Picachu face oh wow, making an suv the among the most popular cars in a country and designing 80+% of that country for car use exclusively ignoring a lot of research related to pedestrian safety can lead to this??? Truly surprised!
U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
361–370 of 625 posts
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#362We only spend $50B on infrastructure related to roads.
Double or triple that on safety measures and making it 100x more enjoyable to walk (bridges, art, etc.) would be a huge ROI.
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
CAFE has had an exception or lower standard for light trucks and an exception for heavy trucks since 1978, and vehicles used as passenger vehicles but meeting either of the truck categories have been incentivized since then; its not something that started 30 years later.
The rise of SUVs and Minivans was a product of this — in the 1980s, not the late 00s.
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. Because batteries are heavy. Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever? > There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150. Did that have a back seat big enough for adults to sit in? If not, then there's your reason.
Maybe F-150's should be considered impractical family vehicles instead of trying to shoehorn them into a do-everything-everywhere-all-the-time kind of vehicle?
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's always amazing to me how on this engineering-heavy forum, so many users fail to recognize the benefit some simple engineering can deliver.
how is setting up a few cameras and issuing serious tickets to idiots not an engineering solution?
obviously it's not a long-term one, as the only real one is to offer effective alternative to all this constant mandatory carmageddon by having walkable/bikeable cities, blablabla.
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#366I 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…
My suburb does as much as it can to make itself walkable. There are crossings and sidewalks everywhere, but it's still a low density suburb so it doesn't make much sense to walk almost anywhere (my kid does walk to school as it happens to be close, but that's it). So while they are trying to address this problem, very few people actually walk. But all of this said, I want low density. Having lived many years in a hig…
> I think that high density living is inhuman.
Which is laughable because for most of human history, we've lived extremely close to each other. Cavemen didn't have acre plots separate from other cavemen.
>I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go
Your lifestyle requires a massive subsidy from the federal government, so you aren't really willing to pay for it. Suburbs generally require other places around them to also have massive parking lots and roads to accommodate the car lifestyle. If suburbanites just stayed in their bland community, it'd be fine, you all want to drive really fast through other people's communities and you clog up our roads.
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#367Earlier 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.
I think it's just people defining loophole differently. In our minds, it sure sounds like some unintended trickery to get around a rule. I think OP is saying that it was known and intentional. Is it still a loophole? By definition, I think it is, but not how it's usually used.
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. Because batteries are heavy. Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever? > There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150. Did that have a back seat big enough for adults to sit in? If not, then there's your reason.
> Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever?
why not? At least until bateries are good enough. Heavy EVs are not exactly more environmentally friendly than ICEs, they just make different trade-offs.
Instead of thinking of the dangers of an ICE sedan, and showing an abomination called an EV sedan, just have a simple EV city car, or invest in actually humane mass transit, propper city planning, etc. If you use just your ICE sedan for longer trips, that's decent enough.
EV replacement for our current type of car types are just an hacky way that doesn't really help, just changes the problems.
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sp…
The person you're responding to sounds like they are rolling off a litany of automotive industry talking points. Especially the jab about "faulty equipment" in the form of bikes and scooters.
Ah yes, we need to quarantine pedestrians far away from cars, further locking them out of the physical spaces in their cities. Plus build more parking garages (what? lol). Oh, and let's take aim at the scourge of ride-sharing, all those inexperienced drivers are a menace! Get rid of scooters and bike-share programs while we're at it, all those inexperienced bikers/scooters are practically _trying_ to get themselves run over.
Why not take it a step further? While we're at it, we need more economic incentives in the form of tax breaks or other mechanisms to increase new car sales to help solve the problems with these pesky pedestrians getting themselves maimed and killed. I mean older vehicles are inherently less safe right? [please ignore the obvious design choices on new trucks and SUVs that serve no function outside of aesthetics which are contributing to the killing of pedestrians, especially children]
Re: U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
#370This article seems to be based on a butchery of statistics, for the sake of a headline. It's referring to total deaths, not per capita, let alone per pedestrian. The article breathlessly claims that, "...more than 7,500 pedestrians were killed by drivers last year — the highest number since 1981." Not only has the population increased by more than 100 million people since 1981, but the number of pedestrians has incre…
>It's referring to total deaths, not per capita, let alone per pedestrian.
What exactly does it matter? Deaths per capita is a stupid statistic anyway. The pedestrian deaths are at least 3 times as numerous in the USA than, for example, the Nordic countries. (in terms of pedestrian deaths/driven distance)
If anything, the article is trying to make a point that the car centricism in the US is bad, and steps should be taken to make it less so.