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.
It doesn't have to be like this though: Other countries pay attention to crashes, especially with fatalities. One of my uncles was a civil engineer working in Spain's government, now retired. All crashes reported to the police would be marked in maps, with an extra layer for fatalities. Then they'd be grouped by the kilometer of road, to look for the sections of road that were the most dangerous. The worst locations would be considered "black spots", and you'd see them in reports that hit the media. Part of the process of prioritizing road upgrades involved sending engineers in, evaluating what made the stretch of road so dangerous, and look for mitigations: From just road markings and using police as a traffic calming measure, to complete rebuilds.
The US has a whole lot more miles of road, and a lot more miles traveled, but I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't areas that prove to be far more dangerous than any other mile of road, and where some efforts couldn't minimize the problem. The way we look at traffic is so much different though: In Spain most roads where cars travel fast tend to be outside of cities. In the US, we have a wide variety of streets rated at 30-40mph, With width and sight lines like roads where you could do 60, but that are really suburban streets where people might actually attempt to cross the street. Who is going to want to track, and fix, the fact that there are a lot of accidents near a high school, in a place where people do 45mph, and teenagers are trying to cross the street to get to the only nearby convenience store?
We build more dangerously, and organize our government in ways where it's far less likely accountability will happen.
The US has this concept of "black spots" too. However, they are ironically named "safety corridors." We get a nice sign [0] to mark the death zone and then traffic continues unabated.
We also mark deadly intersections and turns with white crosses, one for each person who's died there. They're worth paying attention to, and I think locals at least learn to be weary of those locations.
I've been told by driving instructors that the rule of thumb for putting up octagon STOP signs here in Denmark is only when a serious accident has occurred.
I can't find a source for it, but they are definitely rarer than most other places, and I feel like they are taken more serious because of it.
Here in the US, I swear the rule of thumb for installing stop signs is only the limitation of how many can be bought under the current budget. So many intersections would be less frustrating by having yield signs, instead.
4-way stops get installed in volume because neighborhoods gentrify and the new residents complain about the traffic being too fast (the old residents had bigger problems to care about) and converting 2-way stops to 4-way stops is a cheap/easy way to slow down traffic, kinda. Then the next week they complain about having to listen to every vehicle accelerate from the stop.
Maybe the driving instructor wanted to impress upon you the importance of respecting the STOP sign with this story? Maybe it's true in some cases, but somehow I can't imagine that at an intersection with very bad visibility the traffic planners just say "let's start with only a Give Way sign and see how many accidents happen, if it's too bad we can always replace it with a STOP sign"?
It's true however that some countries are more prone to what I call "traffic restrictions overshoot" then others - e.g. in Italy there are many stretches of highway limited to 50 km/h, apparently in hopes that drivers will at least reduce their speed to 70-80 km/h, and many STOP signs hoping that drivers will at least slow down at the intersection.
But I'd think a Give Way sign should suffice in practice even if the intersection has poor visibility. Only if the intersection proves to cheat drivers in to thinking the visibility is not so bad (and hence drivers won't slow down enough) is a Stop sign needed?
I was at a community meeting where they debated removing all such crosses. They were triggering PTSD for people involved in the crashes. Most accidents occur close to home. Imagine a survivor having to drive past such a cross every day. I don't know on which side I land on the issue.
For safety, the crosses should probably be placed far ahead of the dangerous corner, not distracting drivers at the precise point they most need to pay attention.
One would hope that such crosses instead prompt folks to change such intersections so that they will prompt fewer deaths. Maybe then we can have a rule: if we rebuild the road and we see a drop in deaths, then maybe we can remove the sign with crosses. Better yet, replace the intersection with a bus-only, bicycle-only, or rail as public transit, and then that set of crosses is permanently retired.
Sometimes there isn't much you can do. One I grew up near is a T intersection, between three farm fields. The road that butts into the other crests a hill, and the other road is right behind the crest of that hill, about 20-30 meters. There is a T intersection sign on the hill before you reach the top, but some people didn't see it or heed it. If you're following the speed limit with a dry road, it's probably safe even if you ignore the sign. But if you're speeding and miss the sign, you might t-bone somebody on the other road, or crash into the field behind it. I think the people that died there went into the field, but I'm not sure.
Perhaps they could install some sort of blinking warning light on top of the hill and maybe joyriding teenagers would heed that warning, or maybe not. Otherwise I think you'd have to cut through the hill or move the roads completely, either of which there probably isn't much money for.
Traffic control devices that "alert" drivers and rely on their choice to slow down are pointless IMO. Better to make it almost impossible to drive at an unsafe speed without ruining your car, removing the choice.
Rounding off the corners of four productive farm fields is not going to be easy/cheap/popular, especially in areas where large farm equipment needs to use the highway too. And a 200m speed zone will not be respected by much of anyone.
Traffic calming measures is how you tackle things like that. Adding a sharpish S-curve to the roads approaching the T should remove enough speed to make it safer. Won't even need a sign.
A surprise chicane, without even a sign, on a road with a history of speeding cars. What could possibly go wrong?
This also seems to be farm country. Converting productive fields to non-productive traffic calming structures would be about as popular as banning pickup trucks.
It'd not be a surprise chicane. It'd be an obviously visible one. If you're driving in a way where that'd cause accidents you should have your license revoked.
The counterintuitive thing to do is to make roads "feel" unsafe to make them safe.
A example of this (here done for laugh) is [0], where a single lane muddy curvy hillside road has a speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph).
The point I would like to make here is that on a street like this is it impossible to joyride and even with low visibility intersections the risk of a T-bone or a fatal crash is minuscule.
This particular example is a strawman of the problem: there are many reasons why most roads cannot be like this, it is just an example of "If the drivers have to pay attention they will pay attention"
In the british countryside there are roads barely much better than that with similar speed limits. It's not good, you see people driving some crazy speeds having to brake super hard and then reverse to a passing place when they come up against a tractor.
Rural areas don't normally get plowed. Can you imagine the expense of plowing all of USAs rural roads. An alternative is a little swerve that requires slowing down.
Really? You think the highways through the flyover states just pile up with snow all winter? All those mountain passes that connect east and west? They are in fact a higher priority than any urban street. A fleet of double-lane plows speeding down a prairie highway is a sight to see.
Or it is an owned term used by people in such areas (me) when people on the coasts lecture us how things are in our own backyard. By using it we hold a mirror to those with such attitudes re rural areas.
as someone who grew up in a rural area with lots of snow, this is false. The roads absolutely get plowed, just at a lower priority than the main highways.
Not to mention that in such areas its fairly common for locals to own their own plow attachments for their trucks (at least that was my experience in rural MN).
There are a few rural roads that don't get plowed. They have big "Enter at your own risk" signs, often in the best of conditions you need 4 wheel drive (all wheel drive will work, but if you don't understand the difference don't attempt it) to get through them at best.
The vast majority of rural roads get plowed. Everyone who lives in a rural area has at least one plowed route from their driveway to the rest of the world.
Sounds like the prudent way of handling your example T-intersection is to rebuild it so it is no longer a T-intersection, or to move it in a way that forces people to slow down (e.g. by turning it 30 degrees, with curves leading into it, or by setting up a roundabout, or by moving it into a position where you see the crossing road more easily).
Curves before intersections are evil for bicycles. They create unanticipated moving blind spots for drivers, blind spots than can hide a bicycle approaching on the cross street.
If they go to that effort why not, you know, fix the intersection/road? TBH now that I'm driving in the UK there's all sorts of weird inconsistencies while driving/the roads, but their attitude to it seems to be that it's fine.
I'd just love it if roundabout signs posted before the entrance showed:
* The lane starting from the left, that you need to be in to get to a certain exit
* Number of lanes/exit
Atm it's a bunch of guesswork involving:
* Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because THEY'RE COVERED BY CARS OH HOW DID WE NOT THINK OF THIS
* Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because they're so faded because they haven't been painted in 5-10 years
> If they go to that effort why not, you know, fix the intersection/road?
It's several orders of magnitudes different amounts of effort. Putting up a cross can be done one person in an hour. Fixing a road or intersection is months of work for tens of people,several machines, tonnes of material. Source: I've worked on making several dangerous intersection less dangerous
I guess I worded that badly, I more meant "surely a number of white crosses on an intersection, and the deaths of several people is enough to take action and rework the intersection". It's a failing of a government/council to have several people die at a junction that's clearly dangerous and then decide to do nothing about it.
Economics/value of human lives at play, I guess...
I had assumed that every city I've ever lived in was doing the rest of the work too, sending out engineers to asses the reasons for the higher than average deaths and making changes like adding stop lights, clearing anything obstructing people's view, or adjusting speed limits. Seems defeatist (or more cynically, exploitative) to just throw up a sign and extract more money from speeders.
I mean, I want to know when I'm on a road that's got problems, so it's useful for that much I guess, but we kind of have that already in form of the roadside memorial (Descansos) trend that crept north from Mexico and Texas, If a road merits a "safety corridor" sign changes should be being made, otherwise you risk an incentive to build dangerous roads or to do nothing more about them in order to make more money on traffic tickets.
Worth noting that up to a point, removing obstructions makes roads more dangerous. When the street is a complex environment with many obstructions, trees, and/or points of conflict, people drive slow because it feels dangerous to go fast and are therefore less likely to kill or maim.
The most dangerous roadways are what Strong Towns (article source) refers to as a stroad, which are characterized by many, wide lanes, with frequent turnoffs and other points of conflict. They make drivers feel safe, and so they go fast (regardless of speed limit) and kill people. There is a lot more nuance there that is valuable to learn about, but at the moment, it is really difficult to build safe streets, and even fix unsafe streets, in North America.
There's a lot of inertia in the system to design that which gets approved from above, as the article says, rather than to solve local issues locally. You can definitely do it - there are examples across the different states of various design choices - but federal funding may be contingent on following the existing rules.
This relates to a general issue with society(in the US, and to varying extents in other industrialized countries) that has gradually crept up over time: in the post-war period, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy was normalized across many institutions. The rules were necessarily kept simple and strict, using a small amount of data, so that they could be followed accurately. When an exception was needed you talked to an appropriate contact and hoped you were listened to. It was under this system that you got things like the interstates, redlining and urban renewal projects, because there was arbitrary power to decide what was built where and all you had to pass to get a shovel-ready project was a routine checklist.
Then computerization took over and every bureaucracy started adding more complex data models and rulesets. More choices appeared, forms got bigger, more rounds of approvals were added and everyone lost track of who to talk to when things went wrong. You are more likely to be addressed as a categorical minority(e.g. gender or ethnicity) but aren't allowed to be singularly exceptional because there's too much automation in the way.
And when we look at the state of road infrastructure now there's absolutely a case of that phenomenon: The design premise remains locked in "first design for cars at speed" and then other modes are the exceptions that are harder to access: you have to make exceptions to have less parking space, exceptions to add bike paths, exceptions to try a different intersection design and so forth. Major cities are undergoing reform to a lot of these rules, but at varying rates and levels of pessimization. Once you have an established rule, it's not a career-ender to follow it blindly, so you have to take a risk to not follow it.
It feels like in every American city that I've lived in, there was at least one "dead man's curve" that locals would tell me about. In some places, like up in the mountains, there were entire stretches of road that only consisted of such dangerous curves.
Wtf? They put up a sign saying it was a safety corridor, but then didn’t bother to actually add it to the list of safety corridors, and they are surprised that police officers get it wrong?
And the liberal response is to decrease the speed for a road that was previously 45mph, down to 30mph. Of course, the road is perfectly straight, downhill, has a center turn lane, and a multiuse pathway to the side. There's absolutely no reason for 30mph, other than for enhanced revenue generation aka cop theft..
Basically the city I lived in is going anti-car, which would be cool... if it weren't for ALSO de-prioritizing bicycling, busses, and sidewalks. Basically, it's anti-car and laggard to non-caring about alternate choices.
note: i am a leftist. Cars need reduced, significantly. But that also means converting roads to trails, making friendlier bicycling/walking areas, better and free public transit. Basically it'd be improving society at all levels upward - from a pollution, transit, AND poverty position. Which, in the case of the US neoliberal "you will suffer", well, won't really happen except in actual leftist enclaves.
> Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph.https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve...
And this understates the difference, because at lower speed those collisions are also much less likely to occur at all.
If you could systematically reduce the speed on all urban/suburban streets to no more than 20 mph (actual driving speed, not posted limit), it would be a huge safety win for humans living in those places.
It would also make the environment much calmer, quieter, and less stressful.
Wow Americans really have tough bones don't they. In drivers ed, here in Europe students are still being taught that the fatality rate for pedestrians hit by a car at a speed of 70 kph or more is 100 percent, and people here drive fast
> If you could systematically reduce the speed on all urban/suburban streets to no more than 20 mph (actual driving speed, not posted limit), it would be a huge safety win for humans living in those places.
What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?
Furthermore, is safety the highest priority, or is it balanced with other concerns, including road efficiency?
If safety trumps all other priorities, why don’t we just eliminate roads altogether. We can mandate that everyone wear inflatable sumo suits, assign a personal “safety monitor” to every individual, responsible for ensuring they do not make unsafe choices, and then monitor the safety monitors to make sure they’re correctly monitoring everyone else.
Or, we can accept that life has risks and that “accidental” death isn’t actually the worst thing on a societal level.
>What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?
What does "attrition" mean? People killed in car crashes? How could that not be a net loss? Your second sentence says "furthermore" to introduce the idea of the cost of safety measures, so that seems to imply the first sentence isn't considering the cost of safety measures.
In general I think society is based on the idea that everyone's life has inherent worth, and thus their rights should be protected. If we start designing systems based on the idea that some people's lives have negative worth and if they die it'll be beneficial society, that flies in the face of the idea of inherent worth. It seems to me that if society says certain people's lives have negative worth so their lives don't need to be protected because their death will benefit society, that could progress into society saying that it's ok to actively kill those people.
Yes, the US does today in fact actively kill some people with the death penalty. Though it does have a lot of checks in the process to avoid making the determination wrongly. It's a very expensive and thorough process. I'm against the death penalty because it goes against the idea of the inherent value of human life. If you live in a society where jails are very primitive and can't stop determined prisoners from escaping, then the death penalty could make sense to prevent prisoners escaping and then hurting others. We have jails that can hold people though.
You’re right, mass use of roads for everyday transportation is incredibly inefficient in almost every way: Outrageously high construction/maintenance costs, outrageously large space requirements for roads and parking at both ends, high resource and environmental costs for the cars and driving per se, high costs in human health from a sedentary lifestyle and plenty of local pollution, high costs in human time spent driving around in cars, etc.
We’d be much better off if we re-planned the whole society to switch as many trips as possible to other methods of transportation. This would require changes in land-use laws, a shift in investment toward mass transit and pedestrian/bicycle infrastructure, etc.
Making the roads we already have safer would be a good start though.
The US has those lists already. There is plenty of data, and once in a while something useful is done about one of the worst places.
What is lacking is any learning. Despite widespread knowledge of what is wrong nobody does anything about it for the future. We keep designing new roads with all the known bad features. We keep allowing people to get and keep their drivers license with minimal training. I'm sure traffic engineers who study this stuff have a better list than me, but the above two (or variations thereof) will be near the top of theirs. So long as we don't act on what we already know nothing will change.
I don’t know how you’re even comparing American roads to European roads. I spent 3 months in Europe and all I took away from that is how well planned and well thought out American roads are. I just took them for granted.
Perhaps you're focusing a lot on the roads themselves, and less on what's around the roads, or even the deliberate lack of road.
More often than not EU designs will put main roads apart from the activity centers, and have shared ways or slower ways inside dense areas. From a car POV it is subobtimal and ill thought out, while from people's point of view it's pretty great in general.
Of course making roads more pleasant and safe so that half of the would-be drivers become walkers or cyclists is one of the best things you can do you improve the expertof the remaining drivers.
Do you mean the roads are well planned for car trafic or for pedestrian/bicycle trafic? What I usually hear from visitors in our Swedish town is that it's much safer to bike than in their home town. Areas built after 1970 or so was planned for pedestrian first, car second. This has resulted in very few trafic accidents. You can get almost everywhere outside of the city center without sharing road with cars, only crossing at dedicated bicycle crossings or bridges over/under the road.
The most dangerous situation I can think of would still be where cars cross a bicycle road after doing a left or right turn in a crossing and not checking for trafic on the bicycle road.
Just spent 3 months traveling across the United States and then 3 months traveling across Europe and now I’m super curious what part of Europe you visited and what part of the US you are from?
I was in Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and then Italy. I think Denmark and Sweden had the best roads. German autobahns we’re great but getting close to any population center meant I’ll planned junctions showed up again. Not to mention there is no parking anywhere, a real nightmare on a road trip.
My biggest takeaway from Europe was how incredibly well cities were planned for pedestrians vs cars. Obviously these cities were often developed much earlier than US cities and this makes perfect sense.
We got all around Europe (Slovakia to Switzerland to Italy to Austria and back) all without a car. As a US citizen this priority can be frustrating at times because some cities even have no admittance for non-local cars, so you gotta park out of the city and transit in if you don’t have a local plate. But as a US citizen I am incredibly envious of the rail network and the downtown areas which are pedestrian only and entirely devoid of cars.
But also fundamentally we found that just as in states within the US, country to country things were vastly different with road quality. Many Eastern European countries are still weeding out corruption in their political systems and funds allocated for infrastructure are finally making it into public projects, so they often had worse roads and rail systems.
Some extremely old towns or cities might meet this description (and EU has plenty of those). Central Naples for example would probably be navigable on a 200-year old map.
Modern metro areas or developed suburbs not so much.
Not just that, it's also expectations. Traffic runs on a stack not only of rules, but also of cultural conventions. And both rules and conventions exist not only defining the dos and don'ts for drivers but also defining those of traffic engineers.
When we drive in a different country we know that the driving rules are slightly different. We suspect that the conventions for driving are not quite the same.
But the differences in rules and conventions of road design are mostly invisible. We may notice the most glaring differences like preferring roundabouts vs preferring crossings, but the large majority of those design principle differences, they are so close to invisible that we expect our expectations to still work. But they don't. Everything just feels subtly off, and sometimes there's a large difference standing out and we just declare that badly planned. Even when it's in fact perfectly in line with local expectationsand usage patterns, and works just fine (except for the confused foreigner). We notice a few standout differences and then blame every bit of traffic badness we encounter nonetheless on the few differences we consciously notice. The parts that work well are usually completely invisible, because traffic, in our perception, only exists when it's bad.
Rules/conventions on the design side exist for and can differ in just about every aspect, down to draining angle of road surface (do you drain symmetrically or to one side? Do you switch to draining to the inside in a curve? What about softer curves, sharper curves? A consistent threshold is very valuable, but if one country has a different consistent threshold than the other it feels "wrong" to everybody cross-driving even if no side is objectively better). Or the general shape of curves, some places have strict rules for keeping the second derivative of direction as flat as possible, with few, definitive jumps, others prefer a gentleness above all approach.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
But that's the misconception, that car accidents/fatalities are somehow all unique and with a unique solution to be applied individually. In the end almost all of them boil down to the same few root causes: alcohol, speed, no seatbelt, tiredness, bad car maintenance, and a handful of others. So why 1% from 500 things, do you just want to prevent just a few accidents caused by speeding?
You don't need to fix 500 individual incidents but just a bit. You should fix one root cause. If your car won't drive faster than the speed limit for the area or the weather, if it won't drive at all if the driver is inebriated, sleepy, doesn't wear the seat belt properly, etc. then you prevent most of the accidents and fatalities.
So you don't cut 1% from 500 things, you cut all payments for a certain something you don't want.
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 deaths. 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. (I also think it’s pretty easy to think of additional reasons speed might sometimes not be mentioned in the accident report, even when it was a factor, but I don’t have any numbers on that.)
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. 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. (Cars have of course gotten safer, but mostly not through commonsense measures like, “make them smaller” or “make them go slower.” And so safety features inside the car are always fighting against our intransigence on those two fronts.)
Size and speed. This is really obvious stuff, if anybody cared.
The problem is also that generally, engineering takes what is best practice for an interstate with speeds in excess of 55 MPH, and then apply it to local roads with driveways where people are trying to cross the street.
Even a street dead ending in a cul-de-sac and no legal steeet parking is often in excess of 30 feet wide. All that width encourages speeding.
> If we regulated automobiles the same way we regulate aircraft, every single automobile would have a speed governor installed.
With regards to airplane speed limits in FAR 91.117, the responsibility is entirely on the pilot. There are no speed governors to prevent the pilot from busting this reg and it’s somewhat common for pilots to struggle with this in their first jet transition.
The situation with cars is that there are posted limits on every public road, so it's not up to the driver, but drivers exceed these limits routinely, anyway, and doing so directly contributes to something like 12,000 deaths per year. The point here is that if anything that obvious and predictable were happening with air travel it would already have been addressed.
The parent comment is presenting a hypothetical of how a similar degree of regulation would look for cars, not saying that airplanes have that specific regulatory mechanism.
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.
If we aren't then you're just measuring the fraction of the population that drives (which is largely a reflection of wealth and demographics) which isn't really a measurement of the safeness of the roads and driving.
We’re talking about people killed trying to move around the place they live. Butt-in-seat hours is a fine way to measure automobile vs automobile stats, but when we’re talking about deaths from transportation, counting only automobile hours is silly. There are various ways to get around a city, and the way you do that hardly matters if it suits the purposes of that trip.
Very mixed ages and completeness of the data in this list [1] but it seems USA is pretty high on death per kilometer (fifth) of those countries that has data on kilometer traveled.
Specifically in the US the limit is 26,000 lbs GVWR without a CDL. That is the gross vehicle rating cannot be over 26,000 lbs, even if it actually weighs less when driven.
I've always assumed that exceeding the GVWR is illegal but searches show conflicting results.
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
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.
I think it's like the difference between balancing on a plank of wood a foot off the ground and one ten feet off the ground. The act is the same, but the perception of risk is way different and the performance would be as well
It's not even about confidence. It's a matter of being in control. When you drive you can do something about whether or not you crash. When you are a passenger in a plane or train you are completely helpless.
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.
Be a passenger in a car with a driver you're unfamiliar with. Lots of people struggle with that and way overestimate the speeds the driver is going at.
>those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause
This is obviously incorrect reasoning for the United States. If countries around the world had statistically similar collision rates, then you would have a point, but this isn't some sort of power law or random distribution. The fact that our fatality rate are so significantly higher than other developed countries, means that there is a reason. It's not random, it's statistically showing us we're doing something very, very wrong
Is it possible the US just has more bigger vehicles? Speed is obviously a huge part, but adding all that extra mass of many super-size me trucks and SUVs with poor visibility seems like it would factor in.
If you’ve studied the subject, the obvious reason is that Americans allow anyone to drive with minimal training. Regardless of past behavior. We even subsidize insurance rates for people who are so bad at driving they are uninsurable.
> But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events
Not only that, but in the case of a plane or train crash, the passengers were completely powerless to do anything about it. So it's a death that's imposed on them by the event.
In a car, the driver has nearly all the agency to do something about it and not be part of a crash. Car crashes don't just suddenly happen to people on a random distribution.
Many of them are directly the fault of the driver, so you can opt of those (don't drive drunk, sleepy, etc). Many are the fault of other drivers but you could often opt out by paying attention (go watch youtube dashcam car crash videos, it's astonishing the number of crashes where the victim could've avoided it but doesn't do anything). Many are also due to lack of skill (e.g. car slides on an oil slick and driver doesn't know how to control it) which you can opt out by taking car control training. Some are from equipment malfunction which you can also opt out (maintain your car).
I've never owned or driven a car, yet they're around me every day, putting my life at risk (both short-term, that they may crash into me; and long-term, since I'm forced to breathe their emissions)
Whilst pedestrians should avoid risky behaviour, we're still largely powerless; e.g. I recently had an encounter with a motorist reversing out of their driveway without looking, and I've twice had motorists drive down the pavement (sidewalk) towards me (once when the road was water-logged, the other time they were trying to bypass traffic).
At the same time, it's not possible to eliminate all risk from life. Even if all cars disappeared overnight, pedestrians are still getting killed by cyclists for example. And with cars gone there would be a huge increase in cycling, thus cycling-involved deaths.
In such a world (where cars disappeared) would we be having this thread about a need to now ban all bicycles?
To some extent there will always be some risk, just need to find ways to minimize it while balancing utility.
I was mostly responding to your point about agency and powerlessness; and the implicit assumption that 'car crash victim' ⊂ 'car driver'.
As for a hypothetical bicycle ban in a counterfactual universe, I find the premise too uninteresting to form an opinion about.
I'm far more interested in this world; and don't much care for vacuous syllogisms like 'killing is bad; X kills; therefore X is bad', when there's more to be gleaned from measurement, comparison and statistics. For example, off the top of my head:
- How many are killed by cars compared to bicycles (say, per person-km)?
- How likely is a car crash to kill someone compare to a bicycle crash?
- What is the impact on life-expectancy from driving versus cycling (e.g. sedentary activity versus exercise)?
- How does the throughput of bicycles compare to that of cars?
- How does the infrastructure cost of bicycles compare to that of cars?
- How does the environmental impact of bicycles compare to that of cars?
- etc.
I find these to be far more interesting questions than trivial binaries like 'do cars kill?' (yes; so what?), or 'do bicycles kill?' (yes; so what?).
Similarly, the statistics above can inform a whole spectrum of decisions and interventions that can be made; again, off the top of my head:
- The setting of speed limits
- The setting of road-worthiness criteria
- The setting of test and license requirements
- The layout and features of infrastructure (sight-lines, speed bumps, roundabouts, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and their sequencing, etc.)
- The classification and permitted uses of roads (e.g. one-way systems, bus lanes, segregated or integrated cycle lanes, etc.)
- etc.
Again, these are seem far more interesting than strawman cliches like "should we ban X?" (which, as far as I can see, you're the one bringing up? I certainly never mentioned it)
When a scheduled aviation passenger plane crashes.
GA (General Aviation, "private pilots") flights crash all the time, people in them even die most days. If it happened in their catchment it'd probably make your local TV news, but it won't be their main story and it won't be a national headline unless somebody "important" died. A few hundred people die this way, in the US, in a normal year.
The reasons are much the same as for private car ownership:
- The private pilot cuts corners. They cut corners on maintenance and fuel, they cut corners on training, they cut corners on procedures. So their plane may fail more often than it should, or when one thing goes wrong there's less slack left than there should be.
- The private pilot is subject to very relaxed medical requirements, especially in the US. So too often these pilots will become disabled in flight, and they're usually alone or with a non-pilot so if this happens they're probably dead.
- The private pilot's skills are poor, they're subject to minimal day-to-day oversight and few of them seek real development of their skills once qualified. This means when things go wrong the pilot is less likely to successfully recover from a situation which was salvageable.
- "Mission mindset" easily creeps in for private pilots. Particularly for weather, but also for loss of daylight, private pilots often have a purpose (e.g. "Get back in time for Sarah's wedding on Saturday" or "Fit in one more trip to the lake before winter") which causes them to make unwise decisions to press on into poor weather, deteriorating daylight, etc.
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.
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.
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:
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.
"It could have been much worse" seems to be a pretty common response to a few things these days. And even that single survey you point to... Many were seeking more money or career growth, or were laid off.
California and Florida couldn't have been further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet the age-adjusted mortalities weren't that far apart [1].
Absent a feasible zero-COVID strategy, which for most countries was never in the books due to their geographical situation, lockdowns have been found to have virtually no impact on reducing the spread of COVID.
It turns out following the lead of an authoritarian communist state on the COVID response, by totally abrogating civil liberties with community quarantines, i.e. lockdowns, wasn't a great idea.
As for voluntary social distancing, it has been found to impose more measurable costs for 89% of the population than it reduces through mitigating risks of contracting COVID.
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.
How about two states? As mentioned above, Florida and California couldn't be further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet age-adjusted mortality was about the same.
However you can also choose various European countries that avoided masking children and minimized school disruption. France and UK for starters, but also all the Nordic countries. Sweden being quite different from the other Nordic countries, but all of them being consistent in avoiding school disruption or masking children.
Most of Europe does not recommend vaccinating young children either.
Sweden had a higher death rate than its neighbours combined. Also just like Denmark no very large, densely populated cities.
Paris proper is 2mln people squeezed into a 100km^2 city. Greater Paris is 10mln at a definitely urban density. It's no wonder they had larger death rates and this is a apples to oranges comparison.
All the European countries that you listed have good public heath care systems, especially when compared with the US situation. That’s the main reason they had less deaths per capita, not their lockdown policies.
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.
I agree, it was definitely harder the second time with Delta. People broke the rules the first time as well, or mistakes happened, but the few breakouts weren't so difficult to contain.
It worked the same as it worked on personal level too. At the very beginning you can just lock yourself inside and there is basically no chance to get sick. But what then?
If you could just lock everybody in the world for a month you could basically get rid of all the infectious diseases. However you can't. So lock down only helps to win time.
After you win your time you really need to know what to do with it - e.g. effective vaccine is created in this time.
Otherwise you just delay inevitable and that is it.
Our government was pretty careful not to put blame on the people honestly, it's really me that's blaming the people (I'm not the one that's downvoted you though).
The first time round wasn't the main thing that NZ basically shut itself off from the world? I was generally supportive of the sort of measures much of the world implemented restrict the spread of covid (widespread testing, masks, vaccinations, encouraging WFH, etc) however to me both NZ and China's approaches didn't seem feasible for most of the world.
So if I understand correctly NZ had a short hard lockdown to reduce cases to zero and then maintained it by severely restricting and controlling arrivals from abroad. I live in a Central European country that simply cannot seal itself off from the world like NZ did, we have open borders within the EU via Schengen (a good thing IMO) but there's very little chance of every country in the Schengen area agreeing to follow this model. This means virus carriers would inevitably enter the country, cause an outbreak of cases, necessitating repeated lockdowns and the public would quickly rebel against the measures.
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?
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.
Yes, that's news about Florida and Donald Trump. Now do New York and California. The most populous states were likely over-reporting deaths.
By the way, despite the rhetoric, states were getting money from the federal government for reporting a COVID death. There was literally a per-death payment. If that is not an incentive to over-report (despite the usual bloviating from Republicans), I don't know what is.
> Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Hospitals - Section 3710 of the CARES Act directs the Secretary to increase the weighting factor of the assigned Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) by 20 percent for an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 discharged during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) period.
Hospitals get to charge Medicare/Medicaid a 20% surcharge for COVID patients and COVID deaths.
Note that this is deaths and patients who test positive for COVID while at the hospital, not deaths/patients whose reason for being in the hospital is COVID. At one point, those were all counted as "COVID hospitalizations/deaths" respectively by the CDC.
Given that COVID tests are tuned to have high sensitivity and (comparatively) low specificity, all a hospital needs to do to get their hands on that money is just give out a lot of COVID tests, and avoid re-testing the false positives. COVID tests are cheap, and to patients, it looks like the hospital being extra careful about keeping them safe from COVID.
That doesn't pay hospitals 20% more, the MS-DRG weighting factor is used to calculate the resources needed to care for the patient. This document is simply acknowledging the complexity and cost of COVID-19 care.
I don't expect anyone who has swallowed the pandemic conspiracy theories to change their mind. Perhaps someone who is reading along will gain insights into how misinformation starts and is spread.
And that MS-DRG premium means that they get $0 extra? Maybe it's less than 20% extra, and maybe it's more, but I certainly doubt that it's $0.
It sounds a lot like you were presented with evidence that people, particularly hospital administrators, were incentivized to pump the numbers of COVID cases in the US, and dismissed it as a "conspiracy theory."
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The fact of the matter is that people respond to incentives. Whether consciously or not. When you pay people to hand out COVID diagnoses, you are going to get a lot of COVID diagnoses. Particularly, you are going to get people who accept false positives as true positives.
Note that this doesn't mean that they over-counted cases in total: the US likely still under-counted cases due to all the people who never took a test when they were sick. They just under-counted a lot less than many other countries, thanks in part to the incentives being in favor of producing positive test results. Past epidemics have had reporting rates well under 10% in countries with good surveillance.
In China, the incentives are different. Chinese administrators are heavily incentivized to have fewer COVID diagnoses. This means much more draconian lockdown policies (which reduce the number of true positives for COVID), but it also means that they will accept negative test results (true and false negatives) without much question and try very hard to eliminate false positives.
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IMO the most likely story ("conspiracy theory") is:
1. The US and Western Europe, which had similar disease management policies and similar levels of contact between people, likely had very similar true positive rates of cases.
2. China probably had a lower true positive rate due to using more serious procedures to reduce R.
3. Due to co-morbidities (Americans being fat), cases in the US were on average more serious than cases in the EU, meaning more infected people going to the hospital and more people taking tests. On its own, this raised the reporting rate in the US.
4. Hospital systems and doctors in the US followed their incentives and over-reported cases (still under-counting the actual number of total cases by a factor of at least 2). What could have been "you have a mild cold, go home and get some rest" turned into "better take a COVID test just to be safe," and if that test was positive, it was reported as a case.
5. Hospital systems and doctors in China followed their incentives and under-reported cases (under-counting total cases by a factor of 50+). Things that could be COVID cases, but were unlikely, would get swept under the rug without a test.
6. Hospital systems in the EU ended up somewhere in between the US and China in terms of their surveillance rate.
This logically explains the variance in the reported case numbers between countries that did the same things, and also explains why a rational person could be skeptical of official numbers in certain countries. But sure, offering a narrative that lines up better with reality than the official narrative is a "conspiracy theory." As we all know, the official narrative is always correct, even when it is "there are WMDs in Iraq" or "smoking has no adverse heath effects."
Making the statement "The most populous states were likely over-reporting deaths" is alarmist to say the least.
Upon challenge, dialed back to "over-reported cases" or even "under-counted a lot less than many other countries" or "[didn't] try very hard to eliminate false positives" (which is a very strange accusation for different reasons?), still sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here.
If I remember rightly we even know and have evidence of some of the specific ways in which China did this, such as not counting deaths of people in high-risk groups immediately after being infected with and hospitalized due to Covid as Covid deaths and instead blaming their deaths on some existing health conditions. Whereas the UK for example counted everyone who died reasonably soon after catching Covid as a Covid death.
we don't need to rely on the numbers coming from the CCP to get an estimate of how bad it is in china. what we can do is to rely on the covid count of passengers coming in from China, reported by non-Chinese disease authorities. we have several: south korea, singapore, and taiwan who were taking in chinese travelers at various points of the pandemic. china is a minor contributor to imported cases in these three countries.
If people don't like the China example, they can look at New Zealand or Australia, both of which had tiny fractions of our Covid deaths AND experienced less economic decline AND experienced a drop in suicides during the time.
New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. Australia 1500. The vaccines didn't keep people from dying, they postponed them to the next flu season.
The old and sick will catch covid and die. There is nothing you can do about it. Putting your head in the sand and hoping for a magic bullet to save us - vaccines, masks, lockdowns - just means that the rest of the health system will collapse too. We need to be realistic and prepare for a world in which life expectancy is 10 years lower and we need a lot more hospital beds.
That a simple statement of fact is bait ought to tell you how much of a fantasy world people live in.
The covid vaccines are shit and don't work.
End of story.
The mental gymnastics needed to claim they do fall apart when you compare them to vaccines for any other deadly disease. We don't still have small pox running rampant in countries with 90%+ vaccination rates. No one walks around telling you that having only your face paralyzed by polio is a great out come and a reason why we should vaccinate toddlers. If you get the MMR vaccine you're not told to be happy that you only got one of the three.
We need to move people's minds to the real world where everyone gets covid during flu season, rename it covid season while we're at it, and build a hospital system to solve that problem.
Contradicting hard medical evidence about reduced negative outcomes of the COVID vaccine that the entire medical industry has consensus around is just crank stuff at best.
The vaccines are unreasonably effective given how radically the virus has mutated.
The argument that things had to go this way, that we should just lay down our arms from the outset, throw immunocompromised, children and old folks under the bus, and treat it like "flu season" (which has a vaccine for f's sake!) has bequeathed our massive world-wide (or at least west-wide) gain-of-function laboratory that is bringing powerful new mutations to a geo near you.
Track-and-trace and countless bog-standard public health responses (like requiring masks on planes for f's sake), and yes the occasional lockdown, PLUS the fact that we got lucky on how fast we got vaccines delivering measurable improvement in outcomes, would have been a powerful combo. But it wouldn't have made any money.
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.
Last year the Economist estimated them at about 1.7 million excess mortality. There is extremely strong pressure from the top down to minimize the public death count. The credibility of the party (and Xi personally) relies on their Zero Covid policy being seen as effective. I wouldn't even call it a cover up, there are just no incentives to accurately report and many reasons to downplay aggressively.
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?
Do you support the right of the polio-infected resident of Rockland County (a NYC suburb) to attend tonight’s basketball game? Would you be okay with him shopping at your grocery store, standing in line with you at the cash register?
No. There is always some sort of infectious disease going on. Even before COVID-19, thousands of people died every year from influenza and other respiratory diseases (including other corona viruses). This is not a valid reason for imposing restrictions and mandates.
Sure, not rhinovirus but definitely polio. Surely you aren't proposing that anyone ever tried to limit free assembly for run-of-the-mill germs. Point being, your rights exist in tension with public health; they are not absolute.
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.
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.)
The most interesting phenomenon I noticed was how unquestionably loyal many places were to the mask mandates, yet kept all their windows shut even on totally nice days out.
I was in a gym that required everyone to wear a mask (yes, while working out / on a treadmill / etc), but all the large windows were shut, and nobody seemed to care or notice. No staff, no patrons, nobody. So I walked around and opened all the windows. And this wasn't March 2020. This was like end of 2021.
I'm not claiming to be some pandemic savant, nor getting into a mask debate, but what shocked me was the "group psychosis" on masking at the expense of proven and incredibly easy mitigation efforts like opening windows!
In my house at least I have a UV light in my central HVAC that is supposed to be replaced every five years. Maybe it is different for commercial buildings, but commercial buildings also tend to have professional maintenance.
I don't want UV sterilized air. The war on germs is one we can't win. If everything is sterilized then our immune systems will only weaken and when we do come across a flu virus outdoors it will us 10x harder and potentially kill us.
The "fun" part is that hydroelectric dam failures are even more localized and in many cases much more deadly, but people generally don't remember them either.
As far as I can tell the single most deadly power plant disaster in history was the 1975 Banquiao Dam failure[0] that killed 26000 to 240000 people. Yet when you try to google "most deadly power plant disasters" you'll mostly get Chernobyl with 100 attributed deaths.
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.
> The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths,
Are you sure you're not discounting that figure because it's contrary to your conclusion? Very few people have ever died as the indirect long-term result (let alone by direct immediate result) of nuclear energy accidents, even according the highest estimates from histrionic ideologues like Greenpeace.
I'm overall not anti-nuclear or anything. The lasting cultural, ecological, and economic damage from severe nuclear disasters is _pretty_ significant though and we need to do a better job ensuring they don't happen if we wanna restore peoples trust in the idea of nuclear power.
Better job? How many people have died due to nuclear energy accidents? If you consider deaths per megawatt, or most any other standard, the nuclear agencies are doing a fantastic job. How low does the risk have to be?
The relative risk of nuclear to coal is unbelievably low yet there is still this irrational ability to weigh risk/reward benefits correctly.
That's what this topic is about -- the standard for nuclear is high (as it should be), but we take the status quo of fossil fuels without a second thought, even though it's immeasurably worse in almost every way.
Less than a third of the area that's been ruined forever by renewable power generation's "business as usual", indeed less than the area flooded by the Three Gorges Dam alone.
But what if you took the contaminated soil around Chernobyl and shot it tens of kilometers straight up into the air, so all the radioactive isotopes get taken away by the wind and aren't a local problem any more.
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...
The banning of assault rifles is because it’s easy and doesn’t detract from peoples lives at all. Assault rifles are for assault and we don’t need more assault. So why have them? Because a few people think it’s cool to own?
Pistols and other Guns aren’t very effective at stopping deaths, but they’re perceived to be good defense, so banning them en mass is less palatable.
NYC banned pistols once because it was often the source of gang violence - and violence went down. Smart legislation used to address statistic use not headlines. But any ban will save lives and make people safer (and feel safer) so that’s why politicians today are clawing for whatever legislation they can pass.
Let's see how a place like Romania manage it - lots of bears in the Carpathian Mountains, _very_ strict gun laws.
Friends were traveling to the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfăgărășan just for kicks and halfway through they got SMS alerts "Bears in the vicinity" even though they were visiting foreigners. They actually saw the bears on the road itself, but a quickly dispatched van with park rangers arrived at the scene, mostly to control the traffic and protect the bears from all the people in the death machines, as well as tourists "making selfies with the bears" ... after some minutes the bears tired of the situation and left the road.
I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.
Like in tech sometimes its worth it to implement a big refactor that would enable faster / better code, even though it might lead to some edge cases that need to be addressed. Its tricky of course but such a _massive_ win as gun laws just can't be ignored I think.
It's like complaining that if you change your lead pipes to copper / plastic is too much work, and who cares if some people die of lead poisoning now and again, but leaks are much easier to fix with lead ... and you already have so much stock of pipes just not worth it ...
P.S.
I'm truly sorry if this leads to a flame work and I know its a sensitive topic, but from a European perspective the threat of violent uprising has always been such a weird thing to put as a "benefit" having rifles around. Like if your system is designed in such a way that violence is a "check" on something ... is it really a good system? Like sure governors feel a bit scared of loonies with rifles killing them for their transgressions, but wouldn't it be better that people actually rely on safer and more gentle political transitions rather than coup d'état? And I don't think gun laws ever prevented disgruntled constituents to kill government officials - e.g. Abe in Japan.
You do realize the grizzly isn't the European brown bear right?
European brown bears are cuddly lovable puppies by comparison, grizzlies are murder machines with an attitude which can outrun and out climb you.
>I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.
This is a prime example of being confidently wrong and making moral judgments from ignorance. It's easy to put down "those people" living in the mountains when you've never been there. It's even easier to make laws that kill them since they are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them and you'll never have to see them.
Federalism is a good thing, and not just when you can smoke weed.
I love hiking into remote areas, including "bear country". I have seen black bears and grizzly bears while hiking.
You do not need assault rifles, this sounds silly and over the top. You just need to be aware of your surroundings, follow the rules and have a bear spray : https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm
A bear charging at you at full tilt gives you all of half a second to get it with the 9 meter range of bear spray. That's roughly how long it takes you to hit two keyboard keys in a row.
This is such a ridiculously specific situation most people won’t ever be in.
It’s such a small portion of the population that would have such a need for a gun that it can be handled as a special case in laws. No reason the rest of society can’t be safe.
I think its rather arrogant to think that we have perfected government to the point that we can willingly disarm ourselves of one of the most effective forms of defense...
I think it’s arrogant to think a few privately owned guns can actually compare to the massive armory of the US government.
Also, it’s funny that when people actually fight back against government abuse (George Floyd protests) the gun owning demographic seems to find it wrong to be violent despite claiming guns are meant to be used against the government.
It's been shown time and time again that you do not need to, nor do you go toe to toe with the "entire armory of the US government."
It's possible to want to ability to defend yourself while also thinking violence for the sake of violence isn't right. The issue most people had with the protests were that so many innocent people got caught in the cross hairs.
You obviously have no idea what an assault rifle is, just made an assumption from the name.
An assault rifle is a normal rifle that because of a few cosmetic features looks like a military gun. None of those features make it more deadly than any other gun.
Semi auto high caliber rifle capable of holding a magazine over 10 rounds. Happy? Don't split hairs.
Actually, I'm not sure why I get sucked into these discussions time after time. Nothing will ever change without a constitutional amendment. The left needs to make its peace with that.
Any other gun is still plenty deadly that my point stands.
But a lot of headlines talk about banning assault rifles so I used that term.
There’s a somewhat valid claim that pistols are good for self defense because they’re easy to carry. Will anyone use it for self defense? Statistically no. But the perception is there. Rifles, cosmetically altered or not do not have such a feature.
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.
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.
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].
As the OP said, other countries look on with bemusement at people arguing with a straight face that an anecdote involving one gun owner shooting another gun owner after he'd killed three people with an assault weapon widely and legally available locally proves that a policy of encouraging universal gun ownership is better than alternatives. Not least because some of said countries have four orders of magnitude fewer per capita gun deaths
Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter
…who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone.
People want to prevent violence not punish it more.
I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.
That mindset feels reminiscent of the ever-increasing size of vehicles on the road. You avoid the smaller vehicle for fear of being run off the road (or worse) by an oversized truck and so instead of the subcompact you go with the midsize, then crossover, then SUV, ad infinitum.
Also, we’ve already been incarcerating people at an alarming rate.* It seems like there’s something more fundamental being neglected — that’s compelling Americans to use our (abundance of) weapons more readily.
As others have mentioned, we're already one of the leading countries in terms of imprisoning people. You're saying the gun violence problem is therefore because we don't imprison enough people?
What % of the population do you think needs to be imprisoned before we recognize that maybe its guns that are the problem?
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.
The entire US civilian small arms industry is tiny. The largest publicly traded gun company has a stock market capitalization of about 0.05% of Apple. The entire gun industry has an annual revenue of only $70 billion, which doesn't even register as a significant line item in our $20 trillion GDP. Any political influence the industry has is more to do with cultural factors than with size.
I think there's a hint of truth in his supposition though. The gun lobby enjoys significant popular support from the general public who want to buy guns, but they also receive support from the gun industry that want to sell guns. The intersection of these two interests is protecting Americans' right to buy guns from American gun manufactures. In this, the gun lobby has been effective.
However the gun lobby has been generally ineffective and uncaring when it comes to protecting Americans' right to import guns from other countries. Collectors like importing guns, but American gun manufacturers have little interest in that. For instance, the NRA doesn't seem very upset about the Norinco ban, even 20+ years ago when the political/strategic situation between America and China was not on the minds of many. Another example is 922(r) compliance concerning domestic/foreign part counts; notorious among gun collectors as inane, arbitrary and pointless. Yet there doesn't seem to be much drive from the American gun lobby to get this fixed.
It takes very little money to buy your politicians. Tens of thousands of dollars to sway their opinion, a few hundred thousand to buy it outright. The gun companies own a lot of your politicians.
He wants to talk about black on black crime. As opposed to white on white crime which is not talked about as separate issue. Because, most murder by large number are among people who know each other - are friends, family, do business. And those groups tend to have same race.
TIL that people think "black on black crime" has any meaning. I would have thought he wanted to talk about gang violence, which is probably #3 or #4 on the list of gun death causes, behind domestic violence and maybe accidents (with suicides eclipsing both of these).
That's an interesting point, so I did some digging. I'm using 2007 as the reference year, because I can't find any more up-to-date sources on domestic murder.
There were 18,361 total homicides in the US in 2007, 10,129 of which were committed with firearms.
There were 1,975 gang homicides in 2007, or ~10.8% of all homicides [1] I can't find anything contemporaneous, but a 1995 study said that 94%-96% of gang homicides used a firearm. Using the lower number, that would mean 1,857 of those were firearm homicides, or 18.3% of all firearm homicides.
There were 2,340 domestic murders in 2007 [2] (the header says female victims of domestic violence, but that stat is for both genders). [4] says that in 2002 54% of domestic violence homicides were carried out with a firearm, so that would be about 1,264 or ~12.4% of all firearm homicides.
Neither of those numbers is isolated to firearms; I couldn't find any studies specifically scoped to firearms. I also didn't dig very hard into how they get those numbers.
Estimates on accidental deaths put them at ~400 a year. [3]
CDC data for 2007 says there were ~17k suicides with firearms in 2007 (these aren't counted in the homicide numbers above).
Gang violence does seem like it has more firearm homicides than domestic violence, but not by a staggering margin, and it may have flipped since 2007.
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.
Personally find the premise of the article odd. I don’t dislike public transit cause I’m worried I’ll die taking it. I am worried I’ll be mugged, and I know it will be unpleasantly crowded and take a long time.
As for why we find the crashes surprising it’s probably because they’re rare, ie we think of these as safe in this respect, so are surprised when a death occurs. If anything a feather in the cap of public transit.
It was at a crossing that didn't have warning lights or crossing gates. Which is a known issue and has been for many decades.
We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much. Even if saving lives and preventing injuries was the only priority, there are better ways to spend money than improving railroad crossings in rural areas.
The current mileage death rate for motor vehicles is around 1.5 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Marginal improvements in that have to be cheap to be cost-effective, there are many ways to save lives and prevent injuries in America if you have money to spend.
>We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much.
The fact that we as a society have raised a few generations that cannot have adult discussions about "how much is too much" except in small groups, behind closed doors and off the record (and when such discussions leak the conclusions are always vilified no matter what they were) is going to hamper us for at least the next 70yr at least.
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.
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.
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.
Kia had a major recall fairly recently for this too. I think the fix was adding a single fuse but they recommended parking outside until then.
> a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either
A lot of EVs have batteries under the car which I think was the point. Though I can't see it being a huge issue or I would've heard a lot of stories of people being cooked by now.
You realize a gas car contains a tank full of highly flammable and explosive liquid that it uses in small quantity to create small explosions thousands of time in a second?
Of course they catch fire. what's surprising is that they don't do it more, but that's the result of ~150 years of evolution.
> 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.
I used to think this was very dumb and irrational. but eventually I came to think that the statistical death toll doesn't capture the full impact of a problem. how people feel about it is just as important, if not moreso.
yes, driving is pretty high on list of dangerous things we do. but in my whole life I've only known two people that died in crashes and one who was lucky to survive. I take appropriate precautions, of course, but it isn't something that I think about every time I get in a car. on the other hand, if a few guys flew another plane into a skyscraper, I'd be thinking about that every time I got on a plane for a while, even though I'd still be way more likely to die on my way to the airport. doesn't really make sense, but that's how humans are.
the things that make us happy, sad, or fearful are pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. it's not unreasonable to optimize for the things people actually care about. or at least it's not less reasonable than a more "scientific" approach. either way, your goal is to improve the lives of a bunch of intelligent apes.
Really strange. You've known two people who died in crashes. You've probably drove by multiple bad crash sites. And yet you perceive a danger you have only seen on TV or Internet as more important. Nothing here about you in particular, of course — all of this is just "normal".
Makes one think, is it just how humans are or is it actually an example of how powerful is professional media?
To play devil's advocate, we already employ hundreds of thousands of "cities, planners, and civil engineers" continuously to battle these distributed deaths.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
In economics, this is called catastrophe aversion: as a society, do we prefer accidental deaths to be "clumped together" or not (the total number of people killed being equal). Though the question is very important in regulating certain industries that can produce major accidents, we don't really know much about social preferences in this regard (the limited studies undertaken so far suggest that Americans and Europeans do not want regulators to adopt catastrophe-averse policies for safety risks). For an approachable introduction to this question, see [1].
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.
If a careless driver crashes into me, I've been wronged by an individual who made some bad decisions. If a self-driving car hits me, I've been wronged by a corporation that probably cut corners and sold a shitty product for profit. I have some sliver of sympathy for the culprit in the first case, but zero sympathy in the second.
10-15% of car accidents are cause by mechanical failure. Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners, so my question still stands.
> Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners
I think most of them are probably caused by deferred maintenance, which may either be the result of the owner making poor decisions, or a circumstance forced on them by poverty. In cases where the car is defective as manufactured, I have no sympathy for the company that made it. If that happens, I want the car company to pay for it. Which I believe generally happens. Car airbags blow up in your face because of a detective design? The car company has to pay to fix that. So your question has a false premise; we don't ignore deaths caused by faulty manufacturing. Usually anyway, some car companies seem to get away with more than others..
How do you figure the self-driving car was built by cutting corners? Just to be devil's advocate... usually its a small team of people that genuinely care about making self driving better. What prevents it from simply being an accident?
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?
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.
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.
If a train or streetcar isn’t an effective alternative to a human-driven car (as is the case in the overwhelming majority of car trips in the US), how are they an effective alternative to a self-driving car?
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.
Public transit is severy lacking in most cities (the whole, rather urbanised, country, has just 1.5 subway lines...), trains are crap, there are few bike lanes. Most of the money in the past 30 years went into improving the road network, and it made driving a mostly pleasant and convenient experience. Transport-wise, everything else (apart from building a lot of airports) was pretty much neglected though. This is slowly changing, thanks to EU money (it's now being directed more towards public transit and trains), and should get better in the next 10-20 years, but for now it is what it is.
Most of the driving is done where most of the people live. In those huge sparsely populated areas, you can stand next to an road all day and see only a few cars. Even on the interstates, it's not uncommon to be driving along without another car in sight on either horizon.
> 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.
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.
I think we might agree - don't miss the earlier part of that quote - "to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up"
They are both a blessing and a curse. Cars let us commute 25 miles to work in any random direction easily, but a lot of times, that also means we are required to commute 25 miles to work in a random direction.
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.
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.
Strength is multidimensional. Power projection and defense entail different capabilities. It's not like a "strong military" is something you order online, it takes an economic and demographic base which Ukraine couldn't support. Maybe a better argument is that they shouldn't have denuclearized -- for defense you don't need a military, you just need MAD.
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.
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.
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)
> 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?
We do though. In America you can build/buy and fly your own airplane with no license, regulation or certification at all. The catch is that it must be a very small airplane; single seat, under 115kg empty, max 5 gallons of fuel, etc, etc. You can buy or build many of them for about the price of a motorcycle or used car.
They're fairly dangerous to the pilot, but are so small and light they probably don't pose much risk to others. Of course if one crashed straight into you, you'd probably die, but that doesn't happen very often.
True, but not particularly relevant. You're referring to the Ultralight or Light Sport Aircraft categories.
These are almost entirely for recreation and not for transportation.
The basic rules limit use to VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so daytime only on nice days, limited range, etc. Wonderful for getting up and enjoying the sky, but highly impractical for transportation.
We don't see grocery stores ir office/industrial parks installing short airstrip fields for the shoppers or commuters arriving in Ultralights, but they do install bicycle racks. I'd say a bicycle is far more useful in any practical sense.
So yes, in using aircraft for transportation, we're almost entirely in the regime of high regulation and expense.
> 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.
I didn't argue for no regulation. I argued for less regulation.
There is regulation that provides almost no safety benefit (because there is already plenty of regulation), while increasing cost noticeably.
Are you sure? We've been redesigning everything for years because is car wrecks. Cars are safer today because of it. For both passengers and pedestrians. Roads have been rebuilt.
Deaths, pretty million, has been decreasing for the last fifty years thanks to changes being made.
You are right in that car accidents don't elicit quite the same reaction as a single mass death, but they aren't being ignored and aren't quite considered a fact of life.
This is one of the reasons that the things I work on most of the time (healthcare-associated infections) are so insidious.
At any given institution rates are usually quite low, and infections a rarity. But when you project that up to every ICU or hospital in the country, you suddenly get something that causes more deaths than drunk driving.
I think it is all about committing to long term policy, allocating budgets, and sticking to it.
> In Sweden, we have made a fantastic sustainability journey; in the 70's over 1000 people died in traffic every year, now there are a few hundred, but still far too many.
And this is with a very large increase in car use. In Sweden in the ‘30s-40s we had 200-300 deaths/year/100k cars. Today it is 5 deaths/year/100k cars. Cars are safer, newer, better road infrastructure, etc.
In the US there where 42k deaths in road accidents in 2020, with 290 M vehicles. So about 15 deaths/year/vehicle. 200% more. [1]
Going back to the beginning, a long term policy is needed. The question in my mind is if such a thing can be implemented without it getting talked about like some conspiracy against the right wing voter who loves their car?
I can't speak to the government part, but the cost part can't be right.
There have been 20 commercial aviation incidents in the last 20 years in the US of any type and size that included any fatalities by any means. 7 of those included jets, with 1 being a 777, one a 767, and everything else 737 or smaller. A 767 costs about 100 million (list price 200, but the internet says you always get discounts..?)
So we'll ridiculously overestimate the per year cost of airplanes at 100 million, assuming fallaciously that these airplanes are always totaled (they're not) and that they're always 767s (they're not).
On the other hand, let's assume (optimistically) that fatal car crashes always total two people per car, and that they all occur in affordable $10,000 cars (the average new car last year cost almost 5x that at 47K). That gets you 10,000*20,000, or 200 million per year in auto costs.
the media treats it that way, but the government and many non profits work to reduce total deaths. You just dont hear about it because the media gate keeps the news.
seatbelts, car seats, antilock brakes, medians in dangerous intersections, speedbumps, drunk driving laws etc. Are all to reduce one off deaths.
> 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.
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?
> A problem with your insurance incentive is that it only works for people who have insurance. It does nothing to deter uninsured drivers.
Uninsured drivers who can pay compensation if they cause harm aren't the problem. The problem is uninsured drivers who are judgment proof, i.e., who have no significant assets with which to pay compensation. The way that problem is currently handled for driving is for auto insurance policies to include coverage if you get hit by an uninsured driver who can't pay compensation.
But, you say, what if I get killed by that uninsured driver? The answer is that you're already at risk from that today, because someone that reckless isn't going to be deterred by anything, since they're not reasonable people to begin with. In other words, the basic problem you point out, that some people aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless actions, is a valid problem, but can't be solved by social engineering. Your only defense against drivers like that is to drive defensively so that you aren't the one that ends up being their victim. And more generally, your only defense against people who genuinely aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior is to avoid them.
> 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.
> the common consensus is that certainty of punishment is the primary deterrent against criminal activity.
There is no such thing as "certainty of punishment". There isn't even "certainty of punishment if you get caught", since our society is not a sane society in this respect and lets people who do cause harm, up to and including murder, off the hook for all manner of insane ideological reasons.
That said, I didn't say we shouldn't punish people who actually cause harm. The scenario I was describing was a person who is, for example, driving drunk, but hasn't caused harm, and gets stopped by a cop. Should the cop be able to ticket them? Or just prevent them from driving until they are sober? If they haven't caused harm, I would say the latter.
I'm sorry, I should have been clear. The 'certainty of punishment' bit should be understood as a probability. The gist of it is that a person considering criminal behavior isn't worried about the severity of the punishment `S` in isolation, but also the likelihood (read: 'certainty') `C` thereof. Simplistically the deterrence model is `C*S`. An extremely severe punishment (execution!) with zero or effectively zero chance of getting caught provides no deterrence. There's more to it - for example doubling severity does not double deterrence in general - but that's the gist of it.
My little thought experiment supposes a person who is drunk evaluates, before deciding to get in the car, the potential outcomes of drunk drive, while entirely convinced they won't harm someone. (I suspect most drunk drives are entirely convinced they won't harm someone, although it is obvious to anybody else there is at least a _chance_ they will.) Today, getting caught with whatever nonzero probability results in a punishment of some severity. By the model we're assuming above, this produces a nonzero amount of deterrence. If we shift away from punishing drunk drivers, the severity drops to zero. If a drunk's options are to call for a ride from the bar or try to drive home, and getting caught at the latter only mean they'll have to call for a ride from some location between the bar and home, driving is the rational choice after all, _so long as they are convinced they won't hurt anybody_.
I was being too circumspect.
The point of my scenario is to highlight that decriminalizing drunk driving will likely increase the amount of drunk driving, at least among the population of drunk drivers who are overconfident in their abilities. That in turn will increase the danger drunk drivers present to the rest of us.
I gather you think reaction is morally preferable to prevention in such cases. Is that a fair assertion? In general, I bet we agree there is some amount of risk to myself that I must tolerate to afford others their freedoms, and have just landed at different risk tolerances. I try to take need into account when drawing my line in the sand. "Does anybody _need_ to drive drunk?". Since it's a situation drunk drivers make for themselves I'm happy to punish it. How do you draw your line?
> My little thought experiment supposes a person who is drunk evaluates, before deciding to get in the car, the potential outcomes of drunk drive, while entirely convinced they won't harm someone.
And just that last clause makes it clear that, at least at that time and place, that person is not going to be deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior, because their judgment is impaired.
Basically, your solution (which is also, as you point out, the solution in place in our current society), is to put unreasonable incentives in place--unreasonable from the point of view of the person, because, in your hypothetical, they're 100% convinced they won't harm anyone, so to them this whole "don't drive drunk" thing seems like an unreasonable restriction. It might be reasonable from the point of view of society, but that very view of "society" is not really compatible with a free society of free and responsible adults. More on that below.
> I gather you think reaction is morally preferable to prevention in such cases. Is that a fair assertion?
The only moral principle I have stated is that one should not impose punishments on people who have not caused actual harm. But I did imply a corresponding moral responsibility for the people themselves: that they should exercise reasonable judgment when making choices. People who either will not or cannot take on that responsibility are not going to be deterrable by the kinds of reasonable incentives I am proposing.
Your position seems to be, basically, that in our current society, most people fall into the latter category: they either will not or cannot take responsibility for exercising reasonable judgment--for example, by making it an ironclad rule for themselves that if they are going to go someplace where they might get drunk, they have a plan in place in advance to get home without having to drive. If most citizens of our supposedly free society can't meet that standard, we have a much worse problem than drunk driving.
> Since it's a situation drunk drivers make for themselves I'm happy to punish it.
I don't disagree that being in a situation where you "need" to drive drunk is self-inflicted; I basically said the same thing just above. My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.
> The only moral principle I have stated is that one should not impose punishments on people who have not caused actual harm
But isn't the risk of death a harm? That's what I'm driving at here. It's about where the line is drawn.
Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss? Drunk driving is the tip of an iceberg here.
> My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.
This bit about a doomed society interests me. Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function? If society needs those to function and it makes them (society produces its own laws, after all), isn't that the look of a society that is succeeding? A society that regulation and fails to self-regulate is doomed, for sure.
Now then, the bit about 'most' adults needing such help doesn't come from anywhere. I agree it's a few. But if most adults don't need government incentive to drive sober, regulation preventing drunk driving abrogates a 'right' _they won't exercise_. Are their freedoms limited in that case? Or are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?
No. It's a risk. Death itself is a harm, but risk of harm is not the same as actual harm.
> Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss?
If they're taking shots at you with the intent of harming you, that's already a crime; in most jurisdictions it's called assault with a deadly weapon or something similar. The basis for such laws is that having someone intentionally shoot at you, even if they miss, is a harm in and of itself. But that theory does not generalize to any action that carries a risk of causing harm.
If they don't realize you're in the path of the shots and they miss, there is no crime, but there is certainly a very good reason to keep that person as far away from you as possible. And if everyone did that with people who do obviously reckless and dangerous things, those people would find it impossible to survive and would pay the price of their recklessness. I'd be fine with that.
> Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function?
Because if it actually needs nanny state laws to function, that means its citizens are not responsible adults. And a society whose citizens are not responsible adults is doomed.
> I agree it's a few.
If it's only a few, why is it a serious problem that requires nanny state laws to fix? Why can't all of us who are responsible adults just, as I said above, refuse to associate with the few who are not responsible adults? Oh, you want a drink at my bar (or my private party, or just hanging out with me)? Are you going to drive? Sorry, I can't give you a drink if you're going to drive. And so on.
In other words, a society in which all but a few people are responsible adults does not need nanny state laws for the few who are not, because everyone else, as responsible adults, will regulate the behavior of the non-responsible few anyway. Nanny state laws are only needed if many citizens are not responsible adults. But you've said you don't think that's the case. So why don't you, as (presumably) a responsible adult, just do what responsible adults are supposed to do when dealing with the few who aren't responsible?
> are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?
I already described a scenario in which a cop does exactly this with a drunk driver who doesn't cause harm, without imposing any punishment. So your implicit assumption that the only way to get drunk drivers off the roads is to punish them for violating a nanny state law is incorrect. In other words, in my proposed scenario, the cop, a responsible adult, regulates the behavior of one of the few who is not responsible. He can do that without needing any nanny-state laws to justify it. His simple duty to keep the roads safe is enough. That duty already empowers him to get drunk drivers off the road. He can do that just fine without imposing any punishments.
In this particular case, perhaps. But giving the government power to enact such nanny state regulations will abrogate other rights that responsible adults will want to exercise. There is no such thing as a government that only imposes just those nanny state laws that are needed to restrain the irresponsible few and never imposes any that unjustifiably restrain the responsible many. I already gave one counterexample: speed limit laws. There are many others.
> If they're taking shots at you with the intent of harming you, that's already a crime; in most jurisdictions it's called assault with a deadly weapon or something similar. The basis for such laws is that having someone intentionally shoot at you, even if they miss, is a harm in and of itself. But that theory does not generalize to any action that carries a risk of causing harm.
You can't lean on the argument that the harmless act of shooting and missing is a already a crime while simultaneously arguing that drunk driving should not be a crime unless the driver connects. You really need to decide what amount of reckless disregard for another life constitutes a 'harm' and should be criminalized.
> You can't design perfect roads that will magically prevent all accidents.
Sure you can. They are called cycle roads, for bikes. Cars kill people, bikes don't. If American cities were designed with bicycle and train transport in mind, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
>thousands of people die because the government specifically puts them in harm's way
You lost me at the part where this was supposed to not be describing every roadway funded in whole or part by state or federal governments, contingent upon following lethal design standards required by the same.
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.
> 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").
Another pet peeve: The effect of gun ownership on suicide rates goes totally ignored. Suicide accounts for 21k out of 33k annual gun deaths in the US[1]. If we're outraged by school shootings, we should be apoplectic about facilitating suicide.
Nobody needs a gun to commit suicide. In countries where guns are less available, they use hanging or poison.
Putting that aside, it’s not our role to forcibly limit the choices of healthy, responsible people just because some unhealthy, unresponsible people might make the wrong choices when given the freedom to do so.
It’s not a societal-level tragedy if someone chooses to eliminate themselves. While it’s abhorrent to even consider, the fact is, there’s very likely a net economic/social gain.
We don’t need to be protected from our own choices. We need to be protected from the authoritarian impulses of people who don’t think we’re equipped to make choices in the first place.
I see your point, but I strongly disagree. Providing a suicidal person with the right resources to help them avoid suicide will (imo) yield a net gain over the rest of that persons life, as opposed to the gain from selling a gun and a bullet and giving him a quick out.
One example that comes to might right away is Alan Turing. Whose contributions to modern society can hardly be overstated. And I know he didn't use a gun, I'm making a point about helping people out of depression, to oppose your opinion about it being beneficial to let them kill themselves.
Turing didn’t need help out of depression. He needed to NOT be persecuted, tortured, and mutilated by the state, furthering the point that people in power should not interfere with the rights of free people to go about their lives as they see fit as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else.
I agree, I didnt question the reason behind the suicide, I just wanted to point out that not all suicidal people can be labeled as burdens to society.
> Live as they see fit
So in your opinion that includes killing oneself, even in cases that could be avoided if access to appropriate help could be provided? (Not enforced, provided as an alternative option to suicide)
We can provide resources for people who want help without taking away rights from other people who aren’t doing anything wrong. The original comment was about banning guns for everyone to prevent people from committing suicide.
Following that logic, should we lock everyone in a cell under 24/7 suicide watch because it would prevent some people from committing suicide?
No, that's a strawman. You have to draw the line somewhere, and most of the civilized world agrees that not giving general public access to devices that can kill by twitching ones finger, is not above that line. Same as requiring people to wear seatbelts.
Your fallacious argument aside though, you are correct, you can provide support resources without taking rights of others away, and in the US that is the case. Congrats. I will stay in a country where, if I am ever depressed, the support structures have a higher chance of saving me, because it will take more than moving my finger by 2mm to literally explode my head.
Restricting access to guns is not part of a support structure, it is a control structure. Maybe you appreciate the government controlling you in that way, most Americans are more independent minded.
If you didn't want to be around guns, you can simply ... not own one. Many Americans don't, it's not like it's required.
Where I live, I can own a gun if I want to, provided I pass rigorous psychological examination, and repeat it every few years. But because there is practically no guns on the streets, I dont feel the need to. Admittedly, it would be difficult to reconsile my opinions on gun ownership with the need for personal safety if I lived in the US.
But yes, I absolutely do appreciate there being a control structure that prevents psychopaths from going to walmarts artillery section and shooting up a school every other week.
Following the same fallacy you used previously, should we abolish all laws because everyone should be able to excercise their free will completely unrestricted?
Bringing up Turing to support the idea that the state should prevent people from taking their lives is beyond tone deaf. People asking the state to enforce their moral compass (which is basically what you're doing now) is what lead to the situation that Turing killed himself over.
> it’s not our role to forcibly limit the choices of healthy, responsible people just because some unhealthy, unresponsible people might make the wrong choices when given the freedom to do so.
I think your statement is missing the impact that the actions of the "unhealthy" have in others. Otherwise, there would be no reason to stop anyone from driving drunk, buying a couple kgs of uranium, or procuring flasks of Ebola.
> 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").
This would be the case if probability of joining the military was independent of the risk factors for suicide, which I seriously doubt.
Not disagreeing with the point at large, just that the statistical analysis would be even more complicated, at least finding similar demographics between the two populations
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.
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.
Kind of similar for me but my cars tend to get hit now and again a lot whilst parked. One time almost written off because it was hit at high speed and the offender kept on going despite leaving several piece of his own car at the scene. The police couldn't do anything because, well, I was insured so 'they can deal with it'.
Same here, I drove for 7-8 years (not that much though) and my major "accident" was with a thin and curvy tree that was on a dead spot of the rear mirrors while backing up. Was in 3 close calls where the results would have been much worse.
In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away, 2 minor accidents like that for a total of ~8 weeks driving motorbikes (minor since I knew there was gravel/water and was going really slow).
> In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away
Not a motobiker, but I find this part strange - I see people who commute daily on scooters, sports bikes and choppers too and they don't mind mild rain and wet roads much. They do drive slightly slower through city (and on highways too), but not more than 10kmh less.
If its anything similar to bicycle then you just take care on bends/intersections but thats just about it.
Ah sorry, yes ofc you can drive daily on scooters and deal with the rain and wet roads. With rain/gravel on a motorbike you def need to go more than 10kmh slower. I've had my car slide a couple of times under rain, and a few more under gravel/sand on the floor, and on the car it just moves a meter or two and that's it, normally no issue at all. However on the motorbike that same sliding means you are going down. That's all I mean, that the car is a lot safer than the motorbike for small incidents. Probably also for major accidents, but luckily I haven't been in those.
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!)
Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway.
I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance and then if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you. (The insurance is tied to the car, not to the driver.)
The way it works around here is that every car is registered to a person in central registry to get plates. The registry is crosschecked daily with central insurance database to make sure all vehicles have insurance, which is mandatory by law. If you don't have it you get fine automatically, which might go to collections. People without insurance are unheard of.
This of course requires the government to have central database of vehicles, insurance contracts and citizens.
Yes, actually that would probably happen first here (Slovakia) as well. And then if you continue to not pay, they remove the car from the registry and take the plates back.
> Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway.
> if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you
How so? Said cop would have to stop you and check you have insurance. In almost 18 years of driving in France, some of I which I would drive twice a day, I've only been stopped for a police control a whopping 1 time.
Sure, I drive fairly conservatively, but basically I could've driven without license or insurance for all these years.
Also, I'm not sure dealerships have some obligation to check on these. When I bought my first motorcycle, the dealer only ever wanted to see the bank check.
According to [0], it would seem that driving without insurance is quite widespread. They say "over 30000 people have had a crash with an uninsured or runaway driver". Since I'd expect that not everyone without insurance crashes, the number must be higher than that.
Note that in France, the insurance is tied to the car, so if I drive your car, your insurance applies, even if I don't have any insurance of my own.
I know that french generally hate travelling to places that don't speak french, but if you ever did by car and didn't have all papers in order, you may be in for a big surprise. Ie Switzerland, they do frequent background checks especially on foreign plates, I'd say you have 20-30% chance of being checked on average as french on each crossing. With covid, practically any border crossing within Europe had 100% mandatory checks for certain parts of 2020 and 2021, and they often went deeper than just valid covid papers.
Also, France is a mess in quite a few aspects so not surprising when some bureaucracy doesn't work as intended (ie colleague who moved from Belgium ended up in dead-end process when migrating his driving license, literally the law covering his situation was so badly written it didn't make it possible at all to migrate his driving license to French one).
In Switzerland, no car dealer would give you keys to the car before having mandatory 3rd party damage insurance. Once you stop paying, all sorts of automated plate scanners would mark you and you would receive a massive fine, and probably a visit to court that would take your license for some time on top of that. I mean they take license for driving more than 20kmh over limit in certain situations.
If you don't have the plates, the cop doesn't have to check anything. It is very visible that you don't have them.
Doesn't France keep the registry of all cars and whether they have an insurance or not?
I've just realized I'm not completely safe though, because — if what you are saying is true — someone from France can drive their non-insured car to my country and crash into me :)
We have a weird hybrid model in the US (texas, at least) where some aspects of insurance are tied to the driver and some to the car. So I personally have liability insurance that pays out to other people (the legally required part) but also have insurance that covers my car in the event of a wreck.
Yup. Two times our car got hit the driver ran and left no note. Its fucked because then we pay the $750 deductible. Cops dont even try to find who did it. Really frustrating.
> Yup. Two times our car got hit the driver ran and left no note. Its fucked because then we pay the $750 deductible. Cops dont even try to find who did it. Really frustrating.
If you're complaining about the driver not leaving a note, that implies no one you know was there with your car to witness your crash. How do you expect the cops to even try to find out who did it? Go full CSI?
There must be security camera footage along the street before and after the car's location. It doesn't seem implausible to find the damaged car leaving that wasn't damaged coming. You could also look at the damaged vehicle to figure out the paint of the other car, I'm guessing something would be left behind. You could contact repair shops in the area looking for a match.
I don't know - I'm not a cop but there are certainly many possible avenues of investigation if people were willing to try.
Sure if you have infinite resources to throw at a problem, you can do a lot. The actual question is: how much effort is all that, is it worth it, and what's the chance of success?
Realistically, for a property damage case, you're not going to get ten cops scanning hours of grainy security camera footage (that may not exist) from different angles and running all over town for weeks checking every auto body shop in the city looking for paint matches. Even if they did that, there's a good chance they'd fail (e.g. no video, no legible shot of the plates, culprit doesn't take his care into a shop), so they're not going to try.
Investigating would require some resources, yes though obviously not "infinite" resources. That's why we fund police departments, hire investigators and officers, and give them authority to conduct investigations though.
Ignoring, and tacitly permitting, crime results in more crime which in turn results in greater demand for effort. Thoroughly investigating and resolving crime may be more expensive than ignoring crime in the short term, but long term it pays off.
Most people have insurance but the ones doing the crashing disproportionately do not, either because their prior crashing resulted in a requirement for expensive bonded insurance or because their habit of crashing made their insurance prohibitively expensive. I think some places also won't insure drivers who don't have a license, which also correlates well with drivers who get drunk and crash into things.
Given that vehicles are trivial to get and licensing does nothing to stop driving, you have a fair point. IMO probably better to drop the licensing schemes and then execute / imprison those who recklessly crash into others.
Not sure about execute, but in my mind driving drunk is like firing a gun blindly - you might not kill anyone this time but it is dangerous as hell and you should definitely not be doing it. I think it should be taken more seriously.
We don't have to live like this. Don't listen to any of the trolls in this thread that will try to argue that "these deaths are acceptable because driving in cars is great." These tragedies are a result of the choices we've made in developing out transportation infrastructure. Comparable countries, like the UK, France, and Germany have dramatically fewer deaths, because they chose different priorities in developing their transit systems.
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.
No, I'm pretty sure it makes more sense to measure deaths per capita. If poor urban planning made people's commutes 2x longer, would it suddenly be half as bad for someone to die?
I don't care if a meter of road is dangerous, I care if the amount of driving necessary to live in a city is likely to get me killed. Or if I'm liable to be killed while walking. Deaths/distance is a limited metric that has no bearing on societal cost. Deaths/value is the appropriate cost benefit analysis.
The amount of driving 'necessary' for commuting is zero. You can live in a homeless camp next to your job, or the postage-stamp sized studio most people could afford within walking distance of where the jobs are. You may get hassled by police every once in awhile, but then again seems safer than driving. Perhaps roll yourself in bubble wrap as well and wear a helmet while walking there. I can name quite a few cities where you can wake up in a heroin daze and shit in the streets and be within walking distance of someplace to earn some cash.
Personally 99.9% of driving I do is for pleasure, the lever I have to adjust is miles I drive not the miles the average person drives. On an individual level, each person can directly move their "miles I drive" lever but only barely move the "average miles a person drives" lever. Deaths/capita is a societal measurement that only has limited usefulness to the individual human, who is determining his own behavior. Deaths/mile is more useful as it actually allows me to examine how dangerous the roads are and plan how far I want to commute or pleasure drive accordingly.
Deaths / capita also allows the twisted viewpoint that someone driving a million miles for pleasure gives a very wrong view to the person driving a few miles for necessity. You claim to care about the amount of driving 'necessary' but then use a figure that includes deaths from people driving to the cinema or bar or a road trip to Vegas, which are not necessary. If you only include deaths per capita based on 'necessary' driving it would be a hell of a lot smaller, especially in comparison to the change in deaths per mile.
I'm not sure how you interpreted "many third world countries" have notoriously dangerous roads as literally everybody worse than Norway (one of if not the safest in the world) fatalities as being a 3rd world.
I think you also failed to control for race and income, including the vast (per capita) oil production (which Norway taxes the shit out of) that is used towards the benefit of the average Norwegian (Norways is all the way up next to the Emirates in per capita oil production). One study in Chicago, found that those with 'low' economic hardship had nearly ONE THIRD the rate of fatalities [0]. Compound that with those who the study classified 'white' like the relatively homogeneous Norwegians, and you get several percentage points of correction as well. In short, there's a decent argument to be made that a Norwegian dropped into America is almost or just as safe on American roads as they would be in Norway. That is, roads likely aren't 3x safer in Norway, in fact they may be just as safe, so long as you are demographically like a Norwegian.
In short I would say it's probably not the Norwegian road laws or road system that are largely to thank, but rather the fact that Norwegians sit under a gold mine of which is rivaled only by places like the Emirates. And that gold mine is a source of the single greatest improvement in traffic fatality rate in demographic fatality rate, low economic hardship. So yeah, just be born over a gold mine with a silver spoon in your mouth like the Norwegians, why are Americans so lazy?
I don't need to control for race or income. The point made was that the traffic fatalities in the US is only 0.012% of the population. My point was simply that while it's not a huge percentage in absolute terms, it could be lower.
While I'm not entirely convinced our more restrictive traffic laws aren't part of the equation, I'll agree that socioeconomic factors are probably important.
Thankfully, both countries have a vision for zero traffic fatalities by 2050. Lets hope they make it.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I think that is they type of change that is bound to fail, according to the original article. One of the many reasons:
> the growing crash fatality rates are a direct challenge—even a rebuke—to their theory of traffic safety, which relies on applying highway buffering standards to local streets. They need to open up the design process, inviting more voices in—not just to comment, but to share insights into what the design needs to accomplish. And they need to stop attacking dissidents (i.e., those who challenge the status quo), and instead embrace the engineering mindset of problem solvers.
The author is also a much bigger fan of decentralization than I am, as a general political philosophy, though I would be pretty happy if governance was decentralized to the point where I was allowed to build a neighborhood with friends and colleagues like I want.
Nearly any actual that would result in fewer deaths is so far outside the Overton window.
Claiming that there are ineffective government agencies that pay attention to a few tiny aspects of safety but ignore the vast majority of them-better city designs-, is not a thug except window dressing to enable the neglect of these deaths.
You might find it risible to suggest that we are ignoring car deaths, but given the rise in car deaths and the lack of effective action against them, I find it far more risible to suggest that "we" are paying attention to them.
I've been paying attention to them since high school, when 0.5% of my high school died because of cars. Nobody did anything. Nobody suggested we enable life without cars. Nobody changed an intersection. Nobody suggested new technology. It was completely ignored. Sure, the kids were mourned, but we all ignored any action.
There is almost no way for a sober driver to kill a person and be deemed for their death. Police and highway patrol will just escort the driver off the scene. Kill a person crossing in a crosswalk with flashing lights? You'll walk away from the scene.
What other sort of danger do we allow around us? Much less mandate that a person must be exposed to cars if they want to be around other people? It's a preposterous situation that we have chosen and enforce by law. Until we realize what we are doing and acknowledge the car dependency to our legally required city planning, we will continue to ignore the costs that the law imposes on us.
Backup cameras are not going to save any significant amount of lives. What fraction of our car deaths are from backing up? Sure, it sounds like a good idea, and is a good idea, but it will not make the slightest dent in the death and carnage.
Lots of other cities in the US adopted "Vision Zero" policies after seeing how Osls was drastically reducing death. But US cities refuse to make any of the changes that are actually successful at reducing death.
Because what needs to change isn't just the design of the car, what really needs to happen is a change in the design of the road.
We must start designing cities with the assumption that drivers will make mistakes, as all people always do. The design of roads and intersections must minimize the change for a deadly mistake.
And perhaps, and here's the part that's really outside the Overton window, Pepe who want to travel by non-car means should have just as much access and safety as those inside cars. We force everyone in the US to get around by car if they are going to be the median participant in society. What if we had a world where the median person, with a job, was not expected to drive?
> Yet this very simple, very desirable concept is illegal in the US except for a few tiny islands.
I don't see how it can be illegal?
HOAs have extreme power and already impose all kinds of overbearing rules on people subject to them. So you could surely get together with a few hundred likeminded people and build a neighborhood where the HOA prohibits cars.
Zoning law in large parts of this country is designed around single family homes, non-walkable suburban layouts, complete separation of residential and commercial development, and minimum parking requirements at businesses.
Interestingly, places that are dense and friendly to walking and bicycling are actually extremely popular with home buyers and renters. These places have seen prices and demand skyrocket, yet building more of them is often against zoning or other planning guidelines.
It's starting to change, many places are starting to convert to denser and mixed-used zoning and remove minimum parking requirements, but it seems to be happening slower than market demand.
Agreed, but that's an increase in scope of the requirements/desires.
I still think it'd be possible to build a neighborhood where the HOA bans driving cars. Yes, it'll still need roads for emergency access (which you'd want anyway, fire trucks and ambulances do need to get in when needed).
If there are minimum parking space rules in the area that's a bit annoying but shouldn't be a showstopper. Just because the parking needs to be present doesn't mean it needs to be used for that purpose, so the HOA can still ban cars. You can then use that driveway for projects, play space, etc.
Are you talking about pedestrian deaths when you mention car risk for your children?
If so, good news. Those have been going down. Since 1975 pedestrian deaths of under 13 year olds have steadily declined by more than an order of magnitude. For 13-19 year olds the decline hasn't been as big, but is still over a factor of 3 [1].
Fortunately, I'm able to live my life without being forced to own a gun, and am allowed to keep my children out of homes that have guns in them.
But Im not allowed to build a life that isn't centered around transporting my child by car, or subjecting them to car violence while on bike or foot. There's no escaping it, especially in places like the Bay Area that have completely fetishized transporting kids by car. There are better lives possible, and my partner and I are just trying to figure out the two-body problem of moving to a better part of the world without one of us sacrificing a career.
If you're operating on these kind of statistics I think you need to consider the age and race of your child. If you go by likelihood of death, a 19 year old black male (covered by the chart you cited) has a wildly different chance of firearms related death than a 4 year old white child (for that child, they're more likely to die by swimming pool) [0]. In fact the choice to include 18 and 19 year olds at prime age for gang related violence on a study on a decision on what to do with younger children is in fact either a naive or intentionally biased approach.
Under teenage years, your kid is much more likely to die by assault by firearm than by suicide/accident by firearm [1]. It is not easier to fight off an assault while you are unarmed.
Under age 5, by your rationale you probably also never went to a house or anywhere else with a swimming pool, which at that age is as likely to kill your child as a gun. Operating based on this, a good case could be made a household without teenagers may be safer with a gun (assuming you are the owner and you don't assault children, and you either store the firearm on your person or secured in a safe) for protection against assault, while those with teenagers have to counter the risk of suicide by either not owning a gun or putting it in a secure safe. But then again, teenagers are still yet more likely to die by (firearm) assault than (firearm) suicide, so perhaps even they are better off if their guardian can defend them against armed assailants.
As a final note, assuming you do actually take your children places: your hosts probably lied. Not all of them did, but a few probably did, especially if you left the Bay area. Even the ones that are 'honest.' They knew that you would be uncomfortable about firearms in the house, and they themselves would be uncomfortable if their friend found out, so they simply locked them up somewhere in their house where they would never be found or could be accessed and then told you there weren't any there. I don't have the study off hand, but a well researched study I came across showed only ~30% of people truthfully inform guests with children about guns in their house.
If a bunch of people want to worship hunks of death inflicting metal as idols, I have zero problem with that as long as I'm allowed to live away from it. And I am allowed to! If somebody tells me that they go the firing range, that's just great, and I may even go with them some time. But I'm not allowed to live away from cars as a normal member of society.
Yes, now that they have been locked indoors all day they are free of death by car! Sadly there is inexplicable epidemic of obesity, and obesity linked disease appearing in this children later in life, what could possibly be the contributors?
I this attitude a lot, especially from Americans. A 'well if you change this to help A, this other thing B will get worse'. All while the US is at the bottom of list for both A and B.
I can't agree with your assessment at all. Deaths are rising, yet what changes are happening?
Deaths per miles driven have never been lower (2nd table). You can't just add up the negative impacts (deaths) without adjusting for positive impacts (miles traveled).
A mile driven is not a positive impact. A trip taken, an amenity experienced, a commute completed would be a positive impact. But every mile driven is a negative impact.
If the amount driven is increasing, it's likely because the system is failing more.
Given that I only have one life, I actually only care about the cost in lives, not cost per mile.
The way we design our society impacts how much we are forced to drive. Our current plans force people to drive more and more.
Even without increasing miles, deaths by cars are somewhat decreasing, especially compared to decades ago, and I've posted those graphs elsewhere in this thread.
The real way to decrease car deaths isn't to decrease deaths per mile, it's to allow people to avoid the risk at all in the first place.
Because a lot of these deaths stents even from people in the cars, it's from cars ramming into those who haven't gotten in cars but still must risk exposure to them in order to live in the world.
> 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"
> 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?
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.
When I say "fix this" I'm talking about the greatest threat to my children's life, ie me moving to a walkable neighborhood without cars, along with the subset of the population that also wants to live that way.
But my preferred lifestyle has been banned. And it is often because people are afraid that if I'm allowed to live the way I prefer, I'm going to make them live the way I prefer, which just speaks to their basic inability to acknowledge human freedom, or the possibility that people should even be allowed to make their own choice.
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.
Watch some videos from this channel and you'll be able to see how the US definitely does not do enough in terms of creating safe road infrastructure for all:
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.
This is like an oil company spending a lot on oil spill cleanup. Or saying we have a very well appointed water bucket brigade to clear water from a ship with a giant hole in the side.
When you believe car centric development is harmful to its core, it's poor consolation that we're spending even more ineffectual resources on top of that to try to curtail the harms.
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
While true, the are a government organization susceptible to political influence. We could greatly shrink the number of accidents with some very low tech requirements like mandatory full lights and headlights at all times if the car is in gear plus mandatory fish eye mirrors in all side views. These are literally almost free changes but not law. We all know that distraction (texting, nav, infotainment) is another category but we don't have any car rules to mitigate this. Instead we pass largely unforceable laws like "texting and driving is illegal".
Surely we as a society try to ignore the risks. If we would not ignore them we would immediately stop allowing cars in our cities or completely separate the roads for them. Because a fatal accident with a pedestrian or bike is just a matter of high numbers, i.e. a logical consequence.
And btw: I already find the fatality numbers from Germany more than concerning (~3000/year) but in the US you have 13x more although only 4x more people live there. So there is a huge potential for improvement I guess ...
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.
How many of the deaths in the US result in a recall?
How many recalls would it take to stop the deaths? I would argue that every single car death is proof of a defect worthy of recalling that car, but Im not sure if the recall could replace the car with a piece of equipment that would have prevented the death.
Exactly. We focus on the wrong thing, the design of the car, instead of actual effective policy: allow people to get around without being exposed to car traffic. And when there is car traffic, greatly reducing the possibility for interaction.
However, this is quite difficult when nearly all planning in the US puts its top priority as maximum traffic capacity and speed.
If there's a dangerous intersection that needs to be fixed, but that fix reduces car speeds, traffic engineers will demand that they need to see a certain amount of death or injury before they will act. They won't phrase it that way, buts it's equivalent. As long as the intersection fits the numbers that are in a book somewhere it's A-OK until the book has been proven wrong, which it is again and again, as shown in our traffic deaths.
...they could reduce/ angle better the frontal areas of a lot of "cars". This morning a Ram driver came closer than having seen me would surmise - my helmet-protected head was just above the person's bonnet/ hood.
I tried calculating the damage if they'd've hit me and it wasn't pretty: everywhere on my right side damaged/ struck except my ankels and feet.
not to mention the whole front end parking over any pavements.
Different countries deal with this problem in different ways. Roads in the Netherlands have changed dramatically in recent decades. This is due to systematic focus on reducing accident rates, improved standards for road construction, and the roll out of traffic measures to reduce risk; including some of the strictest speed controls in the world. It works.
Bureaucracies are really good at data driven improvements, once they are tasked and empowered to do so.
Here's a list of measures that I know of that I would say are somewhat unique to the Netherlands compared to Germany where I currently live.
- two lane 100km roads now have colored green lines in the middle with white dashed lines on both sides of that green line. This creates a relatively wide area in the middle that is a bit of a neutral zone. This discourages cars from crossing that divider and doing things like driving close to or slightly across the line with half a tire. Reason: these roads are dangerous. Head on collisions at high way speed are usually bad news.
- Generally, overtaking on two lane roads is discouraged and limited to zones that are very clearly marked. You can expect traffic cameras near these zones too. Reason: people are stupid and overtaking cars on two lane roads at high speeds is a recipe for lethal accidents.
- more colored asphalt is used to separate bike lanes from normal lanes. Wherever bike and car traffic mixes, you'll find clearly marked parts of the road for bikes to use. As well as typically, reduced speeds. Reason, when bikes are involved with traffic accidents, the fatalities are significant. So, reduced speed and better separation, reduces the accident rate.
- A lot of country side roads have reduced speed limits. a lot of 80km (default max speed outside of cities) roads have been downgraded to 60km. Reason, narrow roads and high speeds cause lots of accidents. Speeds are clearly indicated both with signs and lettering on the road.
- Traffic cameras are used on all types of roads to enforce speeds in addition to moving speed checks. They are absolutely merciless. 1 km above the limit will cost you. People still speed but a lot less and compared to Germany where people will casually drive 70-80km/hour in places where you are supposed to drive 50km/hour,the difference is huge. The net result is that by and large, traffic seems to stick to the limits. Locals usually know where the cameras are and might risk going a few km over. But most chicken out and drive 45-49 km/hour. Better 2 km under than 1 km over. Those fines are not fun.
- Lots of roads in cities and villages are limited to 30 km/hour. Basically anywhere bikes and cars mix on the road. The default is 50 km/hour.
- Lots of crossings have been replaced with roundabouts. Remaining ones will have traffic lights or at least clearly marked right of way.
You get the point here. This is just a short list. This is a bureaucracy being systematic about rolling out measures that work just working the numbers and statistics. Every accident is analyzed and reported. Hotspots for accidents are prioritized for fixing. Traffic deaths are down by double digit percentages since 2006. And they were relatively low to begin with.
Interesting read, thanks. I also see the Netherlands (and Denmark) as much less car centric and like what I see, including the effort the change the car dominance in the cities.
btw: I just picked the car crash fatalities (per million) and it is indeed better in Netherlands: 35 vs 38.5. The numbers for Netherlands seemed a bit high to me at first, but very likely it is not that easy to compare these numbers and one has to consider other things like the population density, which is only 232/km² vs 423/km² in Netherlands.
As Elon Musk often says. You have to ask the right question to find the right answers.
If you ask the wrong questions and the optimize to fix the answers to those questions then there is not necessary an improvement.
Car designs is just one aspect of overall road network safety.
And of course even there, the US is also often holding safety back. For example advanced tracking headlights are still illegal for example. And other backwards regulations.
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.
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]
I generally don't fear other people driving drunk (except on holiday evenings when I refuse to be on the road.) My personal risk of dying in an alcohol-related crash is massively reduced by my decision to never drink and drive, or get into a car with a driver who's been drinking. The risk is never zero, but it's low enough that I generally don't worry about it.
Do I have absolute complete control over it? No. Do I have a whole lot of control over it? You betcha. The control is not an illusion.
>Are you a good enough driver to save yourself in this situation?
Are you a good enough pedestrian to dodge a drunk that jumps the curb?
That's a rhetorical question. My point here is that the standard you're trying to apply is an asinine one. Unless you live beside the train station you have some exposure to drunk drivers.
No. Nothing the camera car driver could've done to see or avoid that one.
But surely you realize that's not a very common scenario crash. Watch the endless youtube dashcam videos of crashes, the vast majority are simple scenarios where the driver could've done something smarter than what they did.
> Yep I believe that is a pretty well established cognitive bias called Illusion of Control
It is not an illusion that the car driver is in control of the car and their decisions.
It is an euphemism to call car crashes "accidents" because the vast majority were not an accident that simply randomly happened, it was an event the driver could have avoided by making better choices (e.g. call that cab instead of driving drunk, etc).
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.
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.
I don't think people panic about plane crashes; the grounding of 737s a few years back might have been an overreaction to the statistical signal, but that signal also seemed to point to a deep control theory problem (sensors and systems that prompted pilots to do exactly the the wrong thing in a particular corner case.
9/11 is a better example of what you're talking about, where a genuine disaster was so traumatic as to reshape the whole society in ways often detached from risk or rationality.
>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, and is comparable to other similar European countries’ highway fatality rates.
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.
> As a fun aside, the fatality rate on the unrestricted German Autobahn is about half the fatality rate across all US highways
Germany has fanatically strict traffic enforcement, licensing rules, and vehicle inspections, compared to the US. You can't point to just the Autobahn without any further context.
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.
In a controlled access highway (no intersections, no pedestrians, no other kinds of traffic but cars going the same direction) with people paying attention and everyone going roughly the same speed the overall safety doesn't really change from 60 to 70 to 80mph. Texas raised the speed limits on a lot of back country highways to 90MPH. Guess what happened to the fatality rate. Practically unchanged.
> what other area of society do we tolerate extremely dangerous behavior (40,000+ deaths a year) because to not would be an inconvenience?
Lol, heart disease wipes out an order of magnitude more people every year and we do absolutely nothing to stop people from eating and drinking themselves into obesity. But I guess you’re cool with it as long as it’s just suicide and a strain on our healthcare system?
You just gave three examples of people endangering their own lives only, not my family. I'm not "cool" with it, really, but it's a whole different discussion.
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.
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.
Haven't dug into their sources, but I assume this is because buses often run with low utilization. Anyway the answer is trains, the answer is always trains in public transit.
Trains are a tough sell, at least in the western US. So much wide open space, trains are slow, high speed trains too expensive to justify given the sparse population.
I remember once doing the math and finding that there are many times when our local light rail is less efficient than just putting four people in a sedan. When the train is full, though, it's unbeatable.
EVs throw another wrench into that math since they're so much more efficient than ICEVs.
These are not the same thing. Switzerland has a pretty dense population. The section with low population is the Alps, where you're not going to put trains anyway.
Most people that live in remote areas have cars anyway, since sometimes busses only run twice a day. It's a tricky problem to measure "access to public transit".
(The BFS is an amazing source for information, they publish all kinds of statistics)
Switzerland has a similar number of people the bay area, 7-8 million, and is twice as large. So it stands to reason the bay area could have a system as large, useful, and as efficient as Switzerland if not better given it has the amount of same people in a smaller less mountainous area.
I'm still not sure what your point is. My point is the Bay Area has shitty transit and people claim it's because it's spread out. Switzerland is proof that's bullshit. That the same is not true for Fresno or Bakersfield has no relationship to my point.
I don't really know what your point is. That we can't have trains that cover the entire country? So what. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have more in highly populated areas.
Biggest problem for any non big-city to big-city transit are the last few miles. In the end my options are often to use a taxi or get a rental car. In both cases the price needs to be added to the cost of public transit making my personal car cheaper, more convenient and often also faster. It's a tough nut to crack. And I'm saying that as a German with one of the best public transport systems in the world.
not really. The population of the bay area is on par with the entire population of the country of Switzerland yet they manage to have tons of trains in a much larger area
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.
> 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.
> IMO driving speeds, and how a community feels about it, are huge indicators on how hostile and how selfish a community can be.
My gosh, you must think horribly about us Germans.
All your points make sense on the surface, but empirically in Germany our high speed roads cause a lot less deaths than regular roads [1]. So while you might think your argument makes a lot of sense other factors are a lot more important. To name one counter argument: I'm much more focused when driving faster and regularly adjusting my speed and hawkishly watching out for slower vehicles that I am passing than when I'm cruising straight at the same low speed for hours. Other than that a lot of terrible accident situations (turns or getting into opposing traffic) don't occur on separated highways.
To be clear, I'm never speeding and I do go slower at all the limited parts of the Autobahn, which are usually limited due to some kind of danger at higher speeds.
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.
A ton of highway accidents are people changing lanes going way under the average speed of traffic. If everyone was going about the same speed there would be fewer accidents. If everyone is going 75mph and you decide to go 40mph, you're putting yourself and everyone else on that highway in more danger than if you just went 75.
But the accident won't be "your fault" if you're hit from behind and that's what matters more in the minds of those people. It's the Principal Skinner "everyone else is wrong" attitude in real life.
As someone who used to drive a very slow commercial vehicle I absolutely cringe at the people who voluntarily fail to keep up with traffic. It's just not safe and if you're looking in your mirrors you can see all sorts of stupid happen in real time. All sorts of people cutting each other off and getting in each other's way happens as they merge to pass you. All those interactions are potential for something dumb to happen and they are needless.
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.
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.
Car manufacturers who voluntarily implemented this would go out of business so fast. Politicians who propose making this mandatory would face constituent uproar.
Limiting cars to 20mph on most roads would energize disengaged constituents like you wouldn't believe.
e-bikes and e-scooters are relatively new. It's not like people were able to use these things for decades unrestricted and now they have to be throttled.
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?
It's not facetious. I used to ride a motorcycle and oblivious or sometimes malicious drivers were a constant hazard; I'd say I got out of trouble by speeding up as often as slowing down, and I am not into speed for its own sake. Acceleration and maneuverability are as important as braking and (for larger vehicles) structural integrity.
Agreed, riding bikes gives us a different perspective on it all. I'd say we're generally more aware of our surroundings and other vehicles. A lot of the suggestions just won't work. Rules/laws/devices etc won't get rid of the human factor. Some people just lack the ability to be considerate to others.
it's not that rare. a pretty common one (in my area, anyway) is someone starts merging into you from the side while someone is riding your bumper. if you slammed on the brakes, it wouldn't be "your fault", but it would be much better to just speed up and avoid the collision.
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.
Basically impossible to get through. As there are often cases where it picks up a speed limit from something like the off ramp on the equivalent of a highway. Which would be dangerous if it suddenly decelerated from 130 to 80.
"ISA [Intelligent Speed Assist] systems do not automatically apply the brakes, but simply limit engine power preventing the vehicle from accelerating past the current speed limit unless overridden."
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.
Google being what it is these days, I’m finding it difficult to track down the study that was performed a decade after British Columbia reduced the BAC limit and instituted severe penalties for DWI offences, so you’ll have to trust me when I say that there was a significant and long-lasting reduction in DWI cases and automobile accident rates.
Our BAC limit is 0.05, except for new drivers, where it is 0.0.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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.
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.
Or you could simply make it so that the threat of driving drunk was so high that people actually thought twice.
Get caught in a DUI? You simply never. drive. again... Ever. No 2nd chance. Hurt or kill someone as a DUI? Mandatory minimum jail time.
The difference is that this encourages personal responsibility and has personal consequences, rather than attempting to police the entire population for the bad deeds of the few.
Well, then we just have to accept is as a cost of doing business and not try to stop it, because the same could be said about anything short of a full all-knowing surveillance state. People commit murder because they think they're good and won't get caught. Some don't. Better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent be convicted though. So we just have to decide how far down "convicted" really means, and if I need to ask the tech gods in the sky for permission to start my car every time I want to go somewhere I'm feeling rather convicted...
Personally I'd rather live in a world with consequences than live in the lowest-common-denominator big-brother world.
I don't think it does. So I think we actually honestly agree that the current situation is probably fine and that neither mandatory breathalyzers built into all cars nor mandatory loss of driving privileges are desirable outcomes. :-)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
US cars are the same way. If you move faster than 5 mph (which is really slow) and aren't wearing the seat belt, the car will start with uncomfortable beeping. It eventually climaxes to a nigh unbearable screech.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
In these examples, these people aren't posing a threat to other people around them in their risky behavior.
the other poster's point went over your head. Risk-accepting people and their families understand what they're doing and that they're making a bet with their life. I've done so, and not without cost. Opinions might differ on the value of such bets, and acceptance of that risk might be grudging rather than serene, but it's not unexpected.
But sudden random death is a different story. Car crashes or stray bullets can suddenly kill people uninvolved in and not seeking any risk. An unbuckled driver is primarily a danger to themselves, but also highly incentivized to drive differently - eg swerving to avoid an unsurvivable collision, but causing someone else to have a more serious accident.
I'm not sure where you'd start a statistical analysis, but the worst outcomes in the many traffic accidents I've seen always seem to involve 2 cars that have a minor collision causing a third car to have a major one, like hitting a structure or rolling.
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.
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.
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.
anyway, spending on carless infrastructure to provide alternative transport modalities to people is what works, whereas trying to force people to just "do the healthy things" doesn't really
plus there's nothing stopping the US from coming up with "free healthcare 2.0" that also solves this with clever incentives (eg. via a voucher system, people who opt out of the hazardous things get a voucher, for example people without a car get a "free" monthly public transit ticket, etc.)
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.
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.
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.
I've seen your exact same argument made by people who believe the BAC limit should be abolished and it's just as disingenuous to engage with there as it is when applied to seatbelt laws.
A family that refuses to wear seatbelts and doesn't buckle in their children is an individual choice as well in your world, but the end result can be killing someone that didn't have a choice in the first place. And your argument around seatbelt laws seems to assume that the driver is the one at fault, not the one being rear ended or involved in an accident outside of their control resulting in them being ejected from their vehicle.
A good seat and shoulder belt can reduce your movement relative to the steering wheel from centrifugal forces during a sudden sharp high speed swerve to avoid an obstacle, which should reduce the chances that you will lose control.
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.
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.
It's actually a fairly substantial risk, but from unbuckled passengers in the back slamming into the person in front of them. Studies said about a 20% increase in risk of death to the person in the front.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I don't feel like arguing because you're "not even wrong" [0] and I don't have time to educate you or find references you'll find compelling. I would be happy to do so if you want to spend several hours educating me on compiler internals, but I think that probably that's the last thing you want to do today.
I hope you do wear your seatbelt, or at least never get into an accident if not.
You could ask your parents if any of the scenarios they reconstructed were about cases where the person was better off being ejected. Getting trapped in a burning car is a real risk.
> You’re out of your element here, stick to compilers for once.
This is an incredibly stupid way to engage people. He has a degree in aerospace engineering from Caltech and IIRC worked for Boeing on the 757 before getting into compilers.
You’re argument is “you are an expert in one thing and thus can’t know other things.” Take a moment to reflect on why that ends up just making you look really dumb.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
"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.
I don't have data, either. But I do recall the debates about making seatbelts the law. The talk was always about whether one was safer being thrown from a car than staying in the car. I never heard mention about being thrown from a car causing another accident.
After the law passed, I heard many people say they wouldn't wear the belt out of fear of being trapped in a burning car.
It's just that these discussions have been completely forgotten since, and the assumption is that seatbelts are always better.
I wear a seatbelt because the odds are better. I'm aware there are cases where it isn't.
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.
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.
Except when there are sufficient cases of people seriously injuring or killing themselves, then the area is typically fenced off/given restricted access.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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).
>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.
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...
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).
I think that alternatively, considering how approximately every death of a bicyclist or pedestrian, or car driver, is all caused by someone driving an enormous 5,000lb machine irresponsibly, we should redesign our cities in such a way that most people don’t need to drive those cars in the first place for most trips. And if you do need to drive a car, you have much less congested and smaller streets for those trips.
That also allows us to repurpose some of that road space that’s not needed anymore, for separate bike and bus infrastructure that will also be more convenient and safer for everyone.
I don’t want to live in a world where you have to own a giant dangerous $20k machine just to move around, when there are cheaper, safer, healthier, and better-for-the-environment ways to accomplish the same thing.
And I drive too, a lot! I just don’t want to be forced to anymore, but we’ve kinda built society so that you only have one option, and it creates all sorts of problems.
That sounds pretty nice to me. There's a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation here IMO. We should privatize all the roads and let the free market dictate what people like, and I think a lot of people would fall back to bicycles and walking more if they actually had to pay private tolls wherever they drove.
I like your thoughts… I don’t agree about privatization (since the private companies would be a guaranteed monopoly and we see how well that works with internet…), but maybe something similar could also be accomplished by making car registration fees proportional to number of miles driven and size of vehicle, to pay for road damage. Charge 2¢ per mile per ton of vehicle weight or something. Exempt mass transit (busses).
Average 2 ton car pays 4¢ per mile, or $400/year at 10k miles.
Drive a big unnecessary truck, might be 10¢ per mile in road maintenance.
Since road damage is exponential relative to vehicle weight, bikes and pedestrians are basically negligible and we could just round that to $0. Motorcycles under 300 lbs could be small flat rate.
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.
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).
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?
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.
>"until the media decides either alcohol or cars are villains that need to be eradicated from society. "
I feel like this is in the process of happening right now. The number of car-critical and car-hostile posts has been increasing and the sentiment is gaining traction on "the left" lately. What is strongtowns if not one such publication?
Being car critical is more than just a safety issue. I moved from the US to Germany and exchanged commuting by car to commuting by bicycle. The positive impact on my quality of life is impossible to put into mere words. It's huge.
Designing cities/towns where you don't need a car is one of the best things a society can do.
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
> 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.
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.
In my state, for example, you must be at least 18 to purchase firearms generally and 21 to purchase handguns or semiautomatic rifles. Every sale has a mandatory criminal and medical background check. The transfer applications (state and ATF Form 4473) require listing your name, date of birth, address, declaration of citizenship, Social Security number, driver license number, etc. Firearms must be stored in "secure gun storage." They are not permitted on various types of school property or property being used by a school, public demonstrations, state capitol grounds, and so on. You can only discharge firearms in certain places. You must have a license to conceal one on your person. You cannot possess short-barreled shotguns or machine guns. You need special licensing for short-barreled rifles and suppressors. I'm excluding a bunch of stuff—mostly federal laws—but you get the point. Violating any of those laws is a gross misdemeanor or felony. Keep in mind I live in a state with relatively permissive firearms laws! The laws in plenty of other states are much more severe.
Purchasing, owning, and operating a vehicle is much more easier than purchasing, owning, or operating firearms.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yes it is. In many scenarios outside of software, things have already been optimized to a point where the human cannot be removed much further or the safety can’t be improved without violating some other constraint.
> Why were they able to speed on that road?
Every road can be sped on, especially if you’re going to crash.
There is a lot the US could be doing to make roads psychologically harder to speed on. Narrow, winding roads, for instance, make people uncomfortable with speeding. Other countries use this for traffic calming. The NTSB does advocate for design that prioritizes traffic calming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 déclassé.
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.
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.
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.
This is a great point, but I’ll also note: neglect of our automotive infrastructure is a matter of when, not if. A consistent theme among suburbs in the Strong Towns surveys is unsustainable financing of municipal and county roads. Even at the state and federal levels, our road funding doesn’t accurately reflect the biggest sources of wear (trailer and other shipping traffic).
It’s not like we’re ever going to regress into a nation without interstates. But there will be a significant reckoning over the next 50 years over the increasing burden of our overdeveloped road network.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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).
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)
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.
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.
It's misallocated through an enormous network of private contractors, ineffectual nonprofits and government bureaucracies. The unaffordable expenditure (public housing or at least publicly funded housing) is completely out of that budget, while the rest of the programs are so watered down and so much have been leeched out of them that they're completely ineffectual. Rebuilding capacity for direct state action, without farming out to all of these parasitic middlemen is a key component, as is reducing or eliminating wasteful and top-heavy bureaucracies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
i'd take that further a say never have a gun, concealed or not. the chances, even with great training, practice, and discipline, to use it in a way that harms only the perpetrator and no one else, especially not yourself, is fantastically small (much less than lightning strike chances).
my veteran friend who trains others on firearms and has a license to carry would say the same thing.
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.
Shootings in general are a very, very rare event. Mandalay Bay was an exceedingly rare event inside that category.
If you're worried about Mandalay Bay, you're right, you will not be returning fire from the ground into an nth floor hotel window with your sidearm.
The other things on the list still apply. Learn to move, learn to use cover, learn to provide basic medical attention. It's not a bad idea to carry a TQ if you're going somewhere with crazy-large groups of people (for reasons other than shootings, which statistically you will not be involved in).
> 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.
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.
A relative of this feeling is knowledge. I have thousands of miles of snow driving experience in my car. I have no fucking clue how airplanes work and how they handle turbulence.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Idk. I feel most in control the further away I move from the transit appliance. I’d order it something like this (there are other options here I’m omitting) in order of least to most control:
Airplane > cruise ship > car > train > bike > feet
But I may just think about this stuff more than most people. I never feel as in control when I’m stuck in a traffic jam or behind a slow driver versus riding a bike. Even trains feel like I have more control because I’m on my feet to/from the train and I could get off at a stop and just walk away. It’s very liberating versus a car.
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).
Absolutely! I wasn't implying otherwise. I think in the U.S. the inertia of both design and life choices is more of the problem -- I think convenience captures both of these issues in their present state. I use convenience here not to suggest actual convenience, but the appearance of convenience, much in the way that it's not really control, but the appearance of control that makes us register the preferability of the personal car.
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.
You’re focusing on these other aspects, not the actual control. I can put my bike in a car, I can ride a bike up a hill or on a dirt trail, a bike is comparatively inexpensive, I can take a bike on a train to another city. Etc.
And it would be even more obvious which form of transportation provides the most control if you had bike-first infrastructure.
But you’re also not accounting for lots of things completely out of your control, like where highways get built, potholes, funding, insurance rates, the price of rubber for new tires, oil changes, gas stations, etc. It’s the illusion of control.
We’ve designed cities specifically so that you can feel like you are in control driving a car. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
On the arterial street that I linked, intersections like this one are placed every 150 feet. I literally never seen anyone drive the way you describe, ever. Nobody does a rolling stop every 150 feet. Very few drivers even go speed limit there, maybe 1 in 20: most people do around 30 mph, a good fraction does 35 mph. In fact, if you drive the way you describe (which I doubt, because, again, I literally never, ever seen anyone drive like that), you're more likely to get into an accident (most likely getting rear ended), due to being extremely unpredictable.
> I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce your personal risk considerably.
This is, of course, right, but my point was not to demand perfection, I just want to point out that what you describe is extremely unrealistic, and virtually never observed in real life driving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s “drivers (excluding motorcyclists) seriously injured or killed in crashes and whose blood was collected at one of the par- ticipating trauma centers or by MEs” in 2020. There were 474 such drivers, 127 of which had alcohol in their system. But there were 38,000 automobile fatalities in 2020.
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".
Can you? How about controlling for mileage driven? Older drivers are e.g. more likely to be retired and drive substantially fewer miles due to not commuting.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of semantics, there are known road design and electronic/mechanical techniques that can prevent or discourage speeding, regardless of the reason for speeding. The faster a vehicle is going, the more momentum it has, which correlates with risk of death in the event of crash.
the point is that there's no reason to target speeding specifically. you want to target distractedness, recklessness, and impairment to reduce accidents, thereby obviating the problem with speed exacerbating injury and death.
i'm all for narrowing lanes and adding trees to streets as traffic calming measures in urban neighborhoods, but that's because it increases attentiveness, rather than reduces speed per se. speed governors, on the other hand, are bad because they could prevent a driver from speeding up to evade a collision.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
Ever since being rear ended in stopped traffic on the freeway, I do make a practice of stopping a bit further from traffic than normal and watching the mirror, ready to speed away on the shoulder, until there’s a decent buffer of stopped carts behind me.
This isn’t reasonable to expect everyone to do, but any individual can realistically minimize their risk in this regard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, how often would the instructor need to correct a human to drive legal in a busy city? The null hypothesis here is that driving legally in big cities is not practical.
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.
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.
>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)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The reason it takes 20 minutes to walk to a store is because of the automobile. I live in SF, and very few areas of the city are more than a 5 minute walk away from a grocery store. The problem of the automobile is a problem of development and saturation.
The automobile is ideal when few have them. This is exactly why the proliferated widely, now that we have 1.8 automobiles/household, the problems of automobile culture are inescapable unless we revert areas of our cities to pre-automobile urban design.
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.
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.
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.
> Driving makes people feel like they are in control
It doesn't just make them "feel like they are in control", the driver is in control of manouvering the car.
I guess you're arguing for the fact that not 100% of crashes are avoidable by the driver? Yes, that's true. But a very large percentage is very much avoidable by the driver and the choices they make.
In contrast to a plane crash where the passengers literally have nothing at all they can do to avoid death.
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.
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
Nice video. Yeah, that scenario is really bad. And it really shows how some roads aren't well designed or people aren't good at setting up buffers/warning zones to get people to slow down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Title should be “why we ignore hundreds of thousands of deaths in our war analogies before we even get to an analysis”. Unless I’ve missed it, neither the article nor any comments at time I’m reading acknowledge that a war of aggression led to orders of magnitude more Iraqi deaths than the scale of death the author is registering as large. I’m not going to dismiss the 3000ish US military fatalities either, but someone should mention the half a million or more deaths that were suffered by people who didn’t invade a country or start a war.
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.
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.
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?'
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Seems like a win if the reckless drivers get booted into autonomous cars, even if those cars are no better at avoiding accidents than careful human drivers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, this is a good point. There are a lot of lonely and sad old people out there, many of them living in increasingly hoarder-y situations as they age and lose executive function. We go on some pretty sad medical calls/welfare checks. Check in on your old relatives.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
>"What other engineering field has acceptable death rates?"
I'd say virtually all of them, in some form or fashion. Everything has a tradeoff. There is an acceptable death rate electrocution, if there wasn't we wouldn't allow our homes to have electricity.
> What other engineering field has acceptable death rates?
All of them?
I can't think of any engineering area which has a mandate of guaranteeing it will be 100% impossible to have an accident with the product, or it doesn't get built. Can you?
British Columbia has the Insurance Corporation of BC, a publicly-owned company that used to be the sole provider of automobile insurance in the province.
Back in the good old days, they funded improvements to high accident rate intersections, corners, roads, etc. Because as a public company, they were mandated to reduce insurance costs.
That’s all by the wayside now, of course, because we elected a government that turned the company into a general revenue cash cow, leaving little funding for safety improvements.
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."
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?
IIHS safety tests are getting more aggressive on pedestrian safety. And as their results have a huge impact on what the manufacturers do, I expect that in two years time a) a TOP SAFETY PICK+ rating will require passing a night-time pedestrian test, and b) manufacturers will figure it out.
> Want to make it less risky personally? Drive less, or drive a safer car.
In addition, avoid doing the things that cause most accidents. Don't drive impaired (sleepy, drunk, etc), pay attention, get some car control training (not required in the US so most people don't).
It'll never get you to zero risk of course, but you can have far lower chance of car crashes than the national average if you make all these choices.
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.
> 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.
An assumption that's nowhere even stated, let alone supported: that auto crashes are amenable to highway engineering changes. Why is "reckless driving" dismissed as obviously wrong?
> They need to recognize that the growing crash fatality rates are a direct challenge—even a rebuke—to their theory of traffic safety,
excuse me: growing crash fatality rates?? Shouldn't he at least demonstrate that they ARE growing?
As maerF0x0 demonstrates below, they are NOT growing, and roads and cars are certainly WAY safer than they were 50 years ago.
I came across a 1940s Edmonton Journal a while ago and one of the most remarkable differences from a modern newspaper was at the bottom centre of the front page was a number detailing the number of traffic deaths that year similar to a sort of "x days since this factory has had an accident" sign.
What a remarkable thing to track in such a prime location. Clearly at some point someone cared quite a bit about traffic deaths. Not sure if this was some hyper local Edmonton issue for a while or there was broader concern around car deaths during this part of the 20th century.
At some point though this concern about the startling amount of traffic deaths clearly ended.
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.
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.
So how much of this increase is because of increase in car weight and how much is it "road rage" or whatever you want to call it?
I definitely have noticed more aggressive drinking post covid and I hear about it more. Even a gas station worker mentioned randomly to me how people in our city are crazy drivers. This is anecdotal but I've become more worried about driving with the family.
Both are definitely a factor, but don't forget that a lot of the irritate driving behavior is because in America people are forced to drive. Even if they don't want to or really shouldn't be driving, they still have to drive to get around town. Here is a video that explains it further:
As more people do a thing, and do it more, it's natural consequences happen more. Funny how that happens?
Using my eyes to approximate the changes from this graph[1]
* Death rate per mile driven is down like 95% or nonetheless drastically since 1925.
* Current deaths per year is less than 1975, despite driving like 50% more miles
Now, safety likely could be much greater if people gave the same care to driving as in the past. Two phenomenon are likely happening :
1. Driving is more familiar, so its approached with less care, and
2. People have become accustomed to the safety technologies aiding them such that they increase the riskiness of their behavior to match their base risk tolerance. Eg: as brakes get better people drive faster and closer. As cruise radar gets better people use their phones more and rely on it braking.
Alas, this may fall to the same issue with greenhouse gasses / climate change -- Technological change is simply not fast enough for the goals of society, and a net reduction must occur. We cannot make our economy green enough soon enough such that we must simply reduce our consumption, and it seems our safety standards cannot keep up with increasing consumption
People use cars far more than they use guns, there's far more cars owned than guns, and and cars are far more regulated. However, the US is unique in the amount of gun deaths in the world... far higher than other countries, with regulation far lower.
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.
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.
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.
In 2020, there were around 173,000 highway vehicle fires reported in the United States.
These are generally totally ignored as well unless they are one of the exceptionally rare Electric Vehicle cars. Then they are all over the news ZOMG TESLA CAUGHT ON FIRE!?!
If 1000s of people die in ways we deem them able to control (be it car crashes or obesity) that's on them. If they die in ways deemed beyond their control (plane crashes) then that's something you have to stop.
This fails to note an important factor in both suicides and car crashes, which is (in the US especially) strong popular preference for personal freedom over personal safety. People would rather be able to freely own guns (even if they are routinely used for suicide) or drive their own cars at fast speeds (even if it causes deadly accidents).
Trains and planes get such strong safety assurances because they are typically commercially operated, so they are subject to another popular feature, which is commercial operators' permanent fear of liability lawsuits.
It's much harder for people to accept to trade off personal freedom for safety than it is for people to demand safety guarantees in commercial transportation services.
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.
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.
For the same reason the obituaries, listing perhaps 5-10 dead people, is nowhere near the front page of the newspaper, while a murder of just 1 or 2 often is.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Author obviously has a service to sell but the illustrative comparisons here bother me.
Amtrak runs 300 trains a day, very rarely has accidents because the environment is so controlled.
The US runs 120 million cars and trucks a day. 93 fatal accidents a day, many through driver fault.
The risk profile is entirely different. We expect people to crash cars. It's why cars have seatbelts and airbags, and why Amtrak doesn't.
We don't ignore car crashes, we just pay a lot more attention to rail failures because it shouldn't ever happen. They're preventable. Automotive accidents aren't, yet.
Again... if you don't compare the US to any other countries, this line of reasoning might seem plausible. It's not. The US outpaces comparative countries significantly, exactly because our infrastructure and culture of driving is inherently more unsafe.
Even in the safest road-user countries[1], train incidents make the news, while most car accidents don't. We know trains (and planes) are outstandingly safe by design, and we know cars are driven by idiots and lawbreakers.
Just as we intuitively expect that going to war, seeing and doing what needs to be done will have an enduring effect on people's mental health. We expect that from all higher-stress jobs.
It's the deviation from our expectations that makes it "newsworthy" or not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do stuff about it, or that we should be happy with our expectations, but they're big fish outside the scope of the point I'm trying to lean on here.
[1]: I'm British. Not the safest, but up there and relatively high density.
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.