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U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

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Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#101

Post by wussboy »

apsec112 wrote: post #23

I'm not even slightly surprised by this, sadly. Cops need to start ticketing people who drive like maniacs. I drive in DC, and every week I almost get hit by some loon going 30+ over the limit who doesn't care that I'm in the lane they're merging into. I've never seen anyone get ticketed. The roads have become something out of Mad Max , just pure developing-world anarchy.

Enforcement is not the solution because it requires constant vigilance. Road design is because you can build the road in a way that brings about the speed/safety envelope you desire, and then it always works correctly whether anyone is monitoring it or not.

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#102

Post by FigurativeVoid »

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

The amount of just reckless driving I see on a daily basis is staggering. People patently don’t pay attention. One hand on the phone and another eating.

Even without phones, speeding is basically expected in the US.

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#103

Post by LeifCarrotson »

carimura wrote: post #60
jdalgetty wrote: post #33

I live in a subdivision full of young families with kids. I'm also a runner, an avid dog walker and someone who walks his kids to and from school every day. As someone out on foot on a daily basis I am constantly blown away by the amount of people speeding on residential streets and not stopping at stop signs. I don't get it! These are clearly people who live in these neighbourhoods yet they don't care enough about t…

same re: runner+kids. It's insane. I watch people blatantly blow through red lights on a daily basis. Someone once grabbed my mother-in-law and pulled her back because she walked when the signal said walk and she would have been hit. Until now I didn't really have any data, just my eyes, and my brain, and I knew things weren't trending well. Sad.

Same. I live within a mile of an elementary school and giant park that I was excited to allow my kids to roam to and to run to myself. There's 300m of 35mph road and a network of 25mph residential streets. The latter feel pretty safe, the 35mph section, though, sees people going 55mph while staring at their phones on a regular basis.

I bike to and from work most days, decked out in fluorescent colors and reflectors and blinky lights that should make a negligent vehicular homicide civil suit a slam-dunk for my wife, plus an excellent set of life insurance policies if that doesn't work.

To my shame, I have a large old SUV that I use on days I can't bike, but it brings me a perverse joy to drive at or just under the actual speed limit on my road and watch the traffic pile up behind me.

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#104

Post by lotsofpulp »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #81
lotsofpulp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many areas, it would take a ton of work in the effort of making destinations closer to each other. Huge parking lots, setbacks, wide roads, and detached houses on their own quarter, or even eighth, of an acre lot make it so the choice between walking/bicycling and using a personal car is not much of a choice. Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would…

Are pedestrian and bike bridged out of the question?

In my opinion, yes. At its root, it’s simply physics. Once the distances between destinations becomes sufficiently large, it is impossible, especially for the elderly or children.

Search for Target/Costco/Best Buy/Walmart/Kroger/mall and do a street view in US suburbs and see if you can walk those distances carrying things.

You could easily be looking at a quarter mile just from one store entrance to its adjacent store entrance, or even crossing the road which is usually 8+ lanes.

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#105

Post by yboris »

Also related, one of my favorite philosophy papers: Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked? by Douglas Husak

Argues that SUVs are immoral because of the high crash incompatibility. They cause more damage to others (disproportionally), and ironically don't provide more safety for drivers due to higher rollover instances.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#106

Post by mbauman »

rcme wrote: post #37

A large issue in the US is that local communities have very little control over many of the roads in their communities. In addition to locally controlled roads, there are county roads, state roads, and interstates. As a result, even if a community wants to make their road safer, they have no power to do so. There is a county road in my town. The crosswalks make no sense and the road needs to be narrowed to force traf…

Perfect example here is that Indiana has just created a law that explicitly forbids a singular targeted city from adding _any_ new restrictions against turning right on red in _any_ intersection.

https://legiscan.com/IN/bill/HB1050/2023

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#107

Post by i80and »

hermannj314 wrote: post #46

In many states you are required to stop if a pedestrian is crossing the street. What has happened a lot is I will stop to let a pedestrian cross the street at a legal cross walk and the person behind me will assume I am an idiot, honk, and speed around me. My intuition is this is the cause of a significant amount of pedestrian deaths: impatient drivers that assume every stopped car is just an obstacle to zip around.…

This happened to me and it left me with lasting anxiety. I stopped in town at a crosswalk for a pedestrian waiting to cross, and the car a couple seconds behind me went around and tore through the crosswalk.

I don't know what the answer is. Drivers make mistakes -- they don't see things, they might be preoccupied, etc. etc. And yeah, all too often they're negligent to the point of malice. But urban landscapes are almost explicitly designed to force those misjudgements to have literally life-ending consequences, and I haven't seen any large-scale societal acknowledgement of that.

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#108

Post by conductr »

ethanbond wrote: post #34
WillPostForFood wrote: post #13

Article ignores it, but looking at the source data you can see pedestrian deaths were flat, then a large spike in 2020 during Covid, and now we are at a new higher plateau. Cause is not a change in roads, or cars, or more SUVs. Covid/lockdowns changed the way people drive. Less civility, less police enforcement, more chaos. Driving is noticeably worse and more stressful than pre-Covid.

Why would COVID/lockdowns have “changed the way people drive?” Any proposed mechanism? Seems more likely you had a lot of shifting around of people’s driving (e.g. city dwellers moving to suburbs)

The roads were wide open for 2+ years, people got used to driving very fast and not really paying attention to their surroundings because there wasn't much other traffic to start with. People started running red lights because not other traffic to wait on. You could drive recklessly without much risk. Now people are still driving recklessly but have a lot more cars and activity around them.

One thing that I've noticed is people moved to a suburb or took a new job that was a reasonable commute at the time. Now that traffic came back, it's not a reasonable commute anymore so they're trying to drive like crazy to get back and forth.

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#109

Post by pkulak »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #69
pkulak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, turning Houston into Madrid would be very hard. But this is one of the most incrementally solvable problems I've ever seen. There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better.

In the handful jurisdictions where I am familiar with zoning laws and the permitting process, low cost and low effort is not how I would describe any part of even a straightforward approval. Lord help you if you need a variance, and I cannot even imagine what eminent domain on that scale would look like. I do not see how the change would even be possible without tearing buildings down and building new ones closer to…

I meant stuff like city counsel passing a new zoning law. Maybe some concrete bollards to make a protected bike lane. Run a few more busses and trains. That kind of thing.

Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

#110

Post by artimaeis »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #38
WillPostForFood wrote: post #13

Article ignores it, but looking at the source data you can see pedestrian deaths were flat, then a large spike in 2020 during Covid, and now we are at a new higher plateau. Cause is not a change in roads, or cars, or more SUVs. Covid/lockdowns changed the way people drive. Less civility, less police enforcement, more chaos. Driving is noticeably worse and more stressful than pre-Covid.

I promise you that this is not a result of "less police enforcement".

I'm pretty critical of police forces -- but my experience living in Charlotte NC for the past 8 years leads me to believe that police enforcement is at least a part of the equation.

We had a pretty large step-back in traffic enforcement [1][2] starting in 2019. Since the pandemic, traffic around the city has taken on a decidedly Mad-Max vibe. _Every_ time I drive, I see red lights get run. Most times I get on the interstate I see people passing on the shoulder. _Every_ time I get on the interstate I see people driving recklessly fast. Not high-speed flow-of-traffic fast, but 20-30 mph faster than traffic, weaving in and out of traffic without using indicators. Uptown residents have been complaining about the regular street-racing incidents since 2020.

I'm confident there are other factors, and I know not every city has the same problems as Charlotte. But for sure the fact that the police have just stopped enforcing most of the traffic laws has played a part.

[1] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/...

[2] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article26...

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