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The day I accidentally killed a little boy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#191

Post by PerfectElement »

Pigo wrote: post #7

I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.

Same here. I cringe when I see the common HN rhetoric that parents now a days are over-protective. Go say that to parents who lost a child and now live in regret.

Kids are unpredictable. I remember being 7 years old and waiting with my mom to cross a busy street. For some reason that today is unknown to me, I decided to just run across the street as soon as the lights turned yellow. I almost got hit and my mom almost had a heart attack. I use this example to keep me alert when I'm with my daughter in a potentially dangerous but seemingly safe environment. You never know what's going on in their little heads.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#192

Post by adventured »

kmm wrote: post #176
adventured wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU. As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year. In the EU it's half that. You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.

The relevant statistic is fatalities per billion vehicle-kilometers, which attempts to even out that discrepancy, and leads to the same conclusion. Using this metric, the US still has twice the fatality rate than the UK. > In the EU it's half that. I'd like to see a source on that. I think the average American drives about 30% more.

The link/pdf below says 13,000km per driver in the EU. Other sources indicate 11,000km or 12,000km. Any of those work reasonably for this comparison.

https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_f...

The US figure is around 22,000km per person for 2017.

In Sweden for example it's closer to 12,000km per person.

There's a dramatic gulf between the distance driven in the US and most everywhere else.

The passenger vehicles per capita are also reasonably over twice that in the US as in the EU (driving is far more distributed and common per capita). Around 263m passenger vehicles in the US, and 250m in the EU, with the EU having ~743 million people.

If you double or nearly double the distance driven per year, and significantly increase the share of the population that drives, it's not far off to expect a doubling of fatalities vs what you see in the whole of the EU. In fact, I might expect worse than that, as if you're pulling so many km driving, you're probably likely to be driving more often under increased stress and inclimate weather circumstances, driving at times when you perhaps should not be etc. (due to no alternatives). The risk of a bad driving outcome likely accelerates with such substantial increases in km per capita. If you take the US figure on up to 50,000km per capita, I would expect to see an even greater acceleration of fatalities per capita.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#193

Post by jwhitlark »

adventured wrote: post #152
mattlondon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do in such a small place - the US is just too big for to happen!" I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area. US road fatalities per…

The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU. As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year. In the EU it's half that. You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.

I read years ago that outside of inexperience and illness, (being very young or very old), your likelihood of an accident scales linearly with miles driven. So, unlike flying, distance increases risk in statistically meaningful ways.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#194

Post by luckroy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #161
luckroy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true everywhere. My wife's parents live in rural Iowa on a highway that has a 45 mph speed limit. Their home is part of a small cluster of homes and their mailbox is across the road, similar to the circumstances in the OP story.

45 is a speed zone if the normal speed is 60 or 70. I just got done traveling on US 395 through most of California, and we would typically speed zone down to 45, then 40, then 35....around houses. I’m sure there are actually well defined rules about this in California. Regardless, living on a highway is not prime real estate.

Sounds like CA and IA work differently. 45 is the speed limit for that highway because it's windy. On the straighter roads, the limit is usually 50-55. However, there are still no speed zones (as you call them) for small clusters of houses.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#195

Post by pixl97 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #38
tedchs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, people had to be careful before the automobile too, you know. People could by killed by horses or wagons. The introduction of the automobile didn't make it suddenly unsafe to be in the street.

Horses had a habit of not trampling people if they could avoid it, regardless of the driver’s own intent. They were in many ways like self driving cars. These things (safety) aren’t binary. Just because it wasn’t absolutely false before doesn’t mean it was much more true after.

Horses are evil creatures that will stop your head in. The difference between now and then is we dont have an agency that keeps track of horse related deaths then.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#196

Post by croon »

mattlondon wrote: post #117
bryanlarsen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.…

+1 This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do in such a small place - the US is just too big for to happen!" I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area. US road fatalities per…

I've never understood that argument either, on any issue. Most states are smaller than countries, and if on the federal level there aren't any economies of scale or mind-share synergy, then something else is very wrong.

If a small country can do it, a large country should be able to do it much better, either per state if there's gain in small scale solutions, or on a federal level where you only have to solve the problem once for 30 times the population size.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#197

Post by somebodyfree »

christophilus wrote: post #178
Pigo wrote: post #7

I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.

I had a similar experience yesterday when my wife related a near-kidnapping that happened in a grocery store. It seems that a pair of child-traffickers attempted to take a baby out of a shopping cart. It was a male/female duo. (Side note: NEVER leave your children unattended even for a moment. In this case, the parent was right beside the cart, moving groceries from the cart to the conveyor belt. It was a brazen act…

This did not actually happen:

http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/23/ye-olde-ikea-sex-traff...

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#198

Post by lasermike026 »

Cars are the 2nd greatest engineering blunder only second to nuclear weapons. Cars are inherently dangerous. Every time you drive you risk killing someone or yourself. We must work to eliminate cars from the world, at the very least cars driven by humans. I am completely serious. There are the pollution issues too.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#199

Post by adventured »

jwhitlark wrote: post #193
adventured wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU. As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year. In the EU it's half that. You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.

I read years ago that outside of inexperience and illness, (being very young or very old), your likelihood of an accident scales linearly with miles driven. So, unlike flying, distance increases risk in statistically meaningful ways.

That's correct. In the US, in part due to poor public transportation, people often drive when they basically should not. That includes everything from really bad weather, to while intoxicated. Just alcohol-impaired driving crashes alone account for 1/3 of all US traffic deaths each year.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#200

Post by joosters »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #181
joosters wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it happened in the original article. The driver was not charged with killing someone. Even if blame is cast, in the autonomous future that blame would be upon a company, or multiple companies, whose legal departments will spend great effort diverting the blame onto other people or other companies. No one individual will be charged with killing someone, and no one person will have a death on their conscience.

You are conveniently leaving out civil liability. Yes, the self driving car won’t be put in jail because it didn’t have a murderous intent or wasn’t criminally negligent (e.g. drunk). But damn, if it kills someone, at least the insurance company will have to pay up (as it most definitely did in this case); kill more than a few people with your self driving car and you can bet there will be a recall, well, lawsuits, m…

But again, the civil liability will be on companies, who are even further removed from the direct, visceral experience of killing a person. Like you, I'm sure that there was an insurance company paying out some money for funeral costs in the original accident. To the insurers, it will be business as usual, they have been doing this for many years.

My guess is, the pressure for advances in road safety over the years have mainly come from activists, people, individuals who have seen and felt the horror of road deaths. The pressure to improve cars is much less from companies facing rising insurance costs due to liability fines. Indeed, the scandals that we routinely hear about are from car manufacturers avoiding recalls because it is far cheaper to just pay out liability claims when they happen, knowing that they will often not face them.

With the removal of drivers from road killings, there will be fewer people feeling the results of road casualties. I don't mean in any way to ignore the families of those killed on the road, of course their anguish and suffering will always be there and will be brutal. But the fact remains, there will be fewer people witnessing and feeling the effects of road deaths. And so it follows that there could well be less pressure to improve road safety.

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