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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

#331

Post by aidenn0 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #276
apexalpha wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 needing a tune up. Doesn't this work both ways? If you focus on MPG then lighter, smaller variants of the same model will win out over bigger, heavier ones.

What does weight matter on a road trip? Unless you are exclusively driving at 30 mph uphill I don't see it mattering much. Wind resistance is the dominant force. This is the same reason why most railroads put limitations on the maximum grade they have to climb. They are mainly working against wind resistance, not gravity.

There are two numbers on the sticker for fuel efficiency. In-town and highway.

For in-town weight matters greatly (both because you essentially throw away energy every time you break, and because rolling-resistance matters more at low speed).

For highway, up until 2008 the maximum speed tested was 55, which disadvantages heavy-vehicles, as rolling resistance is a higher component of energy used at lower speeds (as a simple approximation, rolling-resistance is linear, and air-resistance is quadratic).

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

#332

Post by kpennell »

fargle wrote: post #254

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…

Yep, it must be the massive increase in jaywalking causing this.

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

#333

Post by sidewndr46 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #331
sidewndr46 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does weight matter on a road trip? Unless you are exclusively driving at 30 mph uphill I don't see it mattering much. Wind resistance is the dominant force. This is the same reason why most railroads put limitations on the maximum grade they have to climb. They are mainly working against wind resistance, not gravity.

There are two numbers on the sticker for fuel efficiency. In-town and highway. For in-town weight matters greatly (both because you essentially throw away energy every time you break, and because rolling-resistance matters more at low speed). For highway, up until 2008 the maximum speed tested was 55, which disadvantages heavy-vehicles, as rolling resistance is a higher component of energy used at lower speeds (as a…

The thread was specifically about a road trip. I can't imagine anyone taking a road trip entirely in town.

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

#334

Post by twiddling »

intotheabyss wrote: post #198
tristor wrote: post #112

Just one more evidence point for why crossovers, SUVs, and trucks are stupid passenger vehicles. There are way too many of these behemoths on our roadways, many lifted, making it worse for pedestrians, anyone driving a normal decent car, and the environment. We have an arms race of stupidity with everyone trying to get a bigger vehicle than everybody else so they can drive more aggressively, see past the other stupid…

Is it really stupid to participate in this arms race? The data suggests that you are much safer in an SUV or truck when it comes to vehicle on vehicle accidents. In fact, the average deaths per 10 billion miles for cars and light vehicles is roughly 40, which is almost twice as many deaths as compared to trucks or SUVs. It's even worse for mini 4 door cars, at around 80 deaths per 10 billion miles. The only thing saf…

There is a video of a pick up driver with a front camera which was the only way he could see the Miata in front of him.

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

#335

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

jackmott42 wrote: post #328
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on! I was there in 2008 during carpocalypse. I’ve typed this before in detail, but this is NOT A LOOPHOLE! In 2008 Obama came in and made changes to CAFE and CARB with Californias very willing help. The news headline you might have seen, and just saw again this year with Biden Admin pushing it was “All vehicles to be XX MPG by 20YY” . To which people who know absolutely nothing about vehicles clap for. People wh…

Sounds like a loophoole to me. You just wanted to get in a swipe at Obama, which is fine, he screwed up here.

No, I voted for Obama.

I was working a Chrysler when this went down. I was in the room for some of these meetings.

But, you believe whatever you want. Everyone involved knew exactly what was happening. There was no “oops, we didn’t know that would happen loophole”.

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

#336

Post by tm-guimaraes »

pc86 wrote: post #325
camdat wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think the pedestrian getting hit cares whether the car is 2,999lbs or 3,0001lbs.

I mean this is obviously false. The heavier a vehicle is, the slower it needs to be going to cause a certain amount of damage, up to and including death. How many pedestrians are hit every year? If you can lower the average weight of vehicles on the road you're directly saving lives.

not only that, but the height of the vehicle front also matters A LOT.

A SUV is perfect for killing pedestrians, it has the perfect triple combo:

* Weight * raised front to perfectly shatter a chest * low visibility for the perfect "i didn't saw him" excuse.

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

#337

Post by pas »

paul7986 wrote: post #175
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 have been seeing people drive the opposite way on a highway on the shoulder of the road to not sit in traffic. I have seen this many times in the past few years and never saw such flagrant dangerous selfish (in terms of no regards for societal laws) behavior before.

I have seen a car slow down and reverse in one of the inner lanes, because they missed the exit. This was at night in Milano. There was almost no traffic, we passed them from the innermost lane, but there were 2 more lanes to them to the right, all empty.

Some people are just really bad at this :/

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

#338

Post by twiddling »

ssully wrote: post #210
sokoloff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with making this jailable (which I do not support in the absence of a collision) is that you stopping to let a pedestrian legally cross is difficult to distinguish from you stopping in a travel lane or bike lane to pick up an Uber fare or stopping to double park near someone waiting for their own Uber. The latter two cases are actually obstacles created by anti-social behavior and are probably more common…

If you pull up behind a car stopped at a pedestrian crossing, your assumption should be they are stopped for a pedestrian.

Or they assume you're an idiot and zip around in the other lane nearly killing the pedestrian

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

#339

Post by inferiorhuman »

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…

  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 needing a tune up.
The 240 was a good car for its time, but its time was the late 70s. A 2023 Camry hybrid is rated at 53 MPG highway and is much safer for everyone involved. When the 240 was sold you could still buy a new car where you were unlikely to survive a 35 mph head on crash into a wall (e.g. crashing into something roughly the same weight).

Meanwhile Euro NCAP rates cars based on the risk to pedestrians (and NHTSA has proposed following suit). A 240 is going to be far less forgiving.

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

#340

Post by tm-guimaraes »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #330
camdat wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think the pedestrian getting hit cares whether the car is 2,999lbs or 3,0001lbs.

I always think the same thing about federal gun restrictions in the US. I can't imagine someone getting shot and thinking "I'm so glad he didn't shoot me with a barrel shorter than 16 inches!!!"

the differencing between breaking a leg and dying are kinda big... Weight and frontal height are deciding factors on that.
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