Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

strongtowns.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 1001 posts

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#591

Post by xyzzyz »

willcipriano wrote: post #207
xyzzyz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (prob…

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…

> 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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#592

Post by Bolkan »

flaque wrote: post #96

There’s an audio version of the same point here: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-drip-drip-drip-of-traf... A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life. When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesi…

> When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again.

They do that because planes and trains are expensive and owned by big corps/government.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#593

Post by anigbrowl »

WalterBright wrote: post #399
CodeAndCuffs wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 peopl…

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#594

Post by dcsommer »

hibikir wrote: post #569
flaque wrote: post #96

There’s an audio version of the same point here: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-drip-drip-drip-of-traf... A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life. When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesi…

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…

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.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#595

Post by woevdbz »

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#596

Post by MichaelCollins »

nightfly wrote: post #470
KptMarchewa wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same happened to nuclear energy, despite the fact that coal kills 100x people yearly than total nuclear energy 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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#597

Post by icelancer »

ETH_start wrote: post #590
ansible wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19... https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... Lockdowns have devasted education: https://www.economist.com/international/2022/0…

Lockdown-type measures will do more long-term damage to the poor and exacerbate socio-economic inequality than COVID, the actual disease, ever could.

Truly the "it is what it is" method of governance.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#598

Post by throwaway6734 »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #466
throwaway6734 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Now I'm really curious for the reasoning behind that.

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

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#599

Post by throwaway6734 »

elihu wrote: post #544
throwaway6734 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shoul…

Agree!

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#600

Post by thrown_22 »

aurelius12 wrote: post #586
alex_young wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China represents 18% of the world's population, yet 0.07% of COVID-19 fatalities. Seems like there is some value in their approach.

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.

And are now catching up.

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.

Post reply on HN