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The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

nytimes.com

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Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#81

Post by californical »

tonmoy wrote: post #55

While their conclusion is probably correct, I would have liked to seen the number of fatalities normalized by population, miles driven, number of pedestrian increase, speed limit change etc

Normalizing by miles driven will take you to the wrong conclusions. It underestimates the extra deaths directly caused by the fact that we’ve built exurbs farther and farther away from where people work over the last 20-30 years.

So maybe deaths per mile would be similar, but we’ve pushed people further and further so they have to drive more miles, increasing the deaths due to poor design.

Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people, gets hidden by statistics like “per mile” or even speed limit changes, which are also more necessary as people need to go further to get to their daily activities, rather than everything being within a short walk or safe bike ride

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#82

Post by tomjakubowski »

saool wrote: post #75
Sayrus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then surely Europe shares that trends and shows growth in pedestrian death. But that isn't the case at all, maybe Europeans are immune to smartphones: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...

Anecdotally... Having spent time driving in both Europe and Southern California, I'd say that European drivers are more attentive to their driving and way less likely to be looking at their phone while driving, since it's policed. You can often see drivers in SoCal holding their phone for a video call.

In downtown LA I routinely spot on-duty police officers, who are usually cruising in large SUVs, texting while driving.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#85

Post by bell-cot »

mcdow wrote: post #51

there’s another thing that started to get quite popular in the late 2000s… smartphones

Yep. The linked NYT article has this weak-sounding line -

> Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.

- but it is so focused on telling a long-winded story that I didn't bother checking whether they'd really tried to correct for that. (My cynical guess is "no" - since if they really cared and had ruled phones out, they'd clearly say so.)

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#86

Post by estebank »

ericpauley wrote: post #58
soperj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost like we need a study to figure out what the actual cause is. Oh, that's what the article is about, the study.

Per tfa vehicle size “ represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths” so the title is really a distraction from the (likely) root cause that GP brings up.

Could it be that the other differences are driven by differences in the built environment? Like narrower roads making people drive slower, or bollards, or alternatives to driving making it less likely to have people that shouldn't be driving doing so?

Also, 10% is a huge effect.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#89

Post by unixuser7104 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #59

WA state recently passed a law about e-bikes/e-motorcycles to deal with the issue of younger teens on these kinda moped-style e-bikes going very fast around town (and often riding quite recklessly). The law is reasonable, but it strikes me what a double standard there is for biking vs driving. For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those ride…

How would you react if told you could no longer drive your primary mode of transportation?

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#90

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

hackingonempty wrote: post #64

In the USA, an order of magnitude more people on foot are killed each year by people driving cars and trucks than are killed in mass shootings. [0][1] It is a massive problem that receives a disproportionate amount of attention. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

We never invest effort in things that provide the most value; we invest in what we're the most emotional about. The number of people killed in 9/11 and every plane hijacking is dwarfed by any single year of deaths due to either vehicle accidents or gun shootings. But we do nothing about either of those things, and instead spend $180B on TSA, to save zero lives. We then roll back things like vaccine mandates, to kill more people (mostly kids).
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