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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

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Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#801

Post by usrusr »

theptip wrote: post #765
kamranjon wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just spent 3 months traveling across the United States and then 3 months traveling across Europe and now I’m super curious what part of Europe you visited and what part of the US you are from?

Some extremely old towns or cities might meet this description (and EU has plenty of those). Central Naples for example would probably be navigable on a 200-year old map. Modern metro areas or developed suburbs not so much.

Not just that, it's also expectations. Traffic runs on a stack not only of rules, but also of cultural conventions. And both rules and conventions exist not only defining the dos and don'ts for drivers but also defining those of traffic engineers.

When we drive in a different country we know that the driving rules are slightly different. We suspect that the conventions for driving are not quite the same. But the differences in rules and conventions of road design are mostly invisible. We may notice the most glaring differences like preferring roundabouts vs preferring crossings, but the large majority of those design principle differences, they are so close to invisible that we expect our expectations to still work. But they don't. Everything just feels subtly off, and sometimes there's a large difference standing out and we just declare that badly planned. Even when it's in fact perfectly in line with local expectationsand usage patterns, and works just fine (except for the confused foreigner). We notice a few standout differences and then blame every bit of traffic badness we encounter nonetheless on the few differences we consciously notice. The parts that work well are usually completely invisible, because traffic, in our perception, only exists when it's bad.

Rules/conventions on the design side exist for and can differ in just about every aspect, down to draining angle of road surface (do you drain symmetrically or to one side? Do you switch to draining to the inside in a curve? What about softer curves, sharper curves? A consistent threshold is very valuable, but if one country has a different consistent threshold than the other it feels "wrong" to everybody cross-driving even if no side is objectively better). Or the general shape of curves, some places have strict rules for keeping the second derivative of direction as flat as possible, with few, definitive jumps, others prefer a gentleness above all approach.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#802

Post by afiori »

epistasis wrote: post #707
rootusrootus wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To be fair most deaths are the fault the the street design that prioritize driver comfort over everything else

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#803

Post by dm319 »

notch656a wrote: post #795
tmnvix wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be that the reduction has come at the cost of children's freedom of movement?

Yes, now that they have been locked indoors all day they are free of death by car! Sadly there is inexplicable epidemic of obesity, and obesity linked disease appearing in this children later in life, what could possibly be the contributors?

I this attitude a lot, especially from Americans. A 'well if you change this to help A, this other thing B will get worse'. All while the US is at the bottom of list for both A and B.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#804

Post by a4a4a4a4 »

gernb wrote: post #731
rootusrootus wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains are a tough sell, at least in the western US. So much wide open space, trains are slow, high speed trains too expensive to justify given the sparse population. I remember once doing the math and finding that there are many times when our local light rail is less efficient than just putting four people in a sedan. When the train is full, though, it's unbeatable. EVs throw another wrench into that math since the…

The sparse population argument seems kind of BS Switzerland has a low population and is covered in trains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32180236

> sparse population

> low population

These are not the same thing. Switzerland has a pretty dense population. The section with low population is the Alps, where you're not going to put trains anyway.

https://www.atlas.bfs.admin.ch/maps/13/de/12614_75_3501_70/2...

Most people that live in remote areas have cars anyway, since sometimes busses only run twice a day. It's a tricky problem to measure "access to public transit".

(The BFS is an amazing source for information, they publish all kinds of statistics)

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#805

Post by raylad »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #625
dcsommer wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We also mark deadly intersections and turns with white crosses, one for each person who's died there. They're worth paying attention to, and I think locals at least learn to be weary of those locations.

Weary = tired

Wary = cautious about

This long lecture is making me weary.

He was wary of drunk people with an attitude.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#806

Post by weberer »

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.

But what if you took the contaminated soil around Chernobyl and shot it tens of kilometers straight up into the air, so all the radioactive isotopes get taken away by the wind and aren't a local problem any more.

That's how coal plants operate.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#807

Post by DocTomoe »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #773
lelandbatey wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would hope that such crosses instead prompt folks to change such intersections so that they will prompt fewer deaths. Maybe then we can have a rule: if we rebuild the road and we see a drop in deaths, then maybe we can remove the sign with crosses. Better yet, replace the intersection with a bus-only, bicycle-only, or rail as public transit, and then that set of crosses is permanently retired.

Sometimes there isn't much you can do. One I grew up near is a T intersection, between three farm fields. The road that butts into the other crests a hill, and the other road is right behind the crest of that hill, about 20-30 meters. There is a T intersection sign on the hill before you reach the top, but some people didn't see it or heed it. If you're following the speed limit with a dry road, it's probably safe ev…

Sounds like the prudent way of handling your example T-intersection is to rebuild it so it is no longer a T-intersection, or to move it in a way that forces people to slow down (e.g. by turning it 30 degrees, with curves leading into it, or by setting up a roundabout, or by moving it into a position where you see the crossing road more easily).

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#808

Post by teakettle42 »

jacobolus wrote: post #790
noasaservice wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the liberal response is to decrease the speed for a road that was previously 45mph, down to 30mph. Of course, the road is perfectly straight, downhill, has a center turn lane, and a multiuse pathway to the side. There's absolutely no reason for 30mph, other than for enhanced revenue generation aka cop theft.. Basically the city I lived in is going anti-car, which would be cool... if it weren't for ALSO de-priorit…

> absolutely no reason There is a very good reason: > Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. https://aaafoundation.…

> If you could systematically reduce the speed on all urban/suburban streets to no more than 20 mph (actual driving speed, not posted limit), it would be a huge safety win for humans living in those places.

What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?

Furthermore, is safety the highest priority, or is it balanced with other concerns, including road efficiency?

If safety trumps all other priorities, why don’t we just eliminate roads altogether. We can mandate that everyone wear inflatable sumo suits, assign a personal “safety monitor” to every individual, responsible for ensuring they do not make unsafe choices, and then monitor the safety monitors to make sure they’re correctly monitoring everyone else.

Or, we can accept that life has risks and that “accidental” death isn’t actually the worst thing on a societal level.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#809

Post by guythedudebro »

thrown_22 wrote: post #721
DogOfTheGaps wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% false. The COVID vaccines continue to massively decrease the risk of severe disease, including in old people.

Can you say which of: + New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. + Australia 1500 + The vaccines didn't keep people from dying Were wrong? Because a 100% false rate is a pretty high bar, especially since you already admitted 3 was true.

You almost made even me fall for the bait. Congrats.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#810

Post by teakettle42 »

montag wrote: post #797
theptip wrote: post #255

> It is widely recognized that there is an epidemic of suicides among current and former military personnel, especially those who have been on active duty in a combat theater... There were 3,481 combat deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since 9/11, there have been over 30,000 military suicides. Over 20 soldiers a day take their own lives. Pet peeve: while I really like the general point of the article, I wish the aut…

Another pet peeve: The effect of gun ownership on suicide rates goes totally ignored. Suicide accounts for 21k out of 33k annual gun deaths in the US[1]. If we're outraged by school shootings, we should be apoplectic about facilitating suicide. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Nobody needs a gun to commit suicide. In countries where guns are less available, they use hanging or poison.

Putting that aside, it’s not our role to forcibly limit the choices of healthy, responsible people just because some unhealthy, unresponsible people might make the wrong choices when given the freedom to do so.

It’s not a societal-level tragedy if someone chooses to eliminate themselves. While it’s abhorrent to even consider, the fact is, there’s very likely a net economic/social gain.

We don’t need to be protected from our own choices. We need to be protected from the authoritarian impulses of people who don’t think we’re equipped to make choices in the first place.

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