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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

strongtowns.org

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Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#631

Post by moistly »

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#632

Post by hnick »

vel0city wrote: post #429
_yoqn wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#633

Post by MichaelCollins »

6yyyyyy wrote: post #620
MichaelCollins wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refusal to drink and drive is not an illusion. I've been refusing to do that successfully my entire life.

But other drivers can drink, and you can't do anything about that. Are you a good enough driver to save yourself in this situation? https://litter.catbox.moe/ed5an4.webm

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#634

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #335
ok_dad wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#635

Post by pclmulqdq »

cratermoon wrote: post #587
pclmulqdq wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is the opposite of most western countries, where the incentives are to over-report. Ahem. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing... https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/01/06/desantis-admits-roughl... https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/19/rebekah-jon...

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#636

Post by epistasis »

mywittyname wrote: post #156
epistasis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> Deaths are rising, yet what changes are happening? https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#637

Post by scoofy »

naasking wrote: post #304
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…

> 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…

>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

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#638

Post by bergenty »

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…

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#639

Post by zip1234 »

clairity wrote: post #439
zip1234 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#640

Post by scoofy »

988747 wrote: post #567
kennywinker wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure 40k deaths per year and countless more severe injuries, permanent disabilities, and financial destitutions count as it going mostly ok

It can be if you compare it to: 1. Total US population, and total deaths per year 2. Amount of miles traveled yearly.

Except that they are dramatically higher than in comparable countries. It's very obvious that the US is overwhelmingly worse off in traffic deaths.
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