of
| stats & probability.
| rustybelt wrote:
| A quick google is telling me that 26.8% of drivers who
| were killed or severely injured had alcohol in their
| bloodstream. Assuming that's true, then wouldn't never
| drinking and driving reduce your risk of death or serious
| injury by around 26.8%? That seems like a substantial
| reduction that is completely in the control of the
| driver.
| clairity wrote:
| no, you have to get _everyone else_ to stop drinking and
| driving, not just yourself, to get that sort of
| reduction.
| TylerE wrote:
| No you don't. Over 50% of crashes are single car
| accidents. I suspect, but don't have proof for, that that
| percentage is even higher in alcohol-related crashes (eg
| driver nods off and drives into a ditch/telephone pole
| rustybelt wrote:
| How? The 26.8% is just drivers with alcohol in their
| system. If I never drink and drive, I will never be part
| of that group. That means the raw rate of traffic
| fatality or severe injury is 26.8% lower for people like
| me (non drunk drivers.)
| zip1234 wrote:
| Speeding doesn't change risk? When 'speed was not a
| factor' in a crash, it just means that the involved
| drivers were not driving above the post speed limit. It
| doesn't mean that the drivers were driving a safe speed.
| In fact, clearly they were not.
| clairity wrote:
| speed increases the severity of collisions, but generally
| doesn't cause them (most of what we classify as speed-
| related is really recklessness, which is also typically a
| misassessment of risk). distractedness, recklessness, and
| impairment are the overwhelming causes of collisions,
| with a small additional portion caused by vehicular
| homicide/suicide, mechanical failure, and environmental
| factors.
| TylerE wrote:
| It's way way higher than 1%. 30% of crashes involve a drunk
| driver. 30% of the drivers on the road are not drunk.
| clairity wrote:
| and it's orders of magnitude higher than 100 drivers on
| the road with you. you're doubling down on a
| misunderstanding of risk. you have no control over most
| of the situations and circumstances that cause
| collisions, injury, and death. you not drinking and
| driving doesn't make all the other drunk drivers sober up
| miraculously. your "control" has quite marginal effects
| at best.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Where is the _control_ when you get hit by a car as a
| pedestrian or cyclist or car driver?
|
| This is an excellent example of biased thinking.
| yongjik wrote:
| I don't understand. What control do I have over a
| tired/drunk/high truck driver running a red light into an
| intersection I'm passing in?
|
| I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash
| into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but
| it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control"
| because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out
| of railroads, but then again, I can't force them out of
| public roads either.
| ModernMech wrote:
| For one, you can choose the routes you take. Accidents
| aren't evenly distributed across every mile of road. Some
| roads are are just statistically safer than others.
| Accidents also aren't evenly distributed across all times
| of day and weather conditions. By choosing not to drive at
| those times and in those conditions, you can lower your
| risk profile.
|
| Moreover, the route you drive most is your commute to work,
| so you can choose where you live to minimize travel time
| and intersections. There's one intersection on my way to
| work, so I guess theoretically what you describe could
| happen. But the accident statistics for that particular
| intersection show that practically no accidents have
| occurred there. Therefore most of the time I spend driving
| is going to be quite safe compared to the aggregate stats,
| and that's by choice.
|
| Delivery driver routes are usually optimized for right
| turns for this reason. My dad was a UPS driver for 30 years
| and went without an accident the entire time, not even one
| that wasn't his fault. You'd think statistically he would
| have gotten into one over the million miles or so he drove
| on and off the job, but I think that just goes to show that
| defensive driving and route planning actually works.
|
| No form of travel is absolutely safe. The best you can do
| is control what you can and hope for the best.
| cdkmoose wrote:
| Bu can you be assured that a drunk/tired/* train engineer
| doesn't run a signal and crash into another train?
| TylerE wrote:
| You can assure that you don't drive drunk.
|
| You can't assure your bus driver didn't pop a few pills
| before they came on shift.
| yongjik wrote:
| You assure your bus driver doesn't have a habit of
| popping pills by making them go through rigorous
| certification, give them decent wages, and punishing them
| harshly when they do pop pills.
|
| You may object it's not perfect, but nothing is, and it
| does work. In fact, it works exactly the same way you can
| assure that your brake pad won't suddenly give way in
| front of a bus coming from your left.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There's risk mitigation there in the form of training and
| testing.
| toyg wrote:
| You also can't be sure a random guy is not going to come
| from a side street on a red light at 90mph and T-bone you
| because he was answering a whatsapp and didn't notice the
| lights.
|
| I ride a motorbike. As part of training I was repeatedly
| told to wear protection not because of my riding skills,
| but because of _everyone else 's_ lack of skills.
| googlryas wrote:
| You can't assure it, but again, you can control your own
| actions to help mitigate the danger of others being
| reckless. For example by driving defensively, scanning to
| the left and right when passing through an intersection,
| etc.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Part of riding a motorbike (cycle here) is also driving
| defensively is it not? I don't assume people are going to
| stop at a given intersection, I take a look at their
| current speed and project it forward before determining
| if it's safe for me to go. If someone is going at a high
| rate of speed towards a stop sign or red light, I don't
| pull out just because I have the "right of way" I assume
| they are going to do something stupid.
|
| Another example: On the highway I get myself into a
| position where I have plenty of stopping distance for the
| car in front of me, but also behind me in case I need to
| stop rapidly myself.
| toyg wrote:
| Yes, but let's be honest: none of us has 360o eyes, and
| very few have split-millisecond reflexes. You control for
| the front, meanwhile somebody hits you from the rear; you
| look to the sides, and someone brakechecks you; and so on
| and so forth. You can reduce chances, but not eliminate
| them. Statistically, by the simple fact that you are
| sharing the road with hundreds of other (often terrible)
| drivers, the chance that one of them will fuck you up is
| incredibly higher than the chance of that happening on a
| public-transport vehicle in dedicated lanes (or even
| rails) driven by someone whose job is to safely move such
| vehicle from A to B every day.
| foepys wrote:
| You will never be able to look into every intersection,
| even very open ones. You will never be able to look out
| for cars traveling 50kph/30mph unless you literally stop
| before entering every intersection.
|
| You also don't have any control over how far behind other
| cars are. The only thing you can do is to drive faster or
| to let them by by stopping or changing lanes. The latter
| is highly dangerous in fast flowing traffic on single
| lane roads while the first will almost never help as the
| other car actively wants to go faster.
|
| Being in absolute control is you can drive as defensively
| as you want, in the end a distracted idiot can take you
| out and the only thing you can do is minimize the risk.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > I don't assume people are going to stop at a given
| intersection, I take a look at their current speed and
| project it forward before determining if it's safe for me
| to go.
|
| While I sympathize with your overall sentiment (and
| indeed, as a fellow motorcyclists, I know _a lot_ about
| defensive driving /riding), I have never seen people
| consistently drive the way you describe, ever. For many
| intersections in the cities (probably most), you simply
| cannot see if someone is actually going from a side road
| until you're so deep in the intersection that you have no
| chance of stopping before it if you notice someone.
|
| Imagine you're driving here:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5703087,-122.3952816,3a,7
| 5y,...
|
| There's a side road on in front of you. Imagine there is
| a car going same speed as you, on a crash trajectory
| (i.e. it is exactly as far from the intersection as you
| are). Where's the first moment you see it?
|
| Most likely, around here:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5703156,-122.3959313,3a,7
| 5y,...
|
| where you're around 20 feet from the intersection of your
| routes. If you begin braking immediately as you notice
| the other car, you need to be going slower 15 mph if you
| want to avoid a crash. If you add any amount of time to
| actually judge the speed of the other car and its
| intention of stopping, you need to be going less than 10
| mph. Needless to say, nobody actually does that, people
| don't slow down to 10 mph in locations like above.
| willcipriano wrote:
| First I must say, in the city I'll park my car at the
| outskirts and take public transit so I admit it's
| situational. I don't like driving with so many
| unpredictable pedestrians running around, you could end
| up in prison because someone had a few too many drinks
| and fell into the road.
|
| But in your example I'd have a good chance to prevent a
| collision. I'd already have my foot on the brake due to
| the crosswalk there. I will have brought my speed down
| that I will be able to stop should someone suddenly
| appear within it. A kid could pop out from between those
| two cars on the right chasing a ball, so you need to have
| a stopping distance of perhaps 2 - 3 feet maximum,
| depending what vehicle of mine I am driving that's
| probably 20 - 25 mph maximum. 25 mph is the speed limit
| there so I probably wouldn't even get tailgaters at that
| speed, but I don't care if I do. That intersection is a
| good place for a rolling stop, where you bring the car
| down to perhaps 5mph before you proceed, mostly because
| of the sidewalks on both sides and the risk of kids
| running around or riding bikes. That's a residential
| street, there should be no need to move quickly down it.
|
| In addition to all that my car has a top of line
| collision avoidance system, side curtain airbags, a high
| crash rating, etc. I always wear my seatbelt and keep my
| kid strapped in with a age appropriate booster seat.
|
| I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce
| your personal risk considerably.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Not only is what he described simply not realistic, it's
| likely far more unsafe than "driving normally" because
| the behavior violates the expectations of many/most other
| drivers and when people are thrown into situations that
| violate their expectations things get weird.
|
| "But he should have been using a reasonable following
| distance" makes for easy low effort internet points but
| internet points won't get you out of a hospital bed.
| hgomersall wrote:
| The point is, every driver you interact with might be
| drunk or distracted. In a collision with a drunk in a
| car, I'd rather be in a bus.
| googlryas wrote:
| Sure, but you would probably rather be driving a car if
| your bus driver was suicidal that morning.
| hgomersall wrote:
| How many suicidal bus drivers have we had? I mean ever.
| TylerE wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dz5kk/bus-driver-china-
| kill...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37328824
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-1995-04-08-me-52192-...
|
| http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/10/12/tt
| c-d... (Not a suicide, but it's on topic)
| egypturnash wrote:
| I just searched for "bus driver suicide" and it was a
| pretty even split between stories about drivers _saving_
| people who were trying to kill themselves, and drivers
| killing themselves. The latter was very much largely
| happening in solitary ways, except for one dude in China
| who drove his bus into a lake.
| dahart wrote:
| This goes straight to the article's point that we tend to
| care about things that don't actually matter as much when
| they _seem_ worse. The hypothetical bus driver suicide
| seems bad if he takes out other people with him, it's
| easy to imagine being a passenger with no control and
| meeting a terrifying doom. Let's just nevermind that it
| almost never happens, and forget that suicide car drivers
| is a much, much more likely occurrence in the real world.
| And bad drivers accidentally taking out people near them
| happens _way_ more often than anything to do with
| suicides. You're far less likely to be killed on a bus
| than in a car, hands down. Wanting to drive a car instead
| simply highlights our flawed emotional thinking.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Even if that happened, how many people can seriously be
| injured in a bus accident in a city? Not talking of bus
| going through mountains and losing breaks
| TylerE wrote:
| Hundreds. Imagine a bus veering off into a busy sidewalk.
| googlryas wrote:
| Everyone on the bus, if the bus driver decides to drive
| the bus off a bridge into a river
| 1270018080 wrote:
| It was critical for your train of thought to skip the
| part where other drivers kill you.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| The difference is really just the perception of control.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is true.
|
| But there are two cars in many fatal wrecks. A family friend
| was killed going to the supermarket by a car running a red
| light and hitting him in an intersection. A few weeks ago a
| semitruck slammed into stopped traffic at full speed on 95-S
| at the Georgia/Florida border. Nothing can be done by a safe
| driver to prevent that.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'd love to see studies that attempt to control for
| attributes related to "driver skill" or "driver
| responsibility" that you could objectively test yourself on,
| so that you could more accurately predict your own risk and
| compare it against the risk of alternatives like public
| transit. It's not really good enough to say "I don't drive
| drunk, and I'm pretty sure I'm a more skilled driver than
| average, therefore I can discard all studies on the risks of
| injury of driving versus public transit."
| rustybelt wrote:
| I don't think you can completely discard all comparisons,
| but people are intuitively right to recognize that if they
| don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving) they're
| less at risk of being in an accident. To argue otherwise is
| basically saying driving drunk is no more risky than
| driving sober.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > but people are intuitively right to recognize that if
| they don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving)
| they're less at risk of being in an accident. To argue
| otherwise is basically saying driving drunk is no more
| risky than driving sober.
|
| Sure, that's why it's important to know how risky
| automobiles are if you discard the cases of drunk drivers
| injuring themselves. I suspect drunk drivers injuring
| themselves accounts for a very small portion of
| automobile injuries, but we need to see the data.
|
| It's not enough to say "I don't drive drunk, and driving
| drunk is very dangerous, therefore automobile risk
| estimates don't apply to me." You could make the same
| argument about driving blindfolded.
| rustybelt wrote:
| A quick google says that 26.8% of drivers killed or
| severely injured in a car accident had alcohol in their
| system. Not drinking and driving significantly reduces
| your risk.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The fact that we rarely if ever see such data sets is a
| strong data point by itself.
|
| Insurance cost (data is widely available) goes down with
| age and you can extrapolate from that to safety but it only
| falls fast initially and the rest is largely a reflection
| of how driving habits change with age.
|
| Occasionally someone like Tesla or Volvo will trot out some
| cherry picked data that boils down to "yes the very safe
| demographics who buy our very safe cars die less than the
| peasants".
|
| Other than those two there's not much.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Yet we push millions of people on the roads when they are
| still dead tired, at once, massively increasing risk factors
| from multiple sides. Heck, many of them rely on coffee to be
| anywhere close to a careful and attentive driver.
|
| You might want to elaborate on your definition of control.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I'd say the difference is density of deaths.
|
| When people die in regular road accidents, it's just a few at
| a time. Not compelling enough for even a mention in national
| news coverage. When a plane or train crashes, it's hundreds
| simultaneously. Often with a good debris field too. Good
| enough to lead with.
| toyg wrote:
| You say control, I say _guilt_. Society loves to attribute
| systemic problems to individual wickedness, because it
| empowers the judgemental elements while requiring no actual
| effort.
|
| As you say, careful drivers are not immune. But as long as
| someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as
| sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking
| forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained
| away.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident
| can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being
| tired from overworking forced on them by societal
| pressures), it can be explained away.
|
| And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly
| what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well,
| yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred
| people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the
| collision so we'll blame _them_. The problem wasn 't us,
| the railway company, who are great, it's those awful
| drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to
| investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to
| examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers
| was _drunk_. Which explains why we 've told his widow that
| she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service
| fund.
|
| Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did)
| coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it
| seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are
| conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the
| drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better
| drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe
| it'd be a good idea to invent _signals_ so that you know if
| a train just around the corner has broken down so that your
| express doesn 't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's
| something for the railway company too. This didn't
| magically fix things overnight, but it did push back
| against the useless "blame the driver" narrative.
|
| Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from
| the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved
| things considerably, but that did not happen automatically,
| somebody had to call the corporate entities on their
| bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car
| owners on their bullshit too.
|
| One trend I _don 't_ like is people who resist the word
| "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done
| on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and
| should, prevent accidents.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| This extends in so many directions. I hear people speak
| this way about the homeless, the addicted, the laid-off,
| the sick. Cancer? Begin the list of things the person did,
| consumed, didn't do that could have caused it (no shortage
| of headlines to feed the lists). Homeless? Must have acted
| irresponsibly and made stupid choices. It's sort of hand in
| hand with the "It can't happen to me" mindset. I remember
| my wife telling me - during the George Floyd trial - one of
| her co-workers interrupted when someone referred to him as
| a man and said "He was a drug addict" like that should end
| the conversation, like that exempted him from being human,
| like some of her favorite celebrities weren't drug addicts.
|
| "To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers
| to return the reply: 'Why not?'" - Christopher Hitchens,
| from Mortality.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| I find many of the issues brought up about public transit being
| unsafe revolve around the people you might encounter on public
| transit (drug users, homeless, mental illness, etc.) and the
| waiting around/walking to public transit stops (muggings,
| thefts, etc.)
|
| I've never had any issues myself, but have absolutely been
| exposed to those issues while taking transit. I've also
| witnessed those issues increase during/post lockdown.
|
| I have no solutions, just pointing out a different angle on the
| "unsafe" issue mentioned above. I'd love to hear if anyone has
| any experience or ideas to reduce this perception of a lack of
| safety.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Right: public transport puts you _in media res_ , exposing
| you to the other people around you. That's overwhelmingly
| average folks trying to go between work, home, and errands,
| but it's also the occasional disturbed person.
|
| I will not deny that you'll find all kinds of antisocial
| behavior on public transit. What I'll say is this: that it's
| fundamentally a civic issue and not a public transit issue,
| and that even _with_ all that behavior we still see nowhere
| near the amount of death and disfigurement that people
| experience on America 's roads on a daily basis.
|
| To make it pithy: we incorrectly prioritize the _feeling_ of
| environmental safety over statistical safety. The reality is
| that the inebriated homeless guy on the subway is _much_ less
| likely to harm you or take your life than the inebriated
| driver in the next lane.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah, this is a good point. I don't think I've ever heard
| anyone express fear when getting on an SF Muni bus or train
| that they're going to be injured or killed in a crash. The
| only safety-related complaints are exactly what you said:
| drug users and people with mental illnesses on the bus, or
| sketchy characters hanging around transit stops. Years ago,
| my partner witnessed someone walk right by her, inches away
| from her, stop a few feet away, and suddenly punch someone in
| the face, right out of the blue. I would be much more afraid
| of that kind of thing happening to me than anything else.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| IMO there's only really 2 underlying issues people have with
| public transit:
|
| 1. In nearly all of the US (maybe everywhere except parts of
| NYC?) it is a worse experience than driving (requires
| planning, takes longer, can't carry more than one or two bags
| with you).
|
| 2. It is declasse.
|
| I think #2 is at least partly a result of #1. Also note that
| #1 is true even for most cities in the US, because cities in
| the US are unbelievably car friendly compared to cities in
| e.g. western Europe. I don't see any public-transit solution
| that doesn't involve intentionally making the car experience
| worse, and that's going to be a tough sell to voters.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > I think #2 is at least partly a result of #1
|
| And vice versa. As I said in a thread yesterday[1]: we
| justify our continuing neglect of public transit by
| claiming that "polite society" avoids it, which in turn
| fulfills the prophecy.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32165783
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That's _partly_ it, but the status quo in the US is of
| the car infrastructure being so good that driving in the
| US is a better experience than taking public transit in
| many places with excellent public transit. Therefore #1
| will remain true as long as we don 't downgrade (either
| intentionally or via neglect) the car infrastructure, and
| taking things away from people is always harder than just
| not giving it to them in the first place.
| PaulsWallet wrote:
| > 2. It is declasse.
|
| "A developed country is not a place where the poor have
| cars. It's where the rich use public transportation" -
| Gustavo Petro
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Right, it's not not necessarily about safety it's about
| needing to feel safe.
|
| A big problem on this honestly is that news media focuses
| disproportionately on interpersonal crime compared to almost
| all other kinds of harm that can be done. Combined with
| generally decreased newsroom budgets, this has led to firmer
| reliance on, and less questioning of, direct police releases.
| We basically just let the cops tell us what to worry about,
| and they predictably tell us to worry about the things that
| get more funding for police.
|
| We've mostly decided that, while these things aren't good per
| se, they are downstream of other incentives and requirements
| that _are_ good, or at least inevitable. I don 't agree, but
| I also don't think there's much value in a "what could be
| different" conversation without having a "why is it like this
| at all" conversation first.
| kieselguhr_kid wrote:
| What we really need is a holistic approach to a lot of these
| issues. Ending the violent prohibition of drugs, building and
| providing housing for the homeless, better and more
| accessible mental health programs, denser cities, better
| transit, etc. We don't have a politics in the US that fully
| articulates the dynamic interconnectivity of all the issues
| and aggressively pushes for a set of solutions.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Doesn't San Fransisco do all of those? They spend a huge
| amount on it anyway. And being one the dirtiest cities
| possible.
| kieselguhr_kid wrote:
| No city can adequately fund these programs, and San
| Francisco certainly doesn't build housing for the
| homeless, have an enlightened drugs policy or have
| adequate mental health care. San Francisco and other
| coastal cities mainly differentiate their policies by
| treating the homeless populations there with malignant
| neglect instead of outright hostility, which leads to the
| phenomenon you see where 10-12 cities bear the brunt of a
| national homelessness crisis. Because San Francisco is
| one of them, you also see a bunch of entitled tech bros
| whining about how they have to see a homeless person
| sometimes on HN.
|
| I will admit that, by American standards, SF has pretty
| good public transit though.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I feel like SF is one of the most permissive places to do
| drugs in perhaps the entire world. Even if there are laws
| on the books, they are not really enforced.
|
| I am not coming from a perspective of pro-law & order,
| just a commentary on drug law & enforcement here.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm really tired of this "SF is the dirties city" trope.
| Yes, there are areas that are incredibly dirty, but those
| areas are something like 5% of the city, and most of
| those areas are concentrated in a few specific
| neighborhoods. Most of the city is fairly clean (but to
| be sure, it's no Singapore) and reasonably well-
| maintained.
|
| I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's
| dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty
| city".
|
| I'm more worried about the threat of violence from
| mentally-unstable people on SF's streets, though that's
| something that's also concentrated in a relatively small
| number of places (unsurprisingly often coinciding with
| the dirtiness).
| Avicebron wrote:
| I saw about 5 between the bart station and Berkeley
| campus on my way to get a curry, and I wouldn't even
| consider that dirty relative to driving a few blocks down
| towards the freeway...(I know it might not technically be
| "SF" but you know what I mean)
| woodruffw wrote:
| > I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's
| dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty
| city".
|
| I've lived here my entire life, and I would :-)
|
| As much as I'm a booster for NYC (and immensely proud of
| our public transit), we're also a very dirty city
| (partially for historical planning reasons, resulting in
| no alleyways or trash disposal consideration).
|
| It's also gotten worse during the pandemic, in no small
| part thanks to drivers: people have stopped moving their
| cars for street cleaning, resulting in accumulations of
| trash and dirt that then clog the drains, worsening our
| floods (and damaging the subways further).
| rr888 wrote:
| > I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".
|
| NYC is a filthy city. I think most people that live here
| and love it would agree.
| [deleted]
| Aunche wrote:
| There are plenty of crazy, dangerous people on the road too.
| Psychologically, you feel more separated than them, even if
| they may be statistically be more dangerous.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I definitely feel safer on public transit. I live in an
| upper class neighborhood and I'm not sure if there's much
| more dangerous in this world than an entitled, distracted,
| moderately wealthy person driving an SUV that has places to
| go.
|
| I leave the actual wealthy out of this because they just
| pay someone else to drive.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| They can't mug me or grope me or blast music on their phone
| 3 feet away from me though. To be fair occasionally there
| will be idiot drivers blasting their bass so loud it
| vibrates nearby cars, but that's far less common than
| inconsiderate assholes blasting music on their phones on
| public transit.
| mrep wrote:
| Yeah, basically every girl I have ever dated avoids
| public transit at all cost because of assholes/creeps.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| These sorts of things can be self selected. I know plenty
| of women who take public transit. The dividing line tends
| to be whether they grew up in a city or moved from the
| suburbs (and of course affluence).
| scrumbledober wrote:
| I was thinking something similar. It's easy for me to
| argue for public transportation as a 6 foot tall man with
| martial arts training. I still get a little uncomfortable
| catching a late night bart ride sometimes...
| goodpoint wrote:
| Try visiting Japan or South Korea or even central Europe.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Yes, these are clearly not universal human issues if
| somewhere like Japan can maintain clean, relatively safe,
| efficient public transportation. It should be obvious we
| should be looking outside of the US as to why certain
| societies are able to solve this issues and others are not.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Because these societies incentivize individuals to behave
| and conform for the better of the group, while iterating
| on their systems. The same way the US has iterated on
| their car-centric culture.
|
| Take the money and incentives away from building roads,
| cars, parking lots, traffic safety etc. and stick them
| into systems which are safer by default, incentives for
| people to keep things clean and not cause a fuss.
| rr888 wrote:
| > why certain societies are able to solve this issues and
| others are not.
|
| You mean by enforcing a racially homogenous society which
| does not allow poor (or anyone really) people from other
| parts of the world?
| [deleted]
| redox99 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're trying to point out. I've only
| been to Japan out of those, and public transport might be
| fast and clean, but it is much less comfortable and a much
| worse experience than driving a nice car.
|
| Unless I'm in a hurry I rather have a comfortable private
| ride, than a less comfortable quick ride packed around
| strangers.
| ratsmack wrote:
| >... while simultaneously handwringing over every incident ...
|
| And then there's those Tesla accidents that must happen
| thousands of time a day, because they're always in the news.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| My concern with auto driver accidents is they may be systemic
| rather than semi-random. Ie, it's an attackable vector that
| can be repeatedly exploited versus the some stochastic human
| error.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't have a bone to pick there, but an observation: much
| of that news seems to be driven by a certain prominent car
| CEO claiming that his cars are (1) safer, and (2) capable of
| self-driving (beyond a bit of driver assistance).
|
| "Trains are safer" is a fact, but it's not a common part of
| messaging around why we should all take trains more often.
| The messaging there usually boils down to convenience,
| economic, and ecological arguments.
| smegger001 wrote:
| I wish the train was more economical then I could take the
| train more but it is not economical (on the west coast of
| the US). I live approx half way between Seattle WA and
| Portland OR and there is a train station within walking
| distance of my home. every time I have checked the price of
| a Amtrak ticket to either city it was significantly cheaper
| to drive and pay for parking then to buy a single train
| ticket.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| This is a bad way to look at it.
|
| We should ask how many more people would die each day without
| cars.
|
| Somehow, this basic analysis is absent in all of the car-hate
| posts.
|
| Not considering pros and cons fairly is a not an honest
| approach.
|
| You can't claim to be objective by just looking at negatives
| and proclaiming cars are bad overall. You need to sum up the
| negatives and positives (assuming an utilitarian view).
|
| Otherwise, just accept all car hate is based on subjective
| emotions.
|
| It is not like car users are cackling evil Captain Planet
| villains. Most of us are not rich enough to live near work and
| schools.
|
| That brings me to a related issue car haters miss: Bike-
| friendly cities should be designed for everyone, not just for
| wealthy white cyclists
|
| https://theconversation.com/amp/bike-friendly-cities-should-...
| eneumann wrote:
| The car-hate posts can be quite emotional for a number of
| (valid) reasons, but understand that reducing cars and car
| trips doesn't happen in a vacuum. No one is arguing to
| instantly and immediately eliminate every vehicle out there.
| It's part of a larger process to replace personal vehicles
| with transit, walk-ability, bike-ability, and generally car-
| free or car-reduced places where people live.
| standardUser wrote:
| "wealthy white cyclists"
|
| What in the ever-living fuck are you even talking about?
| anotherrandom wrote:
| Biking is the ideal solution. There is one significant
| downside, though: the practicality of biking is limited by
| region and time of year+day. In most places in the Southern
| portion of the US (regardless of coast), biking any
| significant distance between the hours of 8am to 9 pm is
| basically saying "I want heatstroke" for nearly 1/2 of the
| year
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Because that question is practically impossible to answer.
| You can't extrapolate current circumstances and draw a
| conclusion from there. The best you can do is compare with
| other countries, disregard any non-related-yet-ultimately-
| significant and draw a fairly weak conclusion from there.
|
| Most of those conclusions would not be in favor of cars,
| either. Especially not in light of environmental damage.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| It is not impossible. Car haters like to think it is
| impossible.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Try it. I assure you, almost any angle you take can be
| poked through.
|
| Cars shine in large, low density zones. For good reasons.
| Most anti-car people are not in favor of removing cars in
| these zones or removing cars altogether, so arguing here
| is moot.
|
| Other places, whether removing a large amount of cars is
| beneficial or detrimental is decided either by culture,
| or by reinvestment options. And then, you're _still_
| stuck only comparing rationalities, with actual numbers
| being far harder to judge.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Yes, a very well written piece with good points and reasoning.
| It isn't just that the long tail of casualties falls below some
| threshold of attention. Large specialist organisations capable
| of industrial warfare or building industrial society cannot
| deal with human effects on an industrial scale. We tried it in
| the Northfield experiment [1] (mass psychotherapy for war
| trauma).
|
| [1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Northfield_experiments
| [deleted]
| jandrese wrote:
| Imagine how angry people would be if at the end of an article
| about a train crash that killed 4 people the author included an
| anecdote about how there were 900 train fatalities in the
| previous year compared to 1.3 million car fatalities.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 900 train fatalities
|
| And 600 of them were trespassers walking on the tracks, then
| the vast majority of the remaining were people who tried to
| beat the train at a crossing. The number of dead passengers
| was _6_ and the number of dead train workers was _11_ , if
| I'm reading this correctly: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-
| and-community/safety-topics...
| jfengel wrote:
| Or self-driving cars. Every incident is Big News, while
| ignoring the fact that 40,000 people die every year in traffic
| accidents (and 4.8 million injuries) -- in the US alone.
|
| People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into
| context.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'll never forget driving across Georgia on Jan 1st a bunch
| of years ago. They've got signs up that say to drive safely
| and show how many traffic fatalities there have been in the
| state that year. On a random day it just looks like a number.
|
| But driving on the highway and passing a sign that said how
| many people had died _today_ doing precisely what I was doing
| at that moment was affecting.
| [deleted]
| intrepidhero wrote:
| It's not just that people are bad at statistics (we are
| though). It's also that we place value on individual agency.
| Getting into a self-driving car (or onto a train) means
| giving up some of my agency and because of that I have higher
| expectations of safety from the self-driving car (or train
| driver) than I would if I had retained that agency. I don't
| think that's weird or unreasonable.
|
| We do need to get better at statistics and realizing that
| when we take on risk, we rarely are the only person impacted
| if something goes sideways. When I take the wheel of a car I
| become a risk myself and to others and I need to place as
| much value on their agency as my own.
| djmips wrote:
| I completely agree that we put a lot of value into personal
| agency but I do think it's a bit unreasonable. Agency when
| driving is only perceived. You could have a heart attack
| and smash into pedestrians. Your car could fail
| mechanically. You could be rear ended by a large truck. You
| could be killed by a drunk or inattentive driver. Your
| agency can not entirely prevent that. Also you may be in
| the top percentile in driving but like everything, everyone
| thinks they are a great driver so you can't take how you
| feel and generalize it to the population.
|
| I'm not arguing that self driving cars are solved but maybe
| they aren't quite as bad as people feel. We need proper
| statistics.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| That's a great point. Often the perceived agency is an
| illusion.
| simion314 wrote:
| >People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into
| context.
|
| We can\t , current self driving is limited in many ways and
| Tesla is notorious for having the driver save the day
| multiple time in 30 minutes and Elon is not publishing this
| incidents. I can't stand the fanboys coming up with fake
| stats that only 5 people ddied this month in a Tesla where in
| fact you have video evidence of more people would have died
| if the driver would have not saved the AI,
|
| A Tesla employee should leak the data and we should then talk
| about stats, do Tesla saves the driver more then the driver
| saves the car. (i know that in reality FSD does not mean what
| the words imply and OP probably had no idea that there are no
| real FSD cars around that drive with no limitation so we can
| do real statistics)
| criley2 wrote:
| The accident rate for "self-driving cars" (a nebulous term
| including both actually autonomous cars like waymo cars as
| well as driver-attention-required cars operating under the
| false advertising of "full self driving") is higher than
| human operated cars.
|
| Currently "self driving cars" get in twice as many accidents
| as humans do per million miles driven.
| belorn wrote:
| It wasn't that long ago that a driver instructor illustrated
| in a video how often they needed to correct the self-driving
| car in order to drive legal. It was multiple corrections per
| minute in a busy city.
|
| In term of statistics, the error rates of human drivers are
| still lower than current self-driving technology. This is why
| the only certified fully self-driving mode is limited in
| Germany to operate at speed of less than 30 km/h, only on
| highways with congestion, and then outside any construction
| zones.
| Spivak wrote:
| Assuming people are ignorant en masse says more about your
| understanding of people than the people.
|
| Not all self driving car accidents make the news -- self
| driving car accidents that any human diver could have easily
| avoided make the news. Statistically safer something
| something miles driven means nothing to the family of someone
| who died in a completely avoidable accident.
|
| Until self driving cars reach the point of handing emergency
| situations -- storms, ice, obstacles, children, other
| accidents, sudden lane changes, tire blowouts -- better than
| humans and stop punting anything less than ideal conditions
| back to the driver it's pointless to talk about safety.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Every time I bring this up when Tesla bashing is going on
| here, I get downvoted. The hate for Elon here blinds people
| to statistics
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Self-driving cars aren't safer than humans, though, and I
| doubt they ever will be.
|
| All the real love for self-driving cars seems to be in the
| US, where they are basically competing with completely
| untrained drivers and a strong drink-driving culture.
|
| No self-driving car on the road today would even come close
| to passing a UK driving test. They wouldn't last the first
| five minutes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's because we feel we can control the circumstances of the car
| crash. We cannot feel in control of airliners. We're hapless
| baggage.
| Ottolay wrote:
| Generally agree, although I think it is largely an illusion.
| Many people die in car accidents they did not cause.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Many people die in car accidents they did not cause.
|
| True, but that doesn't disprove the fact that most people are
| a party to the accident they are in, regardless of who was at
| fault.
|
| For example, if someone is driving with an insecure load, I
| give them a very, very wide berth. There's a word for it -
| defensive driving.
| EddieDante wrote:
| Yog-Sothoth must be fed if we're going to keep it contained
| within the Pentagon. Auto crashes and mass shootings provide a
| plausibly deniable supply of human sacrifices.
| orionion wrote:
| Does the 10k/year rise in last 7 years correlate to rise in ev
| use?
|
| Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
|
| 2014 32,744
|
| 2015 35,485
|
| 2016 37,806
|
| 2017 37,473
|
| 2018 36,835
|
| 2019 36,355
|
| 2020 38,824
|
| 2021 42,915
|
| How Many Electric Cars Are on the Road in the United States?
| https://www.treehugger.com/how-many-electric-cars-are-on-the...
| CodeAndCuffs wrote:
| I was a cop for several years. I worked hundreds of crashes, and
| a few fatalities.
|
| If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the
| seatbelt to be engaged to work, we'd cut our fatality rate in
| half.
|
| Most nations' DUI laws consider a 0.05 BAC as illegal. In most US
| states 0.08 is presumed under the influence, 0.06 - 0.079 is
| considered no presumption either way, and under .06 is considered
| not under the influence. My alcohol tolerance is fairly average,
| but after some off the cuff experiments with whiskey and a
| preliminary breathalyzer, I shouldn't drive at a .055. My wife
| shouldn't drive at a .03
|
| Something like 80% of fatal crashes involve either alcohol, no
| seatbelt, or excessive speed, but not wearing a seatbelt is like
| a 50 dollar ticket, and a secondary offense, in many
| jurisdictions.
| sebazzz wrote:
| > If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the
| seatbelt to be engaged to work
|
| Wait, wearing a seatbelt is not mandatory?
| rascul wrote:
| > Wait, wearing a seatbelt is not mandatory?
|
| Not in New Hampshire.
|
| The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has
| published this document I have found with some statistics
| from 2018. I'm not sure if there's newer stuff published. It
| might be interesting to look at.
|
| https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/.
| ..
| dmead wrote:
| They are, but cars will function without them being used.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| At least in Europe, there is a very annoying beep if you
| don't wear the seatbelt. You can still drive, and there are
| ways to disable it, but most people just wear their
| seatbelt.
|
| I don't think it is mandatory, but it counts in the
| EuroNCAP score, and since it is one of the easiest safety
| feature to implement, they all have it.
| 14 wrote:
| You are right there are ways to disable it easiest being
| a seatbelt delete that clips into the buckle and disabled
| the annoying beep and you can clip into that should you
| choose. Who would choose to not wear a seatbelt is
| strange to me but I also rode a motorcycle so we are dead
| meat anyways if something goes wrong.
| VectorLock wrote:
| My brother does this and it drives me crazy when I'm a
| passenger in his car, I can't fathom how he just deals
| with it.
| toast0 wrote:
| The beeps in the US are not that annoying. Ding ding ding
| ding ding for 30?seconds at start up, again when you put
| it into drive, and then again when you hit a certain
| speed (around 7-10 mph) and/or periodically. It's not
| pleasant, but it's tolerable when I'm moving cars around
| between my house and my barn. Yeah, I probably should
| still buckle up, but it's not critical for sub 15 mph,
| private road driving for a minute or two.
|
| My first car didn't have a seatbelt reminder, and it
| needed a bit of time to warm up, so I got in the habit of
| starting it and then buckling, and 20 years of driving
| with seatbelt reminders hasn't trained me to switch the
| order.
| mantas wrote:
| It was fun when people were sitting on engaged seatbelts
| to prevent the beep :)
| jjcm wrote:
| Legally it's required, but I think their point is it should
| be required by hardware. Right now most new cars just beep at
| you, but you can still operate them.
| cmckn wrote:
| Or people just buckle the belt and then sit on top of it.
| As insane as that is, I've seen plenty of grown ass adults
| do it. An older person I knew went so far as to find a
| seatbelt at a junkyard, cut the buckle off, and leave it in
| the holster permanently.
| andorov wrote:
| You can buy clips that prevent the beeping.
|
| The top result is also a bottle opener...
| https://www.amazon.com/seat-belt-buckle-alarm-
| stopper/s?k=se...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| We never pushed for it politically because it wouldn't
| change anything but it would piss people off. You can
| simply buckle the seatbelt with nobody in the seat, then
| sit down, and the requirement is defeated.
|
| On the other hand, a _mandatory breathalyzer_ for ignition
| would be useful to prevent a lone driver from driving
| drunk. We already have them for people with DUIs, so we
| should make them mandatory for all cars.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> We already have them for people with DUIs, so we
| should make them mandatory for all cars.
|
| Yes, because the idea that every single person should now
| start doing what historically only a reprehensible
| convicted drunk driver was required to do will go over so
| well.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > On the other hand, a mandatory breathalyzer for
| ignition would be useful to prevent a lone driver from
| driving drunk.
|
| That would do nothing accept waste countless man hours of
| productivity, consume a great deal of money, and ensure
| that the next generation of politicians would be
| Libertarians.
| toast0 wrote:
| > On the other hand, a mandatory breathalyzer for
| ignition would be useful to prevent a lone driver from
| driving drunk. We already have them for people with DUIs,
| so we should make them mandatory for all cars.
|
| I don't drink often, and I have never and would never
| drink and drive, but please no. Mandatory breathalyzers
| for everyone is an immense expense and a huge
| inconvenience and I suspect would be easily bypassed by
| those who choose to drink and drive. And I don't want to
| live with the consequences of making it hard to bypass
| such a device, because it likely makes working on a
| vehicle nearly impossible.
| trashtester wrote:
| > On the other hand, a mandatory breathalyzer for
| ignition would be useful to prevent a lone driver from
| driving drunk. We already have them for people with DUIs,
| so we should make them mandatory for all cars.
|
| People who frequently drive under the influence tend to
| have a strong habit. Those would just keep driving an old
| car if such a device is introduced in new cars.
|
| For most other people, such a device would be seen as a
| very annoying.
|
| For it to have the desired impact,it needs to be fitted
| in all old cars, and then we're adding a significant
| expense on top of the annoyance.
|
| Now, MAYBE if the device can be used to reduce insurance
| fees, it might be doable, but only in countries without
| public healthcare.
| drdec wrote:
| FYI, one of the recent giant bills that passed in the US
| requires automakers to implement passive systems which
| detect impaired drivers.
| bumby wrote:
| May be a feasible solution, but it can also become an
| avenue for grift that disproportionately affects those on
| the low socioeconomic spectrum.
|
| You'll likely need to get it routinely calibrated (which
| costs money) and similar to my experience with smog
| tests, there will always be ways to find something small
| to charge for.
|
| Not saying it's a deal killer but it would be wise to
| consider and mitigate second order effects.
| officeplant wrote:
| Had a friend dumb enough to drive drunk a few times and
| get multiple DUI's resulting in a breathalyzer in his
| hopped up WRX. I will never forget the pure frustration
| of him dealing with stalling out a manual car and having
| to grab the breathalyzer while also trying to get started
| again. I wish he would have had to deal with that for
| years instead of 6 months, but at least he cleaned up his
| act.
| asveikau wrote:
| My understanding is that many people drive above the
| legal limit for DUIs and do not get caught. DUI
| prosecution is somewhat the story of selective
| enforcement.
|
| What would piss people off is coming into contact with
| the fact that they're driving illegally. I think many
| drivers are unaware of being above legal limits and would
| probably be angry when confronted with it.
|
| I guess playing devil's advocate... There's probably some
| odd scenario where driving above the limit for an
| emergency circumstance could be justifiable. So perhaps
| the car should not be disabled in this way.
| namesbc wrote:
| Cars should have a regulator installed by the manufacturer to
| limit speed to 20mph on roads with people, and to 60mph on
| grade separated highways.
|
| This maximum would barely change your time to destination, but
| it would save thousands of lives per year.
|
| - 20mph: 90% survival rate
|
| - 30mph: 60% survival rate
|
| - 40mph: 20% survival rate
|
| https://www.betterstreetschicago.org/blog/chicago-speed-came...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Given how low the actual rate of fatalities is compared to
| miles driven, you are proposing that we _significantly_ lower
| the bar for when we think government intervention is the
| right answer.
| notatoad wrote:
| the government already owns the roads and enforces speed
| limits. speed governors are already required for scooters
| and e-bikes in many jurisdictions.
|
| requiring cars to have the same limiters as scooters if
| they want to access the government-owned roads is not a
| huge change in scope.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Even a Tesla can't reliably figure out what the speed
| limit is sometimes. I don't know that I want a governor
| that may suddenly decide I can only do 25 mph on the
| interstate.
| lupire wrote:
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >This maximum would barely change your time to destination
|
| Yes it would. The drive from LA to San Francisco is about 300
| miles on Interstate 5. Much of this highway is completely
| straight, with excellent visibility through an unpopulated
| desert. When sparsely trafficked (as it is much of the time),
| it is safe to drive 80+ MPH on I5 for hours at a time. At 80
| MPH, this is a 3 hour 45 minute drive. At your proposed 60
| MPH, this would be a 5 hour drive.
|
| >but it would save thousands of lives per year.
|
| How many lives do you think would be saved by capping speeds
| to 60 MPH on I5? If alcohol or distracted driving are not
| factors, I would say probably close to zero. As a fun aside,
| the fatality rate on the unrestricted German Autobahn is
| about half the fatality rate across all US highways.
|
| I completely agree about lower speed limits in cities,
| however, where pedestrian deaths are the main concern. While
| I don't think a governor in the car would be practical or
| safe (what if I'm rushing because of a medical emergency?),
| automated enforcement would serve the same purpose.
| pkulak wrote:
| Gonna go ahead and say the unthinkable here... so what? The
| person driving fast endangers themselves and everyone else
| around them. In what other area of society do we tolerate
| extremely dangerous behavior (40,000+ deaths a year)
| because to not would be an inconvenience? Guns, I suppose.
| But I'm not a huge fan or our polices around those either.
| Shaanie wrote:
| Don't forget alcohol, and arguably smoking and being
| obese.
| pkulak wrote:
| Those doesn't endanger other people though.
| [deleted]
| ineedtosleep wrote:
| > How many lives do you think would be saved by capping
| speeds to 60 MPH on I5? If alcohol or distracted driving
| are not factors, I would say probably close to zero.
|
| Amazing how you'd think it's actually close to zero. So
| many dangerous situations are removed once speeding is at
| least attempted to be removed from the equation.
|
| To name two: reaction times are increased, stopping
| distances are reduced. I probably know what you'd say next:
| the driver is distracted. Not the speed's problem. To which
| I'll say, yeah of course the driver's distracted -- it's
| because the driver's human and will never be paying
| attention to the road 100% at all times.
|
| IMO driving speeds, and how a community feels about it, are
| huge indicators on how hostile and how selfish a community
| can be.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Amusingly enough, though I didn't witness this and can't
| verify he was telling the truth anyway, my ex-wife
| claimed that when she went to traffic school, the
| instructor there told the class the number one cause of
| traffic accidents on Texas highways was cars going too
| slow. But I suppose you could argue it's really the
| opposite even in those cases, that all of the people
| cutting you off, deciding to get onto a highway doing 20
| MPH, doing 40 in the passing lane, or randomly slamming
| on the brakes because they get spooked by a plastic bag
| or something, wouldn't be causing accidents if everyone
| else was also driving really slowly, and the accidents
| that did happen would be less deadly.
|
| Although, as far as I understand, fatalities on highways
| are somewhat rare anyway, with most vehicular deaths
| happening at intersections. After all, it's the stopping
| force that kills you, and two vehicles doing 80 and 60 in
| the same direction will collide with less force than one
| doing 40 and one crossing the path in a perpendicular
| direction, or two going 20 and hitting head on.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| In the several trips my wife and I have taken between East
| Bay and SoCal, it's been hard to maintain 80+ mph. Between
| interchanges, construction, slower drivers, trucks passing
| other trucks, and so on, we're lucky to hit an average of
| 70mph.
|
| On the flip side, cruising at 60+mph is totally doable, and
| while it is ~40+ minutes slower in theory, we only need to
| stop for gas once at lower speeds, which shaves off ~10-20
| minutes.
|
| Also, fighting through traffic takes the same regardless,
| so it's usually better to adjust when we're driving than
| trying to drive faster.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| People shouldn't really drive 300 miles in individual
| private vehicles.
|
| Apart from the chance of accidentally killing oneself or
| others, it's hugely inefficient.
|
| If we changed an interstate full of cars to high speed
| trains (or hyperloop or whatever) which depart every half
| hour, it'd be safer, cheaper, cleaner... you name it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So what should I do? Take a train? Doesn't go there. Bus?
| Again. Fly? That's not more efficient. Maybe grandma just
| doesn't need a visit from her grandkids.
|
| Instead, I bought an electric car. I bet it compares
| quite favorably to a typical bus. And grandma does like
| to see her grandkids, let me tell ya.
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| > How many lives do you think would be saved by capping
| speeds to 60 MPH on I5?
|
| The speed limit was in fact 65 MPH until 1995.
| hintymad wrote:
| What if occasionally you need to accelerate to a higher speed
| to avoid an accident?
| kleer001 wrote:
| Then you won't get there and the accident will be less
| fatal.
| kfarr wrote:
| What if that were a fecetious argument proposing a
| situation that does not happen in real life that people
| bring up when speed governors are discussed?
| nostromo wrote:
| It happens all the time. People regularly speed up when
| passing to limit time in oncoming traffic lanes.
|
| Limiting speed in such a scenario could reasonably lead
| to a fatal accident.
| lsh123 wrote:
| Staying home on the couch: 100% survival rate
| drdec wrote:
| Until someone drives into your house
| fipar wrote:
| A sedentary lifestyle will increase the chances of
| circulatory diseases though, so close to 100% survival
| rate, but not there :)
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Well done, you've specified a superset of self driiving
| without delivering any economic benefit. Oh, and every road
| in Europe is now a hazard because you've designed new cars
| with absurdly low speed limits.
|
| But no I'm sure your baselesss opinion on speeds is best.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| Europe is now mandating intelligent speed limiters, so I
| don't know what you are getting on about.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| No, they are not. Cars must alert the driver if they are
| exceeding the speed limit, but there is no forced
| limiting.
|
| https://jalopnik.com/no-europe-didnt-just-force-
| automakers-t...
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| Many expect the EU to eventually remove override
| capabilities as the systems become more widespread.
| not-so-jerry wrote:
| Not sure if you are implying this or not, but how would
| lowering the BAC limit prevent fatal crashes?
|
| Figure 3 in this report shows a somewhat normal distribution
| around .15 g/dl and the mode being around .17 g/dl:
| https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
|
| This is already ~2x the legal limit.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| > Something like 80% of fatal crashes involve either alcohol,
| no seatbelt, or excessive speed
|
| This is the crux of the issue on why we as a society ignore car
| crashes and panic about train/plane crashes.
|
| I'd wager it mostly comes down to filtering out things we feel
| we have control over stressing about those we don't.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I think you are definitely on to something here. For the
| alcohol and speeding I wonder how many of the fatalities are
| people other than the person speeding or drunk. I am not even
| thinking about passengers, but people in other cars,
| bicyclists or pedestrians.
| lupire wrote:
| melling wrote:
| Nobel Prize winner John Nash, and his wife, both died as
| backseat passengers when their driver lost control, hit the
| guardrail, and they were thrown from the car on the way
| home from the airport.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.#Death
|
| Needless to say we should wear seatbelts even in the
| backseat of an automobile.
| tifik wrote:
| Yep I believe that is a pretty well established cognitive
| bias called Illusion of Control [1]. Going down the rabbit
| hole of cognitive biases is a fascinating journey, and lot of
| them are relevant when driving a car.
|
| One I found especially interesting is specifically about how
| improving safety features may not reduce accidents as much as
| it could, because when people feel safer, they tend to take
| greater risks [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Peltzman_
| eff...
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Refusal to drink and drive is not an illusion. I've been
| refusing to do that successfully my entire life.
| gffrd wrote:
| Like sharks: so few fatal interactions, but so much large-
| scale hand-wringing about shark attacks.
|
| I'd double-down on that same wager ...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A Patrol officer I knew said once "I never unbuckled a dead
| man"
| koheripbal wrote:
| It's a nice zinger, but obviously false.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| The quote is not "No one ever unbuckled a dead man".
| bee_rider wrote:
| There were around 42k traffic deaths in 2021 (a 16 year
| high apparently) and around 610k patrol officers
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-
| estimate-2021-tra...
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/751015/number-of-
| police-...
|
| So, assuming every fatality is wearing a seat belt and is
| handled by a cop ('optimistic' assumption for it to be
| 'obviously false'), it would still be around a 7% chance
| per year for a cop to "unbuckle a dead man." So this isn't
| obviously false, depending on the career length. For
| example, after 10 years, assuming independent probability
| of such an encounter per year, .93^10 ~= .48.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| They unbuckled plenty of people who'll never walk/turn their
| heads/poop normally without chronic pain again though.
|
| Cutting fatalities by 50% is a good start, but the other 50%
| aren't walking away from car accidents trouble-free, with or
| without seatbelts in play.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not wearing a seatbelt is an individual choice, and should not
| be a crime.
|
| P.S. Growing up, my dad had the dealer install seatbelts in the
| family wagon before he picked it up. We never moved an inch
| unless everyone was buckled up. Nobody else, and I mean nobody
| else, had seatbelts in their car at the time.
|
| P.P.S. Seatbelts also saved my life.
| Arrath wrote:
| An individual choice that can endanger others when e.g. you
| cannonball through your own windshield and hit someone, or
| cause follow on accidents as people swerve out of your way,
| etc.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not going to happen.
| lovich wrote:
| Well that's a bold statement, guess the rest of us are
| just wrong and there are no externalities associated with
| not wearing a seat belt
| WalterBright wrote:
| First off, the physics are you are going to be thrown
| into whatever your car hit. Second, I've never, ever
| heard of a flying body hurting someone else.
| ok_dad wrote:
| My parents were both in vehicle accident reconstruction
| for just such things and I don't even know how to count
| how many times I watched a car accident reconstruction
| (dummies in crash test vehicles) end in a dummy being
| thrown in any direction you could imagine. It might not
| hit a person but it will hit a car in the other lanes and
| cause accidents.
|
| You're out of your element here, stick to compilers for
| once.
| bendbro wrote:
| > It might not hit a person but it will hit a car in the
| other lanes and cause accidents
|
| A butterfly flaps its wings in China causing ok_dad to
| speculate wildly about the deadly consequences of car
| fired human projectiles.
|
| We definitely need to ban butterflies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Do you know of any such accidents in real life? Do you
| have any statistics on ejected people causing other
| accidents?
|
| What about when people were _saved_ because they were
| flung from a car? Like when the car catches fire, falls
| off a bridge, goes into the river, goes into another lane
| to be smacked by a truck?
| jahewson wrote:
| It's a that like asking for all the data on how many
| people spread polio? Zero! Aha, thus proving the vaccine
| does nothing!
| WalterBright wrote:
| Um, there are lots of polio statistics.
| jahewson wrote:
| Well, that's because almost everyone wears a seatbelt.
| bendbro wrote:
| Rube Goldberg called and he wants his accident back
| bendbro wrote:
| Yes, you survive 2 tons of steel smashing into you only to
| die against .1 ton of perfectly aimed flesh. I wonder what
| the odds of this are? Just kidding, I'm not Wiley E Coyote
| so I don't waste time worrying over comically unlikely ways
| to die. I do however spend time worrying about people with
| comically detached models of physical reality.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| This seems so incredibly unlikely that it is going to need
| some kind of citation. Deer hitting cars is a drop in the
| bucket in terms of human mortality and must be several
| orders of magnitude more common than flying unbuckled
| humans.
| BrianHenryIE wrote:
| Graphic car safety ad about seatbelts:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epTdI-9V6Jk
| WalterBright wrote:
| When I drive I don't move unless my passengers buckle up.
| When I'm the driver, it's my rules.
| CodeAndCuffs wrote:
| Its a choice that effects others. When you get ejected from
| the crash and hit someone else's car. When we have to shut
| down the interstate north and south bound for 3 hours to do a
| full reconstruction. When we have to do a death notification.
|
| Dealing with a dead body isnt a big deal. Your mind kinda
| puts it in the pile of "just evidence". Working the fatality
| is easy. The hard part is the death notification. Having to
| find the family member, either waking them up at 2 am or
| knocking on the door in the middle of an otherwise normal
| afternoon. Its not like brain surgery gone bad. There was 0
| warning of this happening. Noones prepaered for it.
|
| Death notification is a full day of training in our academy.
| Noone deserves to learn their loved one died on the news or
| thru a rumor or over the phone. You have to tell them in
| person.
|
| And you have to be blunt. Anything less just makes it harder
| to cope. "There was a crash, he didn't make it" leaves their
| mind to fabricate a weak lie, like maybe he didn't make
| avoiding the crash, and he's just hurt. This just makes the
| pain last that much longer
|
| "Sir, I'm sorry to tell you that your son was killed in a
| motor vehicle crash".
|
| If you want to make dumb decisions, that's fine, but don't
| try to justify it with this isolated "well it's my choice"
| nonsense. Your choice effects others, and I can still
| remember the reaction of every single death notification I've
| done. The viet nam vet trying to pass a tractor trailer on
| his motorcycle, and the way his wife screamed. Having to tell
| a Dad who's son was touring a college, that his sone was the
| only one in the car not in a seat belt. Having to wake a
| mother up at 2 in the morning to tell her her son is dead,
| and not having an answer to "How do I tell his little sister"
|
| Individual choices generally effect more than the individual
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Yup. Also, that's the Good scenario. What if you are
| unfortunate, and don't die, but just become paraplegic?
| Aside from the financial impact on society (unless you are
| a millionaire, you'll end up needing help) you'll spend the
| rests of your life regretting your choice of not wearing a
| seatbelt.
|
| I somehow suspect that we should just call them "freedom
| belts" and enshrine them in the constitution.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >Individual choices generally effect more than the
| individual
|
| One of the fundamental principles of this country is that
| individual choices are up to the individual unless they
| present _onerous_ effects on others. Simply, any choice can
| be construed to have externalities, much like anything can
| be considered interstate commerce if you squint at it
| strongly enough. To say nothing of the logical incongruity
| of allowing people to ride motorcycles.
|
| Of course if you don't wear your seatbelt you're an idiot,
| but this doesn't feel like an epidemic reaching a
| reasonable threshold, e.g. being deleterious to national
| security.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't envy your job. I'm sure it is tough. I respect you
| for taking on such a difficult task.
|
| However, people still have a right to be stupid with their
| own life. It's not nonsense.
|
| For example, Wilbur and Orville Wright were quite aware
| that they stood a high chance of dying in their airplane
| experiments. Neil Armstrong figured that he had a 1:3 (or
| something like that) chance of dying going to the moon. The
| people who free climb have a very high death rate.
|
| They all have the right to decide for themselves what is
| worth doing and what isn't. If you've got family depending
| on you, you should think about them before taking stupid
| risks. It's your right and your responsibility and your
| decision.
| campbel wrote:
| As long as you're held accountable for your body flinging
| into others and injuring them, sure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Fair enough.
| profile53 wrote:
| Not wearing a seatbelt is also a choice to force the
| healthcare system to support the person for 50 years after
| they break their neck in a preventable way. The choice is
| individual but the consequences are societal.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One of the things I don't like about free health care is it
| comes with the notion that the government should force you
| to do things to reduce those costs.
| pkulak wrote:
| The alternative is letting people die on the street who
| may not be able to pay. No developed country will ever
| have a health care system that shifts 100% of costs to
| the individual.
| [deleted]
| clint wrote:
| Not wearing a seat belt is dangerous to others when you're
| catapulted through your windshield at 90mph into traffic.
| This is not the clear-cut case you want to make it out to be.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you're catapulted through your windshield, you're going
| to hit whatever you drove into, not traffic.
| Arrath wrote:
| If you hit a giant wall, sure.
|
| In the other case, a violent roll over accident will
| happily eject you from a side window and off on a happy
| trajectory towards whatever might be in that direction.
|
| Forward through the windshield is hardly the only way to
| be ejected.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You're going to fall out in the direction you (and the
| car) are travelling/rolling.
| vel0city wrote:
| You're going to be thrown out in some additive vector of
| where you were going and where the other car influenced
| your car to go, depending on what other impacts you're
| getting pre-ejection. That can easily be into another
| car, into other traffic, etc.
| myroon5 wrote:
| whatever you drove into could be traffic
| jiveturkey wrote:
| Who cares if you kill yourself through your own negligence?
| There shouldn't be a fine at all for seatbelts. DUI, OTOH,
| should be treated even more harshly than it is.
| vel0city wrote:
| Who cares? Loads of people. My wife lost a coworker from an
| auto accident, one that they probably would have survived had
| they been wearing their seatbelt. She was a single parent to
| a small child. Losing his mom at such a young age probably
| made a big difference to him. It probably had significant
| impact on her mom, who now has a complicated custody battle
| with an abusive deadbeat dad and massively different life
| having to try and take care of her grandson.
|
| She had a lot of friends, I'm sure they cared about her. My
| wife cared about her. My wife's other coworkers also cared.
|
| Its incredible how selfish so many people are on this site.
| Is there nobody you care about?
| notch656a wrote:
| Won't someone think of the children?
| greedo wrote:
| Because your death becomes an externality that others have to
| pay for.
| goatcode wrote:
| Should we treat all behaviors that are associated with a
| significantly increased mortality rate the same way, or
| should we pick and choose depending on the political and
| social context at the time, like we do with seatbelts?
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Few other behaviors associated with increase mortality
| can also turn you into a missile.
|
| https://youtu.be/bdW_3oQFO0c?t=42
| goatcode wrote:
| Be that as it may, that wasn't the point I was replying
| to.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Is not missiling into another person a form of
| externality?
| goatcode wrote:
| Perhaps, but that's not what the comment was addressing.
| If it were, your point would not address living after
| having become a missile.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I would say we generally do exactly that, when the
| threshold is significant enough and it's a behavior that
| has no beneficial/ safe level (we tax and restrict
| cigarettes heavily, but not so much overconsumption of
| food etc. Arguably we should/could have penalties for
| failing to get enough exercise, though there are almost
| certainly better ways to reduce dangerously sedentary
| lifestyles).
| goatcode wrote:
| >Arguably we should/could have penalties for failing to
| get enough exercise, though there are almost certainly
| better ways to reduce dangerously sedentary lifestyles
|
| This is my point: we pick and choose, and we're subject
| to the whims of society, when it comes to what we deem
| unacceptable. Citing a collective norm that potentially
| could have been influenced by societal ebbs and flows is
| not an objective argument, ever.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Absolutely - regulation is hard. I wonder if there are
| successful instances of government using big-data/ML to
| determine where, when and in what manner it makes sense
| to apply it. And would people vote for governments that
| relied solely on that for what legislation to enact...
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Generally yes. That's why sugar taxes are needed and
| popular with economists.
| goatcode wrote:
| What would you say should be the threshold for increased
| mortality that would subject a given behavior to heavy
| taxation and regulation?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Cyclists take note.
| californical wrote:
| Riding a bicycle is incredibly safe. It's cars that are
| dangerous, around bicyclists and pedestrians alike (and
| even other car drivers).
| notch656a wrote:
| Bicycle deaths per mi is like 6x of cars. Maybe bicycling
| around cars is a big reason for that, but we're measuring
| against the reality there is not the world we want to
| move towards.
|
| I'd say bicycling should be outlawed before driving
| without a seatbelt is (although I'd prefer both be
| legal).
|
| https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-
| studies/Documents/SS1901....
| valeness wrote:
| What are you insinuating precisely?
| kyleamazza wrote:
| Because your body tumbling around in your car during a crash
| can kill passengers, or be catapulted onto the street causing
| another accident/injury from someone trying to avoid it
| mauvehaus wrote:
| First, you're welcome to move to New Hampshire if you feel
| this way and drive around with your seatbelt unbuckled.
| You're also welcome to ride your motorcycle without a helmet
| there.
|
| Second, part of the purpose of the seatbelt is to keep you in
| the driving position for the entire duration of the crash so
| that you can maintain as much control of your vehicle as
| possible until it comes to a complete stop. If the first
| impact of a crash throws you out of the position required to
| drive the car, you're no longer capable of controlling the
| vehicle in such a way that reduces the severity of or
| prevents further impacts. As some of these further impacts
| stand to involve persons not involved in the initial impact,
| it follows that wearing a seatbelt stands to protect them as
| well as you.
|
| Third, We are in absolute agreement that DUI should be
| treated more seriously.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| > Second, part of the purpose of the seatbelt is to keep
| you in the driving position for the entire duration of the
| crash so that you can maintain as much control of your
| vehicle as possible...
|
| I largely agree with this sentiment, however, practically
| speaking I doubt it matters much. Any impact hard enough to
| significantly displace you would likely render you useless
| at operating the vehicle if you are wearing a seatbelt. The
| forces at work during crashes are stronger that most people
| realize.
|
| I read hundreds of traffic accident reports every day. If
| you must traverse the roads, wear your seatbelt, don't ride
| a motorcycle, and avoid excessive speeds. A large portion
| of the reports I see with deaths are single vehicle
| excessive speed loss of control, with a significant portion
| of those not wearing their seatbelts.
|
| Driving is dangerous. Stay safe.
| SheetPost wrote:
| your body yeeted out of the car makes an even bigger mess and
| could hurt/kill sb.
|
| so wear your damn seatbelt
| nextstepguy wrote:
| Because if you don't kill yourself, insurance will care
| footing the bill to send you to the hospital. Maybe
| insurances shouldn't cover people without seatbelts and have
| the ambulance let them be injured at the scene.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Frankly, if the injured person wasn't wearing a belt, I
| wouldn't award him medical damages regardless of who was at
| fault in the collision.
| bhahn wrote:
| I would imagine that most auto insurance policies require
| seatbelts (under some general safety baseline provision)
| for coverage to be valid.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| Believe it or not, cleaning dead bodies off the road everyday
| has a cost.
| powerhour wrote:
| A cost borne by others, in fact.
| notch656a wrote:
| Forcing manufacturers to put in a seatbelt in cars is a
| cost born by others for something many of them never
| wanted, forced on them by people who legislate not only
| having seat belts in their own car but installed in every
| car.
| seabea wrote:
| If your accident involves more than one vehicle, the other
| driver shouldn't need to live with your death on their
| conscience (as it would for most people, regardless of
| whether or not they were at fault).
| wizofaus wrote:
| Aside from the fact your own death is always going to impose
| a cost on society, I'd assume having a seatbelt on as a
| driver significantly increases your ability to maintain at
| least some control of a vehicle in a collision, reducing your
| chance of injuring others (both in and outside said vehicle).
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Curious, is there actually evidence of this? I've been in a
| few accidents and I can't think of how a seat belt would
| maintain control. I feel that anything that would throw you
| out of the seat is basically uncontrollable. My accidents
| with any significant force all happened in the blink of an
| eye.
| vel0city wrote:
| I've been forced to make swerving maneuvers which would
| have been difficult to stay in my seat and in control
| without a seatbelt. I was in a low speed rear end
| collision which would have definitely jarred me out of my
| seat and had me lose control after the fact, probably
| would have caused me to roll into a busy intersection.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You have a right to be stupid, even if it results in your
| death.
|
| > I'd assume having a seatbelt on as a driver significantly
| increases your ability to maintain at least some control of
| a vehicle in a collision
|
| Not a chance. The g forces are tremendous, and you're just
| along for the ride in a collision. In my major accident, I
| had a lap belt on, but my arms and legs and torso flung
| about totally out of my control.
| Arrath wrote:
| In my own accident, despite being slammed against the
| driver's door by the impact, I was able to keep my foot
| stabbed onto the brake pedal throughout the event thanks
| to the belt keeping me more or less in the driver's seat.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's no doubt that the belt played a role in reducing
| your injuries.
| wizofaus wrote:
| But you'd then argue being able to keep your foot on the
| brake doesn't help your chances of avoiding causing
| injury/death to others?
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you're hit from the side, you were already traveling
| forward.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Er, so? If you're hit hard from the side with no seat
| belt, your whole body is likely to be thrown around and
| keeping your foot on the brake is going to be far more
| difficult. Sorry but this does seem like a pointless
| discussion - if you were somehow able to prove that
| seatbelts basically never helped drivers avoid causing
| injuries/deaths to others then I'd agree a $50 fine is
| probably sufficient. But given what I've seen in this
| thread and elsewhere (including direct personal
| experience), seatbelts most definitely do help with that,
| and a fine + license suspension seems quite justified if
| you're caught driving without one (in Australia the fine
| is $550 plus a loss of 4 "demerit points" - lose 12 and
| your license is suspended. Seems a bit soft to me - the
| penalty for driving at 60k/h in a 50 zone is about the
| same.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > if you were somehow able to prove that seatbelts
| basically never helped drivers avoid causing
| injuries/deaths to others
|
| I'm not arguing it never happened. I'm suggesting it
| doesn't happen often enough to be a major factor in
| seatbelt laws. Laws addressing highly unlikely events
| often don't take into account other effects.
|
| For example, when seatbelt laws were proposed, many
| people reported that they were _saved_ from certain death
| by being thrown from their car. For example, if the car
| caught fire. Or the car went off a steep embankment. I
| don 't recall _any_ anecdotes about thrown people causing
| other accidents.
| wizofaus wrote:
| "Laws addressing highly unlikely events often don't take
| into account other effects." Agree 100%, but I'm not
| convinced you could call such events "highly unlikely". I
| don't have enough data to say.
| wizofaus wrote:
| That would depend on the collision. The worst I've had,
| the car I was driving was T-boned by another (their
| fault). If I'd had no seat belt on I somewhat doubt I
| would've been able to maintain control of the vehicle and
| it very likely would have hit other cars.
| pkulak wrote:
| > You have a right to be stupid
|
| To _be_ stupid, sure.
| lovich wrote:
| > You have a right to be stupid, even if it results in
| your death.
|
| Do you? I've not seen hide nor hair of that right defined
| anywhere.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Certainly you have seen "My body, my choice".
|
| It isn't respected as it should be but I would consider
| it a natural right to do what you will with your own
| body. If you don't own that, what do you own? Bodily
| autonomy is the core of all human rights if you think
| about it.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| jumping off mountains is legal
| wizofaus wrote:
| Except when there are sufficient cases of people
| seriously injuring or killing themselves, then the area
| is typically fenced off/given restricted access.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
| of happiness.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Seatbelts also protect other car occupants. When your car
| goes from 80mph to 0mph, if you're not wearing a
| seatbelt, you become a 80kg, 80mph meat missile bouncing
| around the car.
|
| If someone else happens to be in that car with you. Then
| it very likely you're gonna kill them. If multiple people
| are not wearing a seatbelt, then the problems only
| escalates from there.
|
| Sitting in the back doesn't changes the dynamics much
| either. Car seats aren't designed to withstand a 60+kg
| mass hitting them from behind at 80mph. They fold flat,
| and anyone still sitting in them gets folded flat at
| well, and that's all before you start worrying about what
| happens when two skulls collide at 30-100mph.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm aware of that, and when I drive I require that all my
| passengers buckle up.
| dhc02 wrote:
| Seatbelts don't magically stop major accidents from
| happening. But they definitely keep minor accidents from
| turning into major accidents.
|
| They don't keep you in control after you slam into
| something head on or flip the car.
|
| They keep you in control after you clip a deer, or hit a
| rock, or someone rear-ends you, or you swerve hard to
| avoid something, and that can be the difference between a
| good story and killing yourself or others.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Do they? I've been rear-ended, wearing a belt. There was
| no possible way I could control the car under the g
| forces.
|
| If you've got enough side forces to pull you out of your
| seat, you've lost control anyway.
|
| BTW, race car drivers know to take their hands off the
| wheel just before impact, as the front wheels hit they
| can jerk the steering wheel hard enough to break your
| arms.
|
| It's true that if you're going to do performance driving,
| tightly belting yourself in will enable you to feel the
| car better, and enable you to concentrate on driving
| rather than trying to stay seated. But hitting something
| is a whole 'nuther story. If you haven't been hit hard in
| a car (I have), you're not in control. Belt or not.
| You're just along for the ride.
| lttlrck wrote:
| I just saw this on Reddit.
|
| The driver would most likely have regained control had he
| left his seatbelt on. SFW.
|
| https://reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/w4kyx3/oy/
| WalterBright wrote:
| If he hadn't gotten out of his seat to dig in the back,
| he wouldn't have had the accident.
|
| I'm sorry, this is not an argument for seatbelts. It's an
| argument for keeping your eyes on the road.
| GLGirty wrote:
| In the linked article, Strong Towns doesn't say much about
| the nature of these deaths, but in other articles, (e.g.
| below) they explore how many of these killings are vehicle-
| on-pedestrian deaths, and how we've normalized blaming
| victims.
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/14/new-report-
| ame...
| flaque wrote:
| There's an audio version of the same point here:
| https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-drip-drip-drip-of-traf...
|
| A "best effort" summary of this article: if thousands of people
| die in once place, it's one of the great tragedies in American
| history. However if thousands of people die in thousands
| different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life.
|
| When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign
| the entire network to prevent this from happening again. But each
| individual death from car accidents is not enough to trigger the
| same response in cities, planners, and civil engineers.
| hanselot wrote:
| Graffur wrote:
| Thanks for the summary although it doesn't say _why_
| paulpauper wrote:
| Like covid. THoussands of deaths daily became background noise
| coding123 wrote:
| Well, 2 years ago it did not. it was more of an "event". Now
| that it's something we have decided we can't stop (in the
| sense that we've done as much as we can without forcing more
| things - the public has reach a hard limit) it's a lot like
| car crashes.
| googlryas wrote:
| It makes sense because, for most of America, we have designed
| our environment to be heavily dependent on the possibilities
| cars open up for us.
|
| It is not the same with air or train travel. Those are useful,
| but not necessary for almost all people.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It doesn't though. We accept unsafe intersection in America
| that could be made a lot safer. I've also lived in 6
| different car dependent places in my life, and all of them
| are amenable to biking, its just a scary proposition with the
| current infrastructure.
|
| I think a lot of the deaths are put in the realm of "personal
| responsibility" - we don't pursue safer options, even for
| cars, because it's always someone's fault something bad
| happened, rather than intrinsic to the design of the road.
|
| We create roads where people would feel safe going 65mph down
| them, then slap a 35-45mph speed limit on it, and call it a
| day.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be
| made a lot safer._
|
| Related, Americans encountering a traffic circle,
| presumably for the first time and with their brains turned
| off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM
| bostonpete wrote:
| Makes sense, but that still doesn't explain why we ignore
| tens of thousands of auto deaths per year but talk about one
| Uber ATG death for 5 years...
| googlryas wrote:
| My guess is just because self driving cars are new and
| rare. Once there are millions on the road, we will stop
| getting reports about each individual accident involving
| them.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| It's because self-driving cars have alternatives, like
| automated trains or streetcars, that are safer and less
| resource intensive. Self-driving cars aren't _just_
| competing against human-driven cars. Unless you think cars
| are the only form of allowed infrastructure.
| cupofpython wrote:
| probably because self-driving has fuzzy accountability and
| is the same driver in all vehicles.
|
| if a taxi driver crashes, youve got a bad taxi driver
| somewhere you will probably never interact with. If a self-
| driving car crashes, you've got possibly hundred of
| thousands of potential accidents waiting to happen from the
| same "bad driver"
|
| the regular car accident conversations have all been had.
| what else is there to say?
| Akronymus wrote:
| > It makes sense because, for most of America, we have
| designed our environment to be heavily dependent on the
| possibilities cars open up for us.
|
| I disagree on "possibilities cars open up".
|
| If it is optional to use a car basically everywhere, then
| sure, those are freedom. In the majority of the US you are
| locked to HAVING to have a car.
| kjksf wrote:
| Tilting at windmills here but: US is not some unique country
| designed for cars and other countries are not some car-free
| utopias.
|
| Per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehic
| les_...
|
| US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand
| and just above Poland.
|
| Yet this is upteenth time I read that US is "designed" around
| cars as if dependance on cars was some unique property of US.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New
| Zealand and just above Poland.
|
| It doesn't really matter when US has 56 times the cars of
| the first 6 countries combined.
|
| You're comparing San Marino (a small city) with the
| entirety the US. It's just noise.
|
| Consider also that San Marino, Andorra, Monaco,
| Liechtenstein and Malta are all very small and rich
| countries. It is normal for the wealthy to own more cars
| than necessary. Not so normal for tens of millions of
| americans who live currently under the threshold of
| poverty.
|
| I suspect the other countries could do with way less cars,
| americans would still need more than they have (given the
| lacking public infrastructure) but can't afford them.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Polish count includes millions of vehicles that does not
| exist but were never "deregistered".
|
| Amount of active insurance policies is slightly below 27
| million: https://piu.org.pl/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/04/ubezpieczenia-...
|
| That would rate us below Canada but before France.
|
| What's also interesting is that Poland is absolutely not
| designed around cars. Most communist blocks were designed
| for few times less cars. The main cities are still not
| fully connected by highways. We have perfect size country
| for high speed trains.
| googlryas wrote:
| Saying the US was designed around cars doesn't mean it is
| _unique_ in that it is designed around cars.
|
| And the relevant metrics would probably be something like
| miles driven and average speed, not the number of cars per
| capita. Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld may have 1,000 cars each
| but they can only die in a car accident once. Every in San
| Marino owning a car doesn't mean anything if they only
| drive it 15 mph through their city streets which were
| mostly all designed before the advent of cars.
| Findeton wrote:
| Because you can walk in all cities and towns in Poland.
| WesternWind wrote:
| You have to look at kilometers driven per person, not just
| ownership.
|
| Americans drive far far more than most other industrialized
| nations.
|
| https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-
| americans-...
| windows2020 wrote:
| America is huge and lots of it isn't densely populated.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Hence the claim it's designed for cars
| WesternWind wrote:
| Yeah but we commute by car way more. We used to have way
| more railroads and public transit in the US.
| chris_va wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, we already employ hundreds of
| thousands of "cities, planners, and civil engineers"
| continuously to battle these distributed deaths.
| [deleted]
| notatoad wrote:
| that assumes that city planners and civil engineers have a
| goal of battling these distributed deaths.
|
| it's obviously a biased source, but "the war on cars" podcast
| has an interesting episode with Jessie Singer where she
| recounts her interviews with traffic engineers. A municipal
| traffic engineer's only goal is to shield the jurisdiction
| they work from from liability. as long as the industry
| standard best practices are implemented faithfully, you
| probably can't be sued. any attempt to do something different
| from the status quo opens you up to liability.
| masterj wrote:
| This is addressed at length by StrongTowns in this book:
| https://www.confessions.engineer/
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Those people are generally more focused on making sure that
| cars can go fast than on preventing deaths.
| akira2501 wrote:
| This person just missed the agency that _actually does this
| already_. It's not the NTSB, it's NHTSA. There's a database
| of every fatility that happens in a vehicle on American
| roadways. You can download it. It's amazing.
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-
| report...
|
| Every fatal accident is documented. Often in incredible
| detail. I'm annoyed that this is often overlooked.
| Particularly in this case.
|
| And yes, drivers get blamed a lot, because drivers are most
| often at fault. Drugs or alcohol and/or speeding are factors
| in the majority of fatal accidents. This is already known.
|
| For an article that's attempting to so strenuously walk the
| high road, the omission of these facts is bizarre to me. How
| serious can they be?
| rtkwe wrote:
| The same pattern plays out all over the place. Diffuse deaths
| are just background noise to life where singular events
| breakthrough. Happens all the time with gun/heart
| attack/car/pollution/etc. deaths. The last 2 years of COVID
| proved that to me pretty definitively.
| ccn0p wrote:
| Covid deaths: Simple solution, lockdown, virtual learning,
| 6-feet apart, cancel sports and after-school activities, miss
| graduations, etc. All the mental fallout from this: Too
| complex, just a way of life. Drip drip drip.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Well, those solutions don't really work because of the
| contagiousness, so they are going out of favor.
|
| What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA
| vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on
| that is, sadly, minimal.
| bsder wrote:
| Exactly. For example, how many buildings have UV
| sterilized return air, now?
|
| A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way
| more than just Covid.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think UV return air would work as well
| as you think. The real solution is increased ventilation
| rates.
|
| UV bulbs are expensive (and invisible unless you get to
| poke around a buildings mechanical room.), they need to
| be replaced typically ~annually (they won't be). If they
| get dust on them, they don't work as well. Etc. etc.
|
| And here's the issue: To actually deal with high
| concentration infectious aerosols you need to get that
| air out of the room ASAP. (i.e. negative pressure rooms)
| If you can sterilize the return air that's great, but
| frankly I suspect dilution and air movement is going to
| be the dominant effect in reducing infection chains.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I think opening up windows is the answer, but that would
| mean accepting either a loss of climate control, or
| greatly increased energy costs. (I'd prefer the former,
| in all but the absolute hottest summer days or the
| deadliest cold.)
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Generally those things are helpful but I think China has
| pretty well demonstrated that there's no alternative
| universe where fully locking everything down eliminates
| Covid.
| alex_young wrote:
| China represents 18% of the world's population, yet 0.07%
| of COVID-19 fatalities. Seems like there is some value in
| their approach.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Like pretending there are no covid deaths?
| alex_young wrote:
| Surely they aren't covering up that many deaths right?
| The US is 4% of the world population, and represents 16%
| of the fatalities. If China had our rate of fatalities
| that would indicate that they are hiding 4.3 million
| deaths somehow.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 0.07% of reported COVID-19 fatalities. There are a lot of
| incentives to keep the numbers down going up the chain in
| the Chinese bureaucracy. This is the opposite of most
| western countries, where the incentives are to over-
| report.
| nradov wrote:
| There is no value in the Chinese approach. Protecting
| people from infectious disease can't possibly justify
| violating fundamental human rights, such as the right to
| free assembly?
| Nition wrote:
| It worked for us in New Zealand. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| When we tried the same thing a second time it didn't
| work, but that was due to people not following the rules.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| That's what the government says when they fail, they
| blame the people.
|
| It's _your_ fault for not following orders, not _our_
| fault.
| thrashh wrote:
| That's like saying that your grandma was able to keep per
| collection of 4 books perfectly sorted 100% of the time
| so why can't a public library of 50,000 books?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Or at least not without perfect worldwide coordination.
| And assuming there are no animal reservoirs
| anthonypasq wrote:
| its actually remarkable that people still believe this
| after 2+ years
| ansible wrote:
| And if we hadn't done that stuff, we would have seen even
| more than the 1M deaths we did experience. Things could
| have gotten significantly worse as the hospitals filled up
| and space was not available for Covid patients and all the
| other people with heart attacks and other medical
| conditions.
|
| Even as it is, the medical staff have been overworked and
| extremely stressed. They've been quitting the medical field
| in very high numbers:
|
| https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-
| se...
|
| Yes, because of the lockdown, we have paid a high price,
| but don't just dismiss the higher price we would have paid
| if no mitigations had been attempted.
| WASDx wrote:
| Also known as the preparedness paradox.
| nradov wrote:
| Wrong. Most of the non-pharmaceutical interventions were
| pointless pandemic theater. You can find examples of
| other countries that took less extreme measures and still
| had lower death rates.
| jscipione wrote:
| The same goes for the vaccines and the FDA.
| icedistilled wrote:
| Example of the "the brave maverick comment" like the "the
| brave maverick doctor" mentioned in this npr article
| https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2022/07/19/1111794...
| pdonis wrote:
| _> A "best effort" summary of this article: if thousands of
| people die in once place, it's one of the great tragedies in
| American history. However if thousands of people die in
| thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact
| of life._
|
| My summary is different: if thousands of people die because the
| government specifically puts them in harm's way but doesn't
| give them the best available protection against harm,
| particularly when, in retrospect, the government's reasons for
| putting them in harm's way were, to say the least, somewhat
| contrived, we take it very seriously and we demand that the
| government do better.
|
| But if thousands of people die because they individually made
| serious enough errors of judgment that it ended up killing
| them, we consider it a fact of life--because it is. No amount
| of social engineering is going to be able to always protect
| people from the consequences of their own poor choices. You
| can't design perfect roads that will magically prevent all
| accidents.
|
| What we _can_ do as a society is to at least give people the
| proper incentives. Many people routinely ignore traffic laws
| (the most common is probably speed limits). Why? Because they
| can plainly see that many traffic laws are not there to
| actually improve traffic safety, they are there to give
| governments additional revenue sources (again speed limits are
| the most common example). And that means people lose respect
| for all laws, including those that actually _are_ there to
| improve safety (such as seat belt laws).
|
| The way to fix all that is, first, to stop penalizing people
| that haven't caused harm. If I'm speeding, but I don't cause an
| accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and
| force me to either pay a fine or go to court. (Not to mention
| that, during the time the cop has me pulled over just for being
| X mph over the speed limit, event though I haven't caused harm
| or even been driving outside the normal flow of traffic, how
| many _other_ drivers that were doing the same thing have gone
| whizzing by? Obviously enforcement of such laws is going to be
| random, which just makes the incentive problem worse.) Even if
| I 'm driving recklessly, or under the influence, but I don't
| cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket
| and force me to either pay a fine or go to court.
|
| A cop _should_ be able to _stop_ someone who, in their
| judgment, is driving in a way that endangers other drivers.
| "Stop" here means pull them over, just as they would now, and,
| if in the cop's judgment that person is, at that time, not
| capable of driving safely (for example, if they fail a
| breathalyzer), _don 't allow them to drive_. Ask them if there
| is someone they know who can come pick them up. If necessary,
| lock their car and take them to the police station and let them
| contact someone from there. But don't force them to pay a fine
| or go to court if they haven't caused harm.
|
| Second, many of the proper incentives can be better enforced by
| private entities. For example, I mentioned seat belt laws (and
| another poster, a former cop, mentioned them also). What if,
| instead of having seat belt laws, your car insurance policy had
| a rider that, if you were in an accident and were found to not
| be wearing your seat belt, either your deductible becomes much
| higher (say $10,000 instead of $1,000), or your coverage is
| denied altogether? What if, instead of DUI laws, there were a
| similar rider for having an accident if you were found to be
| under the influence? That would give exactly the right
| incentive, for people to _not cause harm_ due to those kinds of
| errors of judgment. Even the law itself could be written the
| same way: no penalty for simply not wearing a seat belt or
| driving under the influence, but _if_ you cause an accident and
| you are found to not be wearing a seat belt or driving under
| the influence, you are presumed to be at fault and you can
| suffer increased penalties.
|
| In short: put the responsibility for individual accidents where
| it belongs: on the individuals that _actually cause harm_.
| sssilver wrote:
| I don't understand why you're being downvoted. You have a
| coherent and well presented point of view. Are downvotes
| supposed to mean disagreement? If so, this community will
| rapidly devolve into an echo chamber.
| mjevans wrote:
| Mostly agree, except:
|
| Design of separation can dramatically help. Isolate
| pedestrians and low-barrier low mass slow motor devices from
| higher mass, higher speed, vehicles.
|
| Dense cities should have an (or many) isolated vehicles only
| layer(s), completely separated from pedestrians.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| definitely didn't expect to see anyone arguing against DUI
| penalties in this thread...
| PebblesRox wrote:
| A problem with your insurance incentive is that it only works
| for people who have insurance. It does nothing to deter
| uninsured drivers.
|
| The risk of dying in a car accident isn't enough to stop some
| people from driving recklessly. Why would a penalty that only
| applies to the rare occasion when someone causes harm be any
| better of an incentive for people who seem to already assume
| they're not going to cause harm by their behavior?
| jrkatz wrote:
| > lock their car and take them to the police station and let
| them contact someone from there. But don't force them to pay
| a fine or go to court if they haven't caused harm.
|
| Supposing at least some drunk drivers are aware they are
| drunk but fully convinced they will not harm anyone, this
| improves their worst case scenario substantially. Before,
| losing their license; now, getting even closer to home before
| calling a ride. Does this incentivize drunk driving among
| people unable to evaluate the danger they present to others
| (e.g., drunks)?
|
| Obviously, this falls apart somewhat because those same
| people probably drive drunk today thinking they won't get
| caught. Nonetheless, the common consensus is that certainty
| of punishment is the primary deterrent against criminal
| activity. Certain non-punishment will change some of the
| calculus.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| In addition, the extra expense associated with regulation to
| make planes ultra-safe makes it unaffordable for some people.
| Those people then go on to use a vastly less safe form of
| transportation.
| toss1 wrote:
| This is confusing. You seem to be suggesting that we should
| let the kind of barely-competent people who typically operate
| & maintain automobiles with a minimum of attention also
| operate aircraft systems with a similarly casual approach in
| order to make it more affordable?
|
| The nature of aviation, where unplanned problems result in
| unplanned non-optional landings in random locations (instead
| of just pulling off the side of the road), would rapidly turn
| aviation into the most dangerous transport mode. Aviation
| would soon become unsustainable, and available to no one.
|
| How does making it less safe help anything? (note that I'm
| not discussing the FAA's massive inefficiencies, many of
| which I'm sure could be improved without compromising safety)
| zamfi wrote:
| Individual deaths can result in local change, perhaps mediated
| by liability concerns.
|
| It's become the cynic's take to point out how quickly an
| unprotected pedestrian crossing gets a traffic light after a
| fatal accident there.
|
| The media makes the thousand deaths at once -- and its response
| -- more salient than a thousand individual deaths.
|
| There is a decent bit of literature around the role of the
| human and his/her purported error in a plane or train crash,
| compared with the culpability of a negligent operator (i.e.,
| driving drunk) of a motor vehicle. Also, the FAA and NTSB have
| a very broad mandate when it comes to regulating planes and
| trains, while the NHTSA has traditionally not been willing to
| impinge on individual rights, perceived or otherwise, in the
| name of safety.
| colpabar wrote:
| This is totally off topic, but aside from the numbers being
| lower, we do the _exact_ same thing with gun deaths.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Which baffles the rest of the world as we see the aggregate
| number and are dumbfounded that nothing is done.
| colpabar wrote:
| As an extremely cynical american, my view is that we don't
| do anything because guns are a big industry in america, and
| industry controls our government in all the places that
| matter.
|
| But my point was more that we only ever talk about gun
| violence when a very specific type of gun violence occurs,
| and pointing out the incidents that constitute the bulk of
| the aggregate number usually gets you called a racist.
| spankalee wrote:
| If you're pointing it out in a way that gets you called
| racist, you might be racist.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Which bulk of the aggregate number? The number 1 cause of
| gun deaths in the US is suicides.
| wrycoder wrote:
| The question under dispute is what is to be done.
|
| Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one
| vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use
| them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess
| their guns legally).
|
| The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding
| citizens actually increases crime[0].
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/15494841224978
| 43200...
| briffle wrote:
| I have a few friends that think the stats I show them are a
| complete lie and fabrication, but the truth is: more people
| from pistols than 'assault rifles'. In fact, in the US, more
| people die from knives than rifles. (not just the 'assualt
| ones' Heck more people per year in the US die of 'hands,
| fists, and feet'. [0]
|
| But guess what is always in the news, and talked about by
| politicians on both sides, until their constituents are
| whipped in a frenzy, donating to their campaign, and can no
| longer see the other side as humans anymore...
|
| [0] https://www.criminalattorneycolumbus.com/which-weapons-
| are-m...
|
| [1] https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/
| 202...
| bdefore wrote:
| Neither the post you respond to nor anyone I've spoken with
| make claim that assault rifles represent a significant
| portion of gun deaths. That politicians gravitate to
| 'banning assault rifles' is lazy governance. Much tighter
| regulation of all guns would be making a difference.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I think politicians fixate on rifles because angry
| constituents armed with rifles are what they _personally_
| fear the most. It 's not about the general population stats
| at all. They don't really care about interpersonal/domestic
| violence or random street crime being committed with pawn
| shop revolvers or knives, even though these together
| account for the overwhelming majority of murders.
| m463 wrote:
| there's one exception: some technologies have unusual
| publicity.
|
| a gasoline car fire? not a peep.
|
| an electric car fire? the media goes crazy.
|
| also nuclear power. Fukushima got a lot of attention, but
| radiation deaths linked to burning coal are significantly
| higher but not touched by the media.
| gillytech wrote:
| How often do gas cars catch on fire randomly (and not under
| the hood but under the passenger compartment as with EVs)
| compared with spontaneous electric car fires?
|
| This is reminiscent of the Galaxy Notes that were exploding
| in people's pockets some years ago.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I've had it happen once, in a 1988 Toyota pickup. The (OEM)
| radio wiring caught fire while driving at slow speed.
| vel0city wrote:
| There are tons of ICE car fire recalls. My sister in law's
| car recently had a recall for the ABS system starting a
| fire. A neighbor of mine had their house burn down in the
| 90s from a car parked for several days in their garage from
| what would later be a recall. Ford had a massive recall of
| millions of cars because the steering column would catch
| fire.
|
| I've owned multiple cars which have had some kind of recall
| which resulted in a fire risk. Zero of them have been EVs.
|
| Sure, those aren't all starting in the passenger
| compartment, but a lot of these battery fires aren't always
| starting in the passenger compartment either.
| mbostleman wrote:
| COVID must be an exception then as 1000s died in different
| places but the public was obsessed. Or the media was at least.
| icedistilled wrote:
| *1,020,000 died in the US and counting.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| The same happened to nuclear energy, despite the fact that coal
| kills 100x people yearly than total nuclear energy deaths.
| nightfly wrote:
| The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are
| amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human
| deaths, 80 square miles around Fukushima and 1,000 square
| miles around Chernobyl are effectively ruined forever.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Coal is (probably) permamently destroying 510 million
| square kilometers of Earth. Few square miles is amazingly
| small price for a carbon free energy.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Try 10,000 times more and you'd be closer, but that's
| probably still an underestimate.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I think that's a little uncharitable: If even a handful of
| people (regardless of location) are harmed by causes that we
| don't accept as normal, those are tragedies and we'll broadcast
| news about that tragedy 24/7 and use enormous institutions to
| move heaven and earth to eliminate that harm. If thousands of
| people are harmed by causes that we do accept, that's life as
| usual. That might be obvious, but it bears some thinking about.
|
| About 19 people in the US have been killed by Takata airbags in
| the years since 2008, and we've spent $24 billion recalling
| vehicles for repair, because that's a risk that we don't
| tolerate.
|
| 100 people will die today in cars - probably more than 19
| people in the next hour, it's going on rush hour and people
| will be tired and in a hurry - and it's just another Thursday.
| Also, close to 19 veterans will commit suicide today. We accept
| that as normal, and I feel strongly that we shouldn't;
| consideration of that outcome should enter into the public
| consciousness as we consider the ethics and justifications of
| military recruitment and our involvement in conflicts across
| the globe.
|
| Where the deaths happen doesn't really matter. I think it's
| more about a human ability to name and blame an antagonist:
| Takata. 9-11. Firestone. Putin. Covid-19. Katrina.
| Comparatively, 'car culture', senelescence, social and cultural
| reintegration, and other issues are diffuse to the point of
| being pervasive and and human brains have a hard time running
| the numbers on the risk analysis.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > ethics and justifications of military recruitment
|
| Putin's War shows what happens when you don't have a strong
| military.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| it shows what happens when you don't have a strong military
| and try to invade a neighbor...
| vel0city wrote:
| The invasion of Ukraine started in 2014, back when
| Ukraine had practically no military. Putin escalated this
| invasion due to the fact Ukraine had been building up its
| army in response to key parts of its country being
| occupied by a foreign invader.
|
| If Ukraine had a large military in 2014, I very much
| doubt Putin would have invaded Crimea nor would there be
| Russian troops in the Donbas.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Since my point wasn't obvious, let me explain. Ukraine
| had a very weak military. If it was stronger, Putin would
| never have invaded.
| naasking wrote:
| > A "best effort" summary of this article: if thousands of
| people die in once place, it's one of the great tragedies in
| American history. However if thousands of people die in
| thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact
| of life.
|
| But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands
| of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a
| single common cause, where the massacre of a thousand people in
| one place _obviously_ has a single common cause. So of course
| the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because
| there 's no obvious connection between them. Of course, if you
| can prove that those have a single common cause that can be
| tackled, then it makes sense to tie them all together.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But these have a common cause. Cars.
| buran77 wrote:
| > So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former
| case, because there's no obvious connection between them
|
| I don't think a common cause is what makes the difference,
| and you see it with lung cancer due to smoking.
|
| The shock factor of plane crashes is brought on by them being
| so rare, killing _a lot_ of people at once, and almost
| guaranteeing those fatalities. This makes them shocking and
| unforgettable, they get a reputation.
|
| On the other hand most people have been in a car crash of
| some sort (a fender bender) and not only survived but walked
| away without a scratch. Plus the stream of news about
| individual crashes just desensitizes people even further.
| thrashh wrote:
| I think it's both.
|
| Honestly it's like a lot of problems where it's easier to
| solve when it's one big thing as opposed to 1000 little
| things. Imagine cutting one big expense out of your budget
| versus having to cut 1% out of 500 things. One of those is
| vastly easier.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Similarly, probably the most dangerous thing most people do
| in their lives is eat (or overeat). It is far more
| dangerous than smoking or driving or flying.
|
| However, overeating (and the consequences) are extremely
| common and utterly unshocking.
|
| People engage in the risky behavior 3 or more times a day,
| and have normalized the deaths they see resulting from it.
| porknubbins wrote:
| Yes the author seems to state that there are many more
| traffic deaths than commercial transport deaths as if the
| point is self evident but I do not see it. From my
| perspective its a minor miracle that there aren't more
| traffic deaths. We let any private individual drive up to a
| 20,000 something pound vehicle with pretty minimal licensing
| requirements (in most places in the US). The news story is
| that it mostly goes ok.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Not sure 40k deaths per year and countless more severe
| injuries, permanent disabilities, and financial
| destitutions count as it going mostly ok
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| my personal theory is that people's overconfidence in their
| ability as drivers and underestimating the risk of driving
| ends up making the process much safer than if people were
| more grounded in reality
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Now I'm really curious for the reasoning behind that.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Or everyone's overconfidence and underestimation means
| there's no appetite for people to accept regulation and
| change. _because I'm not the problem and I'm in control,
| I shouldn't expect change_. Meanwhile when you fly, you
| know you're at the hands of someone else, and you want to
| control them as much as possible.
| elihu wrote:
| I could see that possibly being true. I mean, driving is
| kind of weird; it seems to be mostly done with a part of
| the brain that can operate automatically with little
| conscious effort. It's sort of like playing the piano: if
| I'm playing some piece that I know well I probably won't
| screw up unless I actually try to consciously think about
| what I'm doing, which is when things fall apart.
|
| That said, I think people should be reasonably safety-
| conscious about vehicle maintenance, avoiding risky
| situations, and avoiding things that could sabotage the
| automatic-driving part of their brain, like doing other
| things at the same time that require their attention and
| their hands and eyes.
| dionidium wrote:
| We know, though, that there are certain patterns and
| behaviors that contribute to car accidents. For example, we
| know that speeding was a factor in something like a third of
| all car accidents. And I'm pretty confident that's an
| underestimate, because there are lots of roads where the
| speed limit almost certainly should be slower and speed would
| not be indicated in the accident report, even though it was a
| factor.
|
| If we regulated automobiles the same way we regulate
| aircraft, every single automobile would have a speed governor
| installed.
|
| We also know that size is a significant factor, because of
| physics. This is especially true anytime an accident involves
| a pedestrian or cyclist. And here again, despite clear,
| common sense evidence, cars are getting larger and heavier
| over time, not smaller and safer.
| kazinator wrote:
| Clickbait.
|
| We do not ignore daily car crashes. Serious crashes are reported
| to the police and investigated, just like train wrecks.
|
| The media does not ignore car crashes; bad ones are reported on
| the news.
|
| Trains are large; train wrecks are often big accidents which are
| newsworthy. If it's a passenger train, lots of people are injured
| or dead.
|
| Freight train wrecks can have an environmental impact; chemical
| spills leading to area evacuations and such.
|
| In 2013, in Canada, the Lac-Megantic rail disaster killed 47
| people and destroyed 13 buildings in a town. This was a 73-car
| freight train carrying crude oil. If you can crash your car such
| that 47 people die and 13 buildings are destroyed, you will have
| likely garner the same attention.
|
| Trains run on rails, have right-of-way at crossings, and are
| operated by professionals. Accidents which involve nothing but a
| train (no obstruction of the railway) should not happen, which
| makes such train accidents inherently more newsorthy/noteworthy
| than traffic accidents. People want to know what went wrong in
| the system and how it can be prevented.
| SwetDrems wrote:
| What other engineering field has acceptable death rates? We
| design roads EXPECTING people to die on them. Insane.
| phyzome wrote:
| A potentially larger reason is that we've decided car deaths are
| _acceptable_ -- perhaps because the alternative implicitly might
| be some kind of impingement upon personal-car-culture, and that
| is pre-decided as unacceptable.
| tristor wrote:
| The primary reason why I ignore car crashes is because I ensure
| that I do the following things, all of which greatly reduce my
| risk factor compared to the average:
|
| 1. I always drive attentively with both hands on the steering
| wheel.
|
| 2. I completed on-track driving instruction in a race car,
| multiple times, and also took training in evasive driving
| maneuvers.
|
| 3. I constantly maintain situational awareness of what's going on
| around and with my vehicle.
|
| 4. All of my vehicles are relatively new (less than 10 years old)
| and impeccably maintained, and provided with the highest quality
| tires available replaced on a regular cadence based on service
| life.
|
| 5. I do not drive when I am overly tired, after having consumed
| any alcoholic substance, or in adverse weather conditions. In any
| of these situations, I either do not travel or I find an
| alternate way to travel that doesn't incur the risks of driving.
|
| A simple example of #5 is that I was on a road-trip headed North
| in the US, and we had a late-Spring snowstorm happen around mid-
| day. I had originally planned to get a further 150 miles down the
| road before stopping for the night, but I instead immediately
| pulled off and booked a hotel room, and left again the following
| morning after the roads had cleared and traffic had let up. Could
| I have made it? Almost certainly. Was my vehicle equipped for the
| weather? Yes, absolutely. Was it worth the risk? Not at all. A
| hotel room was $120 for the night, which was cheap insurance
| against possibly dying on vacation.
|
| If I get onto a public bus, or into a ride share, or a taxi, I
| can't guarantee any of the above. The driver might have personal
| issues causing them to have stayed up late the night before, and
| then they had a few martinis to help them sleep, and started the
| morning with heavy coffee drinking, constantly checking on the
| status of their personal issues on their phone while they're
| driving. The bus due to it being a public service may be
| maintained at the margins of acceptable standards with tires and
| other consumable maintenance items being used to the full extent
| of their service life, rather than being replaced preventatively.
| We've all seen the "gators" on public roads of tire treads ripped
| off of truck and bus tires that were retreaded rather than
| replaced, or shredded rubber from large tire blowouts. The bus
| could be 17 years old with a spotty history and frame damage. All
| of these things are out of my control. But I can control myself,
| my driving, my vehicle, and ensure I always leave enough spare
| tire capability to evasively maneuver.
|
| I'm nearing 40 years old and I've avoided HUNDREDS of accidents
| that could have happened due to other drivers. I have never once
| in my entire life been in an accident where I was at fault. In
| fact, I've been in multiple accidents, all of which involved my
| vehicle being entirely stopped and stationary and being rear-
| ended by an inattentive driver, sometimes with me not even being
| in the car when it happened. As long as I am actively moving down
| the roadway, I consider my risk to be massively below the
| national average, because I am a better driver than nearly anyone
| else I've ever met and I drive better quality vehicles that are
| maintained better than nearly any other vehicle on the public
| roads. It's as simple as that.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| All drivers avoid many close calls. That's just inherent to
| being on the road.
| djmips wrote:
| Even just #4 (the tire part) applied / enforced would help
| tremendously.
| tristor wrote:
| Because I do a lot of the maintenance on my own vehicles, I
| have many acquaintances who ask me car advice, and I always
| tell people to buy the best tires they can afford, as it's
| those 4 tires and wheels that are all that's holding your car
| to the ground. I have recently moved cross-country, but the
| previous city I lived in it was incredibly commonplace to see
| vehicles on the highway doing 80+ MPH with horribly visibly
| bald tires, or in some cases people rolling on 4 spares
| (which are only certified to 55MPH).
|
| The average driver in the US has a very flippant attitude
| towards maintenance and towards tires in particularly. Yet,
| tires are one of the most important if not most important
| safety items on your vehicle.
| djmips wrote:
| 40 years old eh? Perhaps it's time to start considering
| retiring from driving to maintain your high standard.
| tristor wrote:
| Agreed, actually. I fully intend to stop driving after I
| retire. It's actually a conversation I've had a few times
| with my parents, and I'm heavily encouraging them to give up
| driving. I wish we had better licensing standards in the US
| at every level and that we forced aged-based retesting on
| older drivers. I know that my mother (72) for instance
| definitely should not be driving, but still does, although
| mostly my father (65) does the driving. I'd prefer if neither
| of them did.
|
| The flip side (and something I think Strong Towns would fully
| agree with me on) is that most American cities are
| constructed for cars and not for people, which means stricter
| licensing standards and being more careful about licensing of
| older drivers is somewhat of a non-starter if it means people
| have no feasible way to get to the store or the doctor (or
| for those below retirement age, to work).
|
| I also realize that my position is heavily privileged, both
| by my ability to afford newer cars and impeccable
| maintenance, my time and affordability of training, and that
| I will likely retire early enough in age to not ever become a
| road hazard due to my age. It is not lost on me that this
| cannot apply to most other people, and I recognize I'm an
| outlier in this way. I heavily support policies to increase
| public transit options, and I hope that self driving cars
| become a reality in my lifetime. We cannot build society's
| policies based on our highest or lowest outliers, but need to
| consider the reality of the normal person's experience.
| CHB0403085482 wrote:
| If USAians can ignore daily multi-death shootings, it can ignore
| any tragedy.
| sytelus wrote:
| My favorite: Number of people die from cancer each year is same
| as number of people died in World War II each year. How much
| resources did we allocated to each? As former chimps, our ability
| grasp probability and statistics is astonishingly limited.
| badpun wrote:
| It's not a fair comparison, because world population in 1940
| was just 2.3 billion. So, in relative terms, WW2 killed almost
| four times as many people per year as cancer does.
|
| Not to mention that the goal of WW2 spending wasn't to improve
| some abstract death prevention statistics, it was actually to
| prevent madmen from taking over the whole world and turning it
| into totalitarian hell.
| noirbot wrote:
| Isn't some of that skewed though? Most of the people who fought
| and died in WW2 were 18-40 year old folks in the prime of their
| life, or minorities killed in atrocities. My guess, and correct
| me if it's wrong, but a lot of people who die from cancer are
| generally unwell in other ways, or more elderly. It's also that
| there's not just one "cancer" we have to fix, and we already
| spend quite a lot of resources on studying and treating cancer.
| darig wrote:
| jandrese wrote:
| The article focuses on trains, but the same thing could be said
| for autonomous vehicles. When one crashes it is national news
| because they are so rare. People who say autonomous vehicles
| won't be viable until the crash rate is zero are setting the bar
| far too high. The threshold should be fewer accidents and/or
| fewer fatalities per million miles driven than human drivers. In
| theory system improvements on the autonomous cars could further
| reduce those figures, while reducing the accidents involving
| human factors is very difficult. You can't change people that
| much. Most of the foreseeable improvements are basically the same
| ones you would need for autonomous vehicles anyway, like better
| sensors around the car to detect obstacles.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "You can't change people that much."
|
| The point of licensing is to restrict the privilege to those
| who can responsibly and competently preform the task. If they
| can't conform to that, then they shouldn't be driving. Tougher
| licensing and enforcement would drastically reduce fatalities.
| We already see this in many European nations with stricter
| enforcement and licensing.
| distant_hat wrote:
| The thing is in the US driving is essential to having any
| sort of life for the most part leaving tiny enclaves like NYC
| aside. And freedom is an important part of US ethos.
| Autonomous cars as long as they are better than humans would
| be accepted by a range of people especially by elderly etc
| because what they want is to get from point A to point B, not
| necessarily to drive.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Coincidentally, the more rural the area, the less dangerous
| a driver would be to others and the easier the practical
| test would be. It's most dangerous in the more populated
| areas because of the concentration of drivers, pads, and
| things makes it more likely they would hit something.
| jandrese wrote:
| In the US it is easier to invent autonomous vehicles than
| take away grandma's drivers license.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The trouble that many elderly face with smartphones leaves
| me a little skeptical that autonomous cars are really a
| solution to that specific problem.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > The threshold should be fewer accidents and/or fewer
| fatalities per million miles driven than human drivers.
|
| Those of us who drive defensively strongly disagree with this
| metric. The "average driver" is extremely skewed towards a
| relatively small subset of drivers who cause most of the
| wrecks. Not coincidentally, the same people who can't afford a
| fancy autonomous car anyway.
| belorn wrote:
| We can start by putting the autonomous vehicles to the driver
| license test to see if they can just pass the lowest standard
| of driving, ie the quality of a novice driver. If they can't do
| that without instructor needing to step in then just like the
| novice they shouldn't be allowed on the roads without a
| licensed driver to oversee them.
|
| That is the bar that autonomous vehicles need to reach. Crash
| rate of zero is not required, through if it is higher than the
| average driver then it might be worth to make the license
| requirements higher.
| jandrese wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a very high bar to pass. Around here a
| drivers test involves a short stint on a low speed closed
| course with a few intersections and then a parallel parking
| test. Our current self driving systems should have no trouble
| with that once they are informed what you expect.
| belorn wrote:
| I guess every country has their own set of expectations and
| rules for what qualify for operating a car in a safe
| manner.
|
| Where I live the practical part of the driver exam is 30m
| of driving in mixed environment, usually involving a number
| of environments (based on what the driver inspector can
| find that day). Those involve city driving, country driving
| and on-off to the highway, with a number of events such as
| driving in areas where there are
| pedestrians/cyclists/children, crossing railway, lane
| changes, roundabouts, passing construction work, and so on.
| Just like with a driver instructor the car has double
| controls, but if the inspector has to take control of the
| car to prevent an accident then its an automatic fail and
| the person has to retake the test at a later date. Minor
| failures can be accepted, through the basic concept is that
| a person who can't drive around for 30 minutes without
| causing an accident shouldn't be on the road.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Talk to any racing driver and they will spell out the importance
| of seatbelts for safety and to maintain control position. For
| many years there were TV spots explaining why you wouldn't be
| disfigured if you wore one. In modern cars those films could play
| repeatedly on the dashboard if you failed to buckle up or sat on
| top of the buckled belt.
|
| Once people understand why something is essential they will do
| it, but we have to keep fresh generations of drivers informed and
| involved imo.
| mywittyname wrote:
| "We" don't ignore them. Every major government has a body
| dedicated entirely to automobile safety.
|
| In the USA, this is NHSTA - National Highway Safety &
| Transportation Administration. They maintain an information
| system of traffic fatality statistics in the USA, called FARS
| (fatality analysis reporting system). This system is used to
| determine new safety devices and standards for vehicles and to
| test their effectiveness.
|
| And they are a powerful organization. A car cannot be sold in the
| USA without NHSTA approval. At the tap of a keyboard, they can
| cost a company billions of dollars. They power reaches far beyond
| the USA as well. Not too long ago, the NHSTA issued a recall that
| bankrupted the largest producer of airbags in the world.
|
| I'd say the USA focuses a lot on reducing automotive fatalities.
| zucker42 wrote:
| US DOTs have people devoted to safety no doubt, but they also
| endorse road and city designs which have safer alternatives.
| epistasis wrote:
| I can't agree with your assessment at all. Deaths are rising,
| yet what changes are happening?
|
| And in particular the NHSTA doesn't give a damn about those
| outside of the car.
|
| The very greatest threat to the life of my children is cars. It
| would be easy, trivial almost, to fix this by legalizing
| building for houses and businesses that don't allow cars, but
| are served only by public transit. Yet this very simple, very
| desirable concept is illegal in the US except for a few tiny
| islands.
|
| We prioritize cars over life in nearly every single aspect of
| law. We modified law to make drivers not culpable for the death
| they inflict on others, because if drivers had to pay for the
| damage they caused, we would not be driving at all.
| partdavid wrote:
| "Not doing what I think should be done for my particular
| interest and priorities" isn't the same as "Ignoring." At
| all.
|
| By all means, continue to advocate, but the idea that "we"
| ignore car crashes is risible.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > Deaths are rising, yet what changes are happening?
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-
| estimate-2021-tra...
| vehementi wrote:
| > I can't agree with your assessment at all. Deaths are
| rising, yet what changes are happening?
|
| More than one factor affecting a phenomenon can exist. They
| can be making changes to make things safer, while other
| things can be working against them. It's like saying "I don't
| believe harm reduction is helping: people still die from ODs"
| panzagl wrote:
| > It would be easy, trivial almost, to fix this by legalizing
| building for houses and businesses that don't allow cars, but
| are served only by public transit.
|
| Is that all? Just move everyone in the country? What do you
| consider non-trivial?
| recursive wrote:
| > Just move everyone in the country?
|
| You've misunderstood.
|
| No need to move everyone in the country. People buying
| these new houses would be moving. As you're probably aware,
| people that buy new houses _already_ regularly move into
| them. And it certainly wouldn 't be everyone.
| masterj wrote:
| Safety regulations for the people inside the vehicles. Next to
| no regulations to protect those obligated to exist alongside
| them. Ex: No regulations for how a pedestrian body will react
| in a crash with an SUV
| Apreche wrote:
| You are correct that they are powerful, but they wield that
| power rarely.
|
| Imagine if Superman was real. There he is standing on a street
| corner. Vastly powerful. Invincible to everything except
| kryptonite. Cape flowing majestically. Someone robs a bank
| right there across the street. He sees it. He hears it. And he
| stands there and watches, doing nothing. That's the NHSTA.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > You are correct that they are powerful, but they wield that
| power rarely.
|
| Define rarely? They issued over a thousand recalls in 2021.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Those bodies routinely enforce road widening and other measures
| in residential areas that make things grossly more dangerous.
|
| They also have explicit tradeoffs between the changes they make
| and deaths, proving the article's point.
|
| Plus the guidelines often prioritise speed as an end goal
| rather than caring about throughput, or the fact that it should
| be a quiet residential street.
|
| Plus the destruction of transit.
|
| Spending just as much as safe, accessible transport would cost
| on road widening projects and barely keeping deaths under a
| high self-declared threshold isn't prioritising safety.
| partdavid wrote:
| Yeah, "we" don't ignore them _at all_. I 'm not sure I'm able
| to articulate all the costs and efforts around road safety, but
| I'm quite certain it's... real high. Not just the directives of
| the NHSTA and the effort required to comply with them (crash
| testing and research, etc.), but _most_ law enforcement
| activity (and the support laws and codes restricting driving
| activity), driver education and licensing (on passenger and
| carrier levels), road maintenance including pervasive safety
| features like guardrails, breakaway posts, collision barriers,
| road re-grading, safety signals.
|
| Maybe the reason it could seem to someone like "we" do is
| exactly because it is _so_ pervasive. It 's second nature to
| get used to all the safety measures that surround us on the
| road. It's not that we ignore the danger of road accidents or
| their consequences: it's that the attention we pay to it is so
| constant it becomes background noise--humans notice novelty,
| not stuff we're used to.
| nemild wrote:
| On a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year
| of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and
| mapped them against actual death rates:
|
| https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
|
| It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially
| glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our
| media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka
| profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and
| decisions if that's all we see.
| narush wrote:
| I _highly_ recommend consuming more of the content put out by
| Strong Towns [1]. If I were to summarize their message, it's that
| in the past 100 years, we've engaged in a large-scale experiment
| to design our places around cars. This is bad for safety, bad for
| the economy, and (most importantly!) bad for us people that live
| in these places! Content and education-wise, they are my favorite
| non-profit :)
|
| If you're looking for audio: their podcast [2] is great (this
| article came out yesterday as a podcast, and I listened to it
| while I was biking... and then got angry at all the cars driving
| around me, lol).
|
| If you're looking for something longer-form, I'd recommend
| reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer [3]. It's literally
| fantastic, and changed the entire way I think about the suburbs
| and cities. I grew up in a suburb and recently moved to the city,
| and had this deep, under-thought feeling that the walking/biking
| (and the livability that came from it) was why I loved cities so
| much. This book helped me understand why I felt that way, what
| specifically is wrong with how we build place currently - and
| also practical things I could do about it!
|
| Not to be dramatic, but that book took me from pretty much
| _never_ thinking about place to: volunteering for a local bike
| advocacy group, biking twice as much, and literally being a more
| friendly neighbor. Effects not guaranteed, but I can't recommend
| this book highly enough if you're interested in this sort of
| thing.
|
| P.S. I am totally unaffiliated with Strong Towns. I just really
| like them :)
|
| P.P.S. If you're looking for some interesting drama, check out
| the lawsuit they are currently engaged in [4] with the Minnesota
| Board of Licensure. IANAL, but it kinda just seems like the
| engineering licenses boards are trying to shut down his speech
| because he points out that maybe letting only-technical engineers
| totally design our spaces isn't really the best idea!
|
| P.P.P.S. Donate here [5]!
|
| [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/
|
| [2] https://www.strongtowns.org/podcast
|
| [3] https://www.strongtowns.org/book
|
| [4] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/2/21/the-latest-
| upd...
|
| [5] https://www.strongtowns.org/membership
| alice_zero wrote:
| Seconding this, a large number of current social problems can
| be attributed to the way our cities is built. Homelessness
| (land use is inefficiently prioritizing single family homes and
| parking lots), public health (car dependency encourages minimal
| walking), and human connection (shared spaces become less
| appealing when they're not <10 minutes outside your doorstep).
| The places we live in has been structured in a manner unlike
| any other time period in human history and it's simply accepted
| without question. It takes a bit to wrap your head around but
| if you go in willing to suspend prior beliefs, it's definitely
| worth it if you want to understand why the world is the way it
| is in certain parts of the world.
|
| Of course there are going to be caveats and cars will always
| have a use. What matters is that people have a choice of
| convenient public transport rather than cars being the only
| option that's practical.
| chroem- wrote:
| You can't conduct commerce on a bike. Anti-car policies are
| also closely coupled with inflated housing prices, since they
| effectively reduce the available housing supply by requiring
| employees to commute from within public transit distance of
| their job.
| narush wrote:
| I'd highly recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering
| Engineer before debating my communication of it. There's a
| lot more depth to the arguments than the one-sentence summary
| a novice (me) can give :)
|
| Namely, Strong Towns isn't anti-car! In fact, they explicitly
| arguing _against_ removing cars from city centers in most
| cases, for reasons related to those that you mention. If I
| remember correctly, many towns tried to do this in the 70's
| or something, and most of them failed; cars are still
| required in most cases.
|
| That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are
| very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to
| put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people!
|
| Again, highly recommend engaging with the source material
| rather than taking my word for it. I've been consuming and
| parroting (sometimes badly) their content for months - they
| have been thinking about these questions for literally
| decades!
| chroem- wrote:
| > That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are
| very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to
| put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people!
|
| That's a semantic argument that doesn't address the real
| problems that skimping on commuter infrastructure can
| cause. San Francisco and Seattle have both achieved some of
| the highest housing prices in the nation thanks to chronic
| underinvestment in highway infrastructure.
| narush wrote:
| Check out the book! You'll get a lot from it I think --
| even if it's just a better understand of a different
| viewpoint :)
| chroem- wrote:
| No thank you: I don't care for content that's searching
| for evidence to support a preconcieved position. There is
| too much dogma and not enough pragmatism in this space.
|
| I already get enough of their content on HN to recognize
| dogma when I see it. Quite frankly, it's a circlejerk
| where everyone else is wrong unless they follow the ST-
| scene's ideologically-founded prescriptions, and if you
| post evidence to the contrary you'll often get shouted
| down.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| > There is too much dogma and not enough pragmatism in
| this space.
|
| And rejecting other viewpoints out of hand isn't
| dogmatic?
| chroem- wrote:
| cianmm wrote:
| Thanks for the book recommendation! I've ordered it.
| cianmm wrote:
| Anti car policies need to be paired with pro sustainability
| and livable city policies. You can't do just one or the
| other, both need to happen close to simultaneously. We need
| to strongly discourage car use and encourage sustainable
| transportation while strongly safeguarding it for those who
| truly need it, rather than those who just want it.
|
| You can conduct many types of commerce, maybe most types of
| commerce by bike. You can't do things like say transporting
| more than two sofas, or large scale building materials, but
| if the goal is to reduce car usage as much as possible you'd
| be surprised how much you can do with a good cargo bike.
|
| With an electric bike most people could easily do a 15km
| commute within 40 minutes especially where provided safe
| cycling infrastructure. And with no need to store and
| transport all of these cars despite them only being used for
| two hours a day you can use all of that space to build more
| housing.
|
| People who want to live outside of population centres and
| thus feel the need to own a car but need to commute into
| population centres can instead commute to large scale park
| and ride for public transit. Maybe they can also charge their
| cars there too, maybe even for free with ownership of a
| transit pass.
|
| And the best part about strongly discouraging car ownership
| and usage while strongly encouraging sustainable transport is
| that it frees up space on the road for busses, emergency
| services, cyclists, pedestrians, and those who need vehicles
| for transporting goods or for accessibility reasons.
|
| Finally, consider that housing prices in areas with
| sustainable transport options might be higher because people
| want to live where they can safely walk and cycle surrounded
| by trees and plants. Make that possible for anybody who wants
| it and we'll have a cheaper house prices, healthier
| populations, less climate change, safer societies, and just
| generally a nicer time.
| gringoDan wrote:
| If cars were invented today, they would be illegal.
|
| We give 16-year-olds minimal training, then entrust them with the
| control of a 3,000 lb. weapon for the rest of their lives. You
| can be an awful driver, but even if you get into multiple
| accidents, your license will rarely be taken away.
|
| If cars had not been invented, we would have designed 20th
| century cities around people, rather than the automobile. We'd
| have a robust public transportation network that would all but
| eliminate the need for cars, at least in cities and suburbs (see
| Japan).
|
| Between the death toll and the alienation from living in places
| designed for cars, I'm not sure if the car has been a net
| positive for society.
| causi wrote:
| Human response is never in actual proportion to reality. For
| example, veterans have a suicide rate lower than farmers,
| fisherman, construction workers, maintenance workers, and
| engineers.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| I don't think you are correct on engineers. General suicide
| rate in the US in 2019: 16.8/100k[0]. Suicide rate of veterans
| in the US in 2019: 31.6/100k[0]. Suicide rate of engineers in
| the US in 2016: 23.2/100k [1].
|
| [0]: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-
| sheets/2021/2021-N... [1]:
| https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/84275
| Willish42 wrote:
| I didn't realize aggregated info on this type of thing was so
| readily available. TY for including references!
| ithkuil wrote:
| How do veteran farmers compare to non-veteran farmers? (Or
| fishermen etc?)
| j-bos wrote:
| This is a thought provoking question, thanks for that.
| [deleted]
| wyager wrote:
| Because it's worth it. The question is why we don't ignore other
| causes of death that are also worth it.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| While in retrospect The Dark Knight was almost comically heavy
| handed and clumsy, the Joker's speech about "the plan" was pretty
| solid and holds up.
| intrasight wrote:
| We don't ignore them - we just accept that risk
|
| Data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics
|
| 0.00000003% chance of dying if you drive a kilometer to the yoga
| studio.
|
| Want to make it less risky personally? Drive less, or drive a
| safer car.
|
| https://www.iihs.org/ratings/top-safety-picks
| elwell wrote:
| It's not spinning the roulette wheel; the skill/sobriety/self-
| control of the driver has a lot of influence on the probability
| per kilometer.
| kminehart wrote:
| It sure would be nice if we could just "drive less".
| Unfortunately the cities we live in, at least in the US, are
| designed such that it's the only option we have. That's a huge
| focus of the website / book in the OP called, "Strong Towns."
| avianlyric wrote:
| What about all the pedestrians that are killed by vehicles
| (which is rapidly trending up)? Do just have accept that even
| those that don't benefit from car must still suffer the
| consequences of cars?
| giantg2 wrote:
| The engineering side is good to look at. We should also be
| looking at the education/credentialing side too. Many incidents
| are drivers making poor choices, not knowing the laws, or not
| understanding vehicle dynamics. Stricter licensing would be a
| good way to reduce incidents regardless of the redesigns.
| Arguably, that would be the fastest and cheapest route to
| effective change.
| malauxyeux wrote:
| We've got strict credentialing here in France for obtaining
| your first license and we're well below the US in traffic
| deaths.
|
| It may be part of the picture, though I still witness plenty of
| dangerous/aggressive/stupid driving here.
|
| One thing we do have going for us, I believe, is "no permit"
| cars. These are tiny cars with tiny engines that don't require
| a permit to drive.
|
| Many (most?) drivers with revoked licenses still need to drive.
| And they can still legally drive a "no permit" car. It's
| believed anyway that this serves as a security valve for
| keeping drunk drivers out of heavy, more deadly vehicles.
|
| Of course, driving a "no permit" car under the influence is
| still illegal.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i was in Paris and Southern France for two weeks a little bit
| a go. As a US driver, the chaos of your mopeds makes driving
| pretty harrowing haha. Still, i was impressed. In all the
| driving I did over those two weeks I didn't see a single
| accident. In the US I would have seen at least two being
| cleaned up on the highways.
| malauxyeux wrote:
| I wonder if the harrowing bit isn't a strength.
|
| When you're driving in North America, even in a city
| center, it often feels like there's nothing to do except
| watch the car in front of you and the next light. I wonder
| if that makes drivers disengage and not notice dangers.
|
| In contrast, things tend to be a lot denser and less
| regular here. Maybe that keeps peoples' heads on the road.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Yeah, every driver should have to re-do a driving test every 5
| years to maintain a license and if they are convicted of a
| moving violation they should have to re-do the test within a
| year of that violation, in addition to the 5 year test.
|
| Driving is a privilege, not a right.
| kiba wrote:
| Or we could just get rid of the need to drive cars. The best
| part is no part.
| Ottolay wrote:
| On a personal level, this reminds me of a concept called
| normalization of deviance. [1]
|
| Every time we do something which we know may be risky, but we do
| not have a catastrophic result, we further reduce the perceived
| risk that the catastrophic result will occur to us.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think it's just because car crashes aren't a wedge issue, so
| they don't politically matter. We certainly don't ignore car
| crashes on local news, where they make a great space filler.
|
| Amtrak (and train travel in general) certainly is a wedge issue
| ("Amtrak Joe"), so we fixate on the only thing interesting that
| ever happens with it (crashes.) We can then discuss the state of
| it, whether we should shut it down or expand it, whether flying
| is safer, etc.
| dbrueck wrote:
| No need to overcomplicate it: we ignore it because it's not
| _that_ common.
|
| I mean, for every one person that dies in a car accident in the
| U.S., 16 die from heart disease and look at how good we are
| (collectively) at not really tackling that as a source of deaths!
| indymike wrote:
| The answer here is that the convenience of being able to jump in
| a car, and get to your destination quickly is worth the risk of
| occasionally being injured or dying on the way to most people.
| You also have to compare against what came before the car: horses
| and walking, both of which may have been perilous in comparison
| with DC Beltway traffic on the way home from work. Ah... never
| mind - braving the elements and bears might be better than the DC
| Beltway at rush hour.
| codemonkey-zeta wrote:
| That's not the alternative strongtowns advocates for. You can
| have _more_ convenient and _more_ safe municipalities at the
| same time. I recommend the "stroads" essay on their site (as
| well as the others too). Strongtowns really provides a very
| compelling thesis when you consider the whole of their
| proposals.
| dontcontactme wrote:
| Another factor is that people are more afraid of scary things
| when they feel like they can't control them. Driving makes people
| feel like they are in control, which makes drivers underestimate
| their chances of crashing. This is the same reason that airplane
| crashes and autonomous vehicle crashes are also huge news events:
| if people feel like crashes are being caused by something they
| can't control, that scares them.
| kieselguhr_kid wrote:
| I want to make clear that I agree completely, but I've been
| injured in two car crashes in my life. Once, I was a pedestrian
| and crossing the street in a crosswalk with a signal when an
| old lady drove into me and then drove off. We had made eye
| contact while I crossed, but for whatever reason she decided to
| start driving nonetheless. The other time, I was stopped at a
| red light and someone arguing with their partner rear ended me.
| Incidentally, I caused minor injuries to others in a similar
| crash when I was a teenager. Clearly, there was no element of
| control to the injured parties in any of those three stories.
|
| It'd be really nice if we could figure out how to convey to
| people that they don't have any significant control over their
| safety when driving, so that we can finally start making
| rational attempts to drive down the number of motorist and
| pedestrian deaths.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yes, the feeling of control is an illusion.
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