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Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

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Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#41

Post by dllthomas »

Crito wrote: post #36
ansimionescu wrote: post #2

In Romanian 'car crash' is called literally 'accident' [0]. Something that's always baffled me is how friggin' thin the metal plates that make up the car are. Why the fuck does a whole industry consider this normal?! [1] Edit: thanks for the info (and for the downvotes 0: http://translate.google.com/#en/ro/car%20crash 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhCXFsQ6kKQ

Car crashes are often called "accidents" in America too. I found it interesting and insightful when my driving instructor back in highschool spent a good 10 minutes ranting about there not being any such thing as a car 'accident' (students mentioning the word "accident" later in the course were scolded, to drive home the point). Obviously you can dream up scenarios that you might be able to really call an accident, b…

This is silly. Nearly all accidents car or not can be avoided by being more defensive and alert. I dropped a glass - if I'd taken more care in handling it and been more aware of my surroundings, I probably wouldn't have. I said something dumb and accidentally hurt your feelings? Jeeze, if I'd only taken more care, been more aware of what I was saying. I accidentally deleted that file? Shoot, should have been more careful and considered better what folder I was in.

"You can do things to reduce your risk of accidents" is a vital message, using words in an atypical way can be a pedagogical tool to drive it home, but insisting that there's some deep sense in which that's genuinely the case is silly.

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#42

Post by saraid216 »

lutorm wrote: post #37
tokenadult wrote: post #25

The death rate per miles driven in the United States has fallen dramatically in my lifetime, and I can remember when the annual number of deaths was much higher.[1] That said, the article makes a very interesting claim about attitudes that we should all follow to the end of the article for further discussion here: "There’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sob…

Your edit is an important point: As far as I am aware, there are no safety standards or ratings for how likely a vehicle is to injure occupants of other vehicles, let alone unprotected pedestrians or bicyclists. If anything, the focus on occupant safety to the exclusion of others has supported the "race to the top" in terms of vehicle mass and size.

Yup.

http://www.kidsandcars.org/back-overs.html

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#44

Post by sologoub »

The dedicated bike lane is surely a great invention, but the implementation is often luck-luster and I think causes more harm than good.

Santa Monica probably has more good bike lanes than most other US cities, but I am terrified to even try the new on 28th leading from Ocean Park to Pico and beyond to Olympic. They basically took a narrow street and tried to leave space for parking and add a bike lane on top of that. As a result, most SUVs or wider cars don't fit into the designated lanes.

As the result, they either try to leave room for bicycles and drive slightly over the center or in the bike lane. If they try the former, they end up swerving violently into the bike lane to avoid on-coming traffic, so I don't know which is worse.

If the bike lanes were actually well implemented the entire way to the office, I would leave my car parked most days... as it stands now, that's not happening any time soon.

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#45

Post by rgbrenner »

abstractbill wrote: post #8
TylerE wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you WANT it to deform. A stiff structure would increase deceleration on the occupants - in addition to being more likely to get in accident in the first place - additional weight will cause the vehicle to brake less rapidly, be more likely to roll over, etc, in addition to reducing efficiency.

I've often wondered about this. Instead of just having a single thin metal skin that deforms, wouldn't it be even better to have multiple skins sandwiching a kind of honeycomb structure? That way you have even more stuff to deform and absorb the impact.

Yes, you're right.. that's why it's more than just the skin of the car.. it's called the crumple zone:

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regu...

The idea is that the entire front of the car is a crumple zone (to absorb the impact), and there's a rigid frame around the passenger compartment.

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#46

Post by saraid216 »

_delirium wrote: post #39
kiba wrote: post #7

It's such a shame. The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle.

Really depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada. Not true in the biggest North American city (NYC), though. Also not true in much of Europe.

Europe generally resisted the authoritarianism of the car, and lashed back against it fairly strongly. In the US, many cities were literally gutted in favor of making sure cars could move fast. Then we started designing with the assumption that anyone worth caring about had a car.

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#47

Post by _delirium »

trothamel wrote: post #31

In 2004, 42,836 Americans were killed in motor vehicle accidents. So this number actually represents a huge improvement. Something to realize is that potential replacements to cars are not that much safer. Highway travel is responsible for 7.7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Mass transit is responsible for 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Given the less-direct routings used by transit, it's not totally cle…

I agree that having exactly the same urban design but just replacing the transit modality is likely to produce only a minimal improvement (not to mention being difficult to do, since transit modality and urban layout are interlinked). I think the bigger wins come from shifts in commute patterns. People who take transit typically also take it for fewer miles, making the annual per-person death rates of transit riders considerably lower than the smaller per-mile gap would imply. I think having an urban layout where transit could even work is the big change. But those are pretty deeply tied, e.g. people won't move into denser "transit-oriented development" if there's no good transit to it.

That's the main factor impacting the total number, also. Americans are about 2-3x more likely to die each year while commuting than Germans are, but mostly because they have longer commutes, not because the per-mile safety is worse (though it is slightly worse).

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#48

Post by mikeash »

tokenadult wrote: post #25

The death rate per miles driven in the United States has fallen dramatically in my lifetime, and I can remember when the annual number of deaths was much higher.[1] That said, the article makes a very interesting claim about attitudes that we should all follow to the end of the article for further discussion here: "There’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sob…

I was recently in Beijing, where the supremacy of the automobile over the pedestrian is just about taken to its logical conclusion.

The US puts cars on a high footing compared to pedestrians, with pedestrians restricted to crossing roads at certain points, generally better signaling and routes for cars, etc. Yet cars are still required to yield to pedestrians when e.g. turning or at a marked crosswalk.

In Beijing, the idea of yielding to pedestrians when turning doesn't seem to exist. Crossing a major intersection, even with full signaling, is an adventure and an exercise in attempting to look in all directions simultaneously. It's even worse than you might think, because the sidewalk often doubles as a parking lot, so somebody might by trying to drive up where you're waiting, or worse, come up behind you! And you are expected to yield. It got to the point where I measured the difficulty of any walk not in terms of distance but in terms of how many intersections I'd have to cross.

Beijing is pretty walkable overall but at the same time this can make it extremely unpleasant, depending on where you are. I wonder if that might not be where the US is heading if we're not careful about it.

(The Chinese are strangely cavalier about cars in general. Essentially nobody wears seat belts, for example, and drunk driving is common. No surprise that their death rate per vehicle is three times higher than the US's. Seat belts would be such an easy way to reduce that. It's hard to understand.)

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#49

Post by sien »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #6

"Murder Machines"? Come on. Not all deaths are murder. We Americans have this idea that nothing bad should ever happen, that we should find a way to prevent it. It's a goal to shoot for, certainly. But calling it murder if you don't reach that goal? No. Can we climb down from the overheated rhetoric? It smells like propaganda.

The Economist had a much better article on 25 Jan

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21595031-rich-co...

That was about how car deaths will probably be the leading killer in the developing world within a few years exceeding HIV.

But without the incorrect shock title it wasn't getting posted around the net nearly as much.

Also, technically there would very probably be a few murders committed with cars each year. But it would be a vastly lower number than the total number of fatalities.

Re: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

#50

Post by barrkel »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #28
wyager wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern lightweight cars are significantly safer than old, heavy cars. Thick steel is good for protecting you from explosions, not collisions.

Equivalent car classes are much heavier now than they were 20+ years ago. It's because of the weight of airbags and safety features.

Car class distribution has changed in the past 20+ years.
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