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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

#391

Post by nradov »

BorgHunter wrote: post #87
ecshafer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a relatively easy fix. Remove zoning regulation and the market should build towards denser towns. It is outright illegal to build dense right now in most of the US. There are other ares that need to be fixed that all exacerbate the issue: The NHSTA recommends large wide roads for moving vehicles faster, CAFE standards makes cars heavier and larger since trucks / suvs don't have the same regulations, FHA loans…

Is zoning regulation as a concept really the root cause, though? Houston famously has no zoning code and is fairly lax with land use generally (although it isn't completely the Wild West), and it isn't very dense. It seems like zoning could even be a key part of the solution, being a tool that could be used to mandate that new construction be more dense around mass transit hubs, for instance. There are lots of anti-d…

Preferences vary, but the vast majority of Americans prefer to spread out and live in single-family detached houses with some space and privacy. HN users love to complain that this is irrational or wasteful or imposes externalities on others. Those are valid points, but they don't change the choices that home buyers make.

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

#392

Post by sidewndr46 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #354
sidewndr46 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!!!"

Clearly the barrel-length restrictions were intended to be about how easy they are to conceal. There was an attempt to draw a distinction between long-guns and hand-guns. The NFA ended up exempting pistols, which results in the strange situation where manufacturing a pistol to fire a .223 Remmington is legal, but shortening an AR-15 is not. Perhaps if they only exempted revolvers it would make more sense.

That is false. The objective was to prevent the handgun ban from being circumvented. The handgun ban never became law but we're left with an oddball restriction around short barrels on rifles.

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

#393

Post by verall »

vwcx wrote: post #371
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a middle ground; I live in a detached, standalone house in small east coast city, and I am within a 10 minute walk to a really good coffee shop/bakery, a pharmacy, small public library, a few restaurants, small boutique kitchenware and fabric/clothing shops, etc. I'm also a couple of blocks away from a bus stop that can take me to the train station. The neighborhood is dense, but there are no high-rises, and…

Where do the people who staff those establishments live? How do they get to their jobs, and at what cost?

Probably in nearishby highrises or in detached homes with roommates, by either car or bus, because it's an east coast city so those things most likely exist.

Contrast with Houston, say, where in most areas streets are not really crossable.

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

#394

Post by BluePen7 »

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…

Can confirm, my one incident is a homeless guy who decided to sail down a hill on his BMX at night, wearing all black, and run a red light against my right-of-way.

He "hit me" as much as I hit him, but given I'm in a car on a freeway exit, obviously he was worse for wear.

But on the plus side, I do drive a low slung sports sedan so he got to tumble and walk away alive at least. Car was a write-off though.

If he'd been hit by a truck like the one my tenant drives (GMC Sierra 3500), the hood is about eye-level for me, and I'm 5'11, it probably would have been a lot worse.

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

#395

Post by giraffe_lady »

e40 wrote: post #190
ethanbond wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "defund the police" movement that happened just before Covid has contributed to police pulling back enforcement of all sorts of things. Also, many cities have a "no chase" rule for police now because of high-profile crashes which killed people. Guessing the lawsuit payouts were large and contributed to the decisions. I think people realized there are no consequences so decided to do what the heck they wanted.

> The "defund the police" movement that happened just before Covid has contributed to police pulling back enforcement of all sorts of things.

How? That movement failed and police have more funding now. If you're paying them more and they're doing less that's a problem between y'all. You got what you wanted you don't also get to blame us.

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

#396

Post by _Microft »

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.

Road damage scales with fourth power of axle load.

A car that is 50% heavier does 5 times the damage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

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

#397

Post by pnutjam »

VohuMana wrote: post #345
sidewndr46 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why drivers are increasingly angry where I live is because there is no enforcement of traffic laws at all. Red lights are run nonstop, drivers use bicycle lanes as travel lanes, etc. I watched someone just reverse down a road opposite the direction of travel yesterday. Like it was no big deal.

This has been my experience, in my area people have even found ways around the newly installed red light cameras, they just remove their license plate. Usually you would get hit with a pretty big ticket for that but the police are not enforcing any sort of traffic laws and relying on cameras to do the enforcing.

This is what happens when every traffic stop is billed as a combat situation. Cops feel like their dangerous (and they are) because America can't pass sensible gun restrictions.

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

#398

Post by terramex »

egberts1 wrote: post #253
saiya-jin wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Important to mention that driver was drunk out of his mind (2.8‰ BAC)

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

#399

Post by pastage »

winternett wrote: post #381
rimunroe wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Telling pedestrians they can walk into a busy street when the signal clearly shows to not cross is not intelligent behavior. Regardless of right of way or safety stances, there is everything from impaired drivers to drivers with faulty brakes and other car issues that make crossing at any time unexpectedly unreasonable. Pedestrians should only be told by officials to cross streets when signals indicate it's safe (as…

Traffic lights are there for cars, of course pedestrians and everyone else should be able to ignore them. They are not there for safety, and unprotected road users are superb at managing risks.

Jaywalking should never be a crime if you live in such a community you really have along way to go.

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

#400

Post by timbit42 »

technothrasher wrote: post #372
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.…

> In many states you are required to stop if a pedestrian is crossing the street. Wait, are there states where this is not required?

Not if there isn't a crosswalk.
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