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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

#251

Post by marcosdumay »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #30
luxurytent wrote: post #11

I guess pickup trucks fall under the category of SUVs? It's wild how we've lost access to our streets and neighbourhoods for the convenience of mostly suburban vehicle users. Actually not wild, but disgraceful. The majority of roads are too wide and with little options for alternative modes of transport, drivers are growingly frustrated and angry on the road. We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution i…

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…

> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is

I love how even people with radical anti-car discourse just shrugs it away and never even stop to think that half of that catch-22 problem can be solved by just the government spending some money on running empty buses.

No social reorganization, no legal change, no non-popular choice; just spending what is pennies compared to transit infrastructure.

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

#252

Post by globular-toast »

avelis wrote: post #6

It would appear Vision Zero in the US is not working. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

People value their own metal boxes on wheels over other people's bodies. That much should be abundantly clear to anyone who uses the road as a pedestrian or cyclist. I can't begin to imagine how cars can be compatible with society when people are like that.

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

#253

Post by egberts1 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #217
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop sign + a tiny roundabout is the cheapest way to this, e.g https://www.google.fr/maps/@37.4461846,-122.1654555,3a,75y,3... Someone probably died here for this roundabout to be added though.

This is not the best design, you can still go full speed through it. Much better ones actually force you to slow down, ie sub 30kmh otherwise your suspension, tires etc will get hammered a bit (or more). There are numerous ways how to do it, ie central island is wide, island's walls are high and steep, you can have speed bumps before it etc. Its has been done elsewhere and it works.

Already done.

A car leaps 7 meters into the air across the roundabout.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aniguxnz9ik

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

#254

Post by fargle »

We've definitely seen a lot more pedestrian deaths in our area in the last couple years. But it's not the prevalence or size of the cars, SUVs, trucks.

What's happening here is that there's an explosion of homeless living and walking in and around the very fast two-lane roads and one highway in particular. They are drugged out of their mind and oblivious. Just about every couple weeks there's a fatality where someone wanders into the road or crosses unsafely in the night and the car or often 18-wheeler can't see to avoid them. At highway speeds it wouldn't matter if it was a Honda, and sometimes is.

This isn't a suburban or urban area where it's people getting mowed down in the crosswalks. This is out in the desert. Just another way that fentanyl kills. Since 5 years ago, it seems to have increased almost an order of magnitude.

So as captivating as the SUV story is, at least here it's nothing to do with it. But might not be like that everywhere. But the article doesn't address this at all.

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

#255

Post by rimunroe »

winternett wrote: post #197
luxurytent wrote: post #11

I guess pickup trucks fall under the category of SUVs? It's wild how we've lost access to our streets and neighbourhoods for the convenience of mostly suburban vehicle users. Actually not wild, but disgraceful. The majority of roads are too wide and with little options for alternative modes of transport, drivers are growingly frustrated and angry on the road. We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution i…

In Washington DC, ridesharing has taken over. I think if someone truly correlated this, they'd find that having a bunch of untrained and self regulated rideshare drivers contributes greatly to these troubling statistics. Cities are also flooding roads with inexperienced bike and scooter riders on faulty equipment in favor of the revenue it provides, cities also have not updated traffic light infrastructure since the…

I'm surprised you wouldn't always be required to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Vehicles going fast speeding in dense areas are a huge driver of pedestrian fatalities so reducing speed limits sounds great to me. I've heard that lowering the speed limit from 35 to 25 mph can actually increase average throughput in cities by calming traffic. Here in Massachusetts we're trying to make it legal to use automatic speed limit enforcement (cameras with license plate readers detecting speeding vehicles).

Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!).

Barrier separated transport is great for cyclists (and pedestrians), but not if it means restricting cyclists to only riding in bicycle lanes. If you limited cyclists to only riding in places where they had dedicated pathways you'd vastly reduce the practicality of riding in any US city I've been to.

I personally feel much safer riding on streets when there are more cyclists around me. It feels like the motorists are more likely to keep an eye out and not do something careless.

We could also try and force automakers to make safer "light trucks", as they're currently much more dangerous than This article[1] suggests the rate of pedestrian fatalities by vehicle type is 50% higher for light trucks than for cars per mile driven. It's baffling that we allow such large and dangerously-designed vehicles on the road.

[1] https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/4/232

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

#256

Post by CaptainMarvel »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #225
luxurytent wrote: post #11

I guess pickup trucks fall under the category of SUVs? It's wild how we've lost access to our streets and neighbourhoods for the convenience of mostly suburban vehicle users. Actually not wild, but disgraceful. The majority of roads are too wide and with little options for alternative modes of transport, drivers are growingly frustrated and angry on the road. We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution i…

We've been regulating the wrong things when it comes to vehicles. Instead of being obsessed with MPG, we should have been obsessed with weight and size. There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. There's no reason 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150. Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it need…

Don’t forget there have been massive loopholes in vehicle emission regulations which favour larger SUVs and pick-up trucks.

If regulations actually focused on MPG, these vehicles would not be the size and weight that they are.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-lo...

Right target. Bad implementation.

Going forwards, with widespread electric vehicles, focusing directly on size and weight makes a lot of sense, in addition to MPG (or more generally, energy efficiency).

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

#257

Post by taeric »

ahoy wrote: post #122
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…

Stop signs basically dont work anywhere. If you want people to drive slowly, you have to build streets that make them do so. If anyone is interested in this stuff, the youtube channel NotJustBikes talks a lot about this and related topics. Here's a short video on how "traffic calming" infrastructure gets drivers to slow down, and we all know that stop signs just dont. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tGOBOw9s-QM

The psychology of this seems easy to explain, too. Stop signs get folks into a routine of basically, "stop, see nothing is there to stop for, start moving." Do that enough times, and you accidentally move on to "start moving" from habit alone. Contrast that with things that have you slow down, where you will slow down every time from the same learned habit. Even if you accidentally move on and potentially hit something, you will have at least slowed considerably beforehand.

(Yes, you should also be coming to a full stop, but it is impressive how rapidly people will go through the motions of "stop, look, go" to the point that they don't realize they didn't finish any one step. Similar to talking, all told. In speech, most words blend together and you don't have meaningful stops between all words.)

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

#258

Post by lotsofpulp »

marcosdumay wrote: post #251
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…

> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is I love how even people with radical anti-car discourse just shrugs it away and never even stop to think that half of that catch-22 problem can be solved by just the government spending some money on running empty buses. No social reorganization, no legal change, no non-popular choice; just spending what is pennies compared to transit infrastr…

I am speaking more to the political possibility. Things like increasing car parking costs, removing car parking, and spending money on more frequent buses is feasible, but politically impossible.

Sufficient voters will have sufficient resources to own and store their own car, and they are going to want to use it, and they are not going to want to spend money on empty buses.

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

#259

Post by marcosdumay »

evandale wrote: post #171
lotsofpulp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that does nothing, because the root problem of destinations being too far from one another is not addressed. A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it. You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car. The bus or train has to run at least every 10min, otherwise one missed connection and you’re wasting 20min+ with your refrigerated groceries. And that type of frequency is simply not econo…

> A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it. So add more buses and trains. > You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car. More buses and trains will make this happen. More bike lanes will make this happen. With the proper infrastructure people can go longer distances without a car. All these things can be done incrementally and you're trying to claim they can't be. > The bus or train has to run…

> your groceries are fine being out in the heat for 20 minutes

It's not 20 minutes. It's 20 minutes more than the normal trip duration.

That 2 hours rule seems to be health related. But a lot of food gets bad much before it becomes unsafe to eat.

Anyway, city traffic is not caused by people getting to a grocery store. That's all a red herring.

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

#260

Post by brailsafe »

piffey wrote: post #180
BitwiseFool wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better." I used to think this as well, until I started sitting in on HOA and city council meetings. Good lord, even the most seemingly simple proposals are drenched in red tape and artificial barriers imposed by busybodies. I'm not sure how to get around this, sadly.

Easy: drop the public commentary portion of development. Random old people with nothing to do all day shouldn't be allowed to delay a project by months because they want to complain about the orientation of a window on a project. If you don't own the land, weren't democratically elected, and aren't funding the property you shouldn't get a say in local land use. Ridiculous that we've even set up these systems.

Months is incredibly generous
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