The day I accidentally killed a little boy • Hacker News Board

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#401

Post by orbitur » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 6:57 PM UTC

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…

Have you spent any time living/driving in places like Houston or Atlanta or the suburbs of Chicago or Los Angeles? How about the bay area outside of SF?

Because if you have, I can't imagine how you'd think it's a solvable problem.

The US is too big... at least a lot of cities are, in terms of distance covered. EU benefits from population growth pre car-era. Density necessitates lower speeds and smaller roads, and good luck regulating US cities into that state.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#402

Post by hnaccy » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 6:57 PM UTC

LordKano wrote: post #341

treyfitty wrote: post #322

Ever since I became a father (2 months ago), I've been seeing the world as a dangerous and an ugly place. This is confounded with the fact that, a month ago, I came to find out that my brother was bullied in HS and was never the same. My brother has been out of high school for about 9 years now, but It took me 6 whole years to consider the possibility that something was wrong. I was in undergrad and focused on my stu…

For me, that happened when I became the father of two little girls. My radar is up whenever I am in public with my daughters. I notice if strangers look for too long in their direction or if I see someone hanging out where children are, without a child of their own. Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me. We'll lock eyes for a moment and it's clear that we recognize each other (for what we are, not necessaril…

Having you head on a swivel for would-be child snatchers at all times seems like irrational paranoia.

I imagine it's the deceptively mundane that is the true danger, automobiles being the most obvious.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#403

Post by Aloha » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

lsc wrote: post #375

treyfitty wrote: post #322

Ever since I became a father (2 months ago), I've been seeing the world as a dangerous and an ugly place. This is confounded with the fact that, a month ago, I came to find out that my brother was bullied in HS and was never the same. My brother has been out of high school for about 9 years now, but It took me 6 whole years to consider the possibility that something was wrong. I was in undergrad and focused on my stu…

I think that the lesson of the article is not that weirdos or strangers make the world a dangerous and ugly place, but that we, the regular people who vote for and move to areas with zoning densities that make public transit impractical, who commute long distances in cars, make the world a dangerous and ugly place. Every time we get into a car, we are choosing to take a risk not only with our own life, but with the l…

I don't think this is the argument the author of the article was trying to send at all. This accident could have just as easily happened in a dense urban core, as it could have in suburbia.

The message was something else - sometimes, bad things just happen to people, and there is little you can do about it other than move on, and learn from the experiences.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#404

Post by mnm1 » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

leonroy wrote: post #389

parasubvert wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that kind of paranoia productive? Especially considering we are at historically low crime rates. A very young child needs supervision and precautions to prevent them from hurting themselves, as this article sadly shows, and even then, its blind bad luck sometimes. But otherwise I can’t think any of my family (two young kids, 1 year and 8 years) or friends (many kids of various ages) being super cautious about thei…

Excellent points. There was an article where the author interviewed a bunch of kids a few decades back and examined how they played and then revisited them 20 years later to see how their kids played. The original group of kids played across a very large area (something like a couple square miles of woodland) and roamed across their hometowns with little oversight. Two decades later their children by comparison were…

My parents also placed perceived (by them) safety above everything else when I was a teenager. I missed out on a lot of things in life and am still missing out on things due to never having learned essential life skills and never having had essential experiences. I still resent them for that and so does my sister. Sometimes, I think parents only think of themselves, as strange as that might sound in this context. It's extremely selfish, IMO, to hold back a child from their full potential because the parents have their own irrational issues that they're not dealing with.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#405

Post by orbitur » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

tedchs wrote: post #22

francisofascii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It is interesting to read the early history of the automobile in the U.S. Many of the pedestrian deaths in the early days were children. Speed governor laws were proposed but ultimately rejected. Motordom won the day. Now it is built into our society that people have to be super vigilant whenever we walk outside. Kids have to always be careful and limited to where they can play. It is sad how much of our freed…

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 and wagons are loud. As were the earliest cars.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#406

Post by peatmoss » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

btrettel wrote: post #397

peatmoss wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often don't think that 5 mph is significant, but it absolutely is. https://one.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/HS809012.ht... Table 2 in that link shows fatalities approximately doubling for each 5 mph increment of speed added. That doesn't even take into account the increased likelihood of hitting someone (increased speed means decreased ability to react and stop). And yes, most (U.S.) roads are designed…

Most drivers do not appreciate how dangerous speeding is, definitely. As a libertarian friend of mine will say, "people automatically drive at safe speeds". (He has a very libertarian thinking style.) This view seems to be believed by the public at large if not stated explicitly, though it is false. To be fair, one needs to consider both absolute and relative speeds. Risk increases monotonically with absolute speed,…

> Risk increases monotonically with absolute speed, but if you are going around the average speed of other vehicles on the road, that is safer than going slower.

This advice is good on highways to avoid colliding with other vehicles at high speeds. On local streets, it's better to be the neighborhood pace car and slow down :-)

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#407

Post by hycaria » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #390

hycaria wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we just at some point admit that we inevitably will lose people in accidents and that the trade off is just not worth it?

That is exactly what happened. It is why we have the world we have. And I am fine with changing that world to a better one but the path had better be incremental and realistic or it simply will not happen. And even then there will be some risk of accident.

That was not especially directed at you, in this whole thread you can find a worryingly high amount of ridiculous proposals or behaviours... Zero risk is not a thing in life, we just have to deal with it.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#408

Post by btrettel » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #359

peatmoss wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing speed limits and designing roadways to discourage high speeds. But yeah, I like to measure annual traffic fatalities in 9/11s. Here in the US, we typically do >10 of them per year. We toppled the governments of two countries, created a whole new department of our federal government, and continue to advance prosthetics at a breakneck pace to fix the men and women we send to be disfigured overseas as a respons…

>Reducing speed limits and designing roadways to discourage high speeds. One of these works. One of these handicapps your infrastructure's capacity, reduces safety in certain conditions and has a handful of other negative externalities. I would wager that were it not for someone following the speed limit the woman in OP's story would not have been cruising along in a line of traffic with her situational awareness dim…

> You can design roads to reduce speed but just posting a different sign has minimal positive effect so better limiting/controlling interaction between different types/speeds of traffic on roads you already have (e.g. adding sidewalks or bike lanes) works better there.

As a cyclist, my observation is that "share the road" signs are strongly negatively correlated with how well drivers treat cyclists. The signs are a response to bad driving but do little to improve bad driving. In effect they should be considered warnings to cyclists put up by the government to cover their asses, because it's obvious to me that almost no drivers notice them. The presence of the sign means that drivers mistreat cyclists here, and not much else. I try my best to avoid any roads with one of those signs.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#409

Post by btrettel » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

peatmoss wrote: post #406

btrettel wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most drivers do not appreciate how dangerous speeding is, definitely. As a libertarian friend of mine will say, "people automatically drive at safe speeds". (He has a very libertarian thinking style.) This view seems to be believed by the public at large if not stated explicitly, though it is false. To be fair, one needs to consider both absolute and relative speeds. Risk increases monotonically with absolute speed,…

> Risk increases monotonically with absolute speed, but if you are going around the average speed of other vehicles on the road, that is safer than going slower. This advice is good on highways to avoid colliding with other vehicles at high speeds. On local streets, it's better to be the neighborhood pace car and slow down :-)

Excellent point. I'll keep the phrase "neighborhood pace car" in mind for the future.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#410

Post by gcheong » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #343

gcheong wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of everyday technology has the potential to cause death. People sometimes get hit by trains and those run on tracks. Whether the advantage of using the technology outweigh the downsides is always the tradeoff we need to decide on with an eye on trying to eliminate the downsides as much as possible while retaining the benefits.

True, just pointing out the irony of waiting for technology to fix technology.

True, but is it any more ironic than continuing to bring more people into existence with such typical cheery optimism despite the fact that the very act of doing so also condemns them at some point to die a certain death?