Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you live? West coast or South?
My money's on mid-west, honestly.
Nailed it.
Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there no mandatory insurance to cover damages to others in the US? In my country if I want to drive a car it has to have this insurance so if I crash into someone all of the damage I do to them is covered.
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!)
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only we could take this further. What’s more in “control” than driving? Walking and riding a bike. That’s ultimate control.
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…
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#704Earlier 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…
"Not doing what I think should be done for my particular interest and priorities" isn't the same as "Ignoring." At all. By all means, continue to advocate, but the idea that "we" ignore car crashes is risible.
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 aer…
Is all this true for modern UV LEDs?
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think #2 is at least partly a result of #1 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. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32165783
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 th…
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> You are correct that they are powerful, but they wield that power rarely. Define rarely? They issued over a thousand recalls in 2021.
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
Riding a bicycle is incredibly safe. It’s cars that are dangerous, around bicyclists and pedestrians alike (and even other car drivers).
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). https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS1901....
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 als…
> 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. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/t…
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.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You have a right to be stupid, even if it results in your death. Do you? I’ve not seen hide nor hair of that right defined anywhere.
Your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Supreme Court recently ruled if it’s not in the constitution it’s not a real right sooooooo