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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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#52

Post by sukuriant »

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.

Modern European tests include pedestrian safety ratings:

https://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/euroncap/crash_tests.h...

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

#53

Post by _delirium »

saraid216 wrote: post #46
_delirium wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder to what extent some of that is a fortunate combination of circumstances. Many European countries were quite positive on highways in the mid 20th century. But city centers mostly escaped having American-style freeways bulldozed through them, I think out of urban-preservation reasons more than anti-car or pro-transit sentiment. Same reason NYC ended up finally pushing back on Robert Moses's plans. So the freeways mostly stopped at the edges.

At the height of the uncontrolled car-ification of Copenhagen in the '70s the place was totally crawling with automobiles to the exclusion of other modalities, though. It's pretty weird to look at some photos from that era, with car traffic taking up almost the whole width of narrow streets in the city center, pedestrians confined to narrow ledge-like sidewalks, and bikes either absent or trying their luck in traffic. Now most of those streets have been either pedestrianized, turned into mixed-traffic, low-speed "living streets", or had the roads narrowed to one lane to make room for bike lanes and/or wider sidewalks.

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

#54

Post by pugz »

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.

The Australasian New Car Assessment Program provides a website howsafeisyourcar.com.au. A recent interesting addition is precisely what you say: it measures pedestrian safety in collisions with specific car models. For example, the 2013 VW Polo:

http://www.howsafeisyourcar.com.au/2013/Volkswagen/Polo/Tren...

"The bumper provided mixed protection for pedestrians' legs. The front edge of the bonnet was marginal to poor. The centre of the bonnet offered good protection to a child's head but poorer protection towards the edges. In most areas likely to be struck by an adult's head, poor protection was provided."

EDIT: Seems three of us posted in the same minute. :)

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

#56

Post by _delirium »

sologoub wrote: post #44

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 of issues with those kinds of lanes, Copenhagen changed direction a bit ago and now puts in only bike lanes physically separated by a curb from the car lanes, at least where possible (excluding some narrow streets). If there's street parking, the lane is also typically on the other side of the parked cars (the sidewalk side), making it even more impossible for someone to swerve from the car lanes into the bike lane. Also reduces "door" incidents, since the lane isn't on the driver-door side of parked cars. In addition to being much safer for cyclists, it also helps reduce drivers' need to watch out for the other direction, cyclists unexpectedly swerving into the auto lanes, e.g. to pass another cyclist. That part becomes particularly important if getting people to bike is actually successful: if you have a major route with a steady stream of >10 cyclists/minute, you really want that stream managed in its own space, segregated from both the cars and pedestrians.

I believe some of these kinds of "really separated" bike lanes exist in the U.S., but not many. The last statistics I saw were that the U.S. (in total) has about 200 miles of physically protected bike lanes (including bike-only routes), while Greater Copenhagen alone has 600 miles of them.

edit: some photos of various configurations, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Physically_separ...

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

#57

Post by sukuriant »

bunderbunder wrote: post #9
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.

Murder? No. Negligent homicide? Yes.

That's not entirely fair. Maybe in some of the cases; but, I've seen people do some really, really, REALLY unwise things as pedestrians that they're lucky someone was paying a huge amount of attention so they weren't hit.

The most pressing example in my mind is a woman cross the street in the middle of a rain shower, within 15 yards, probably much less (my mind's eye paints the memory as 'the edge of my car was here and the lady was RIGHT THERE!!!'), of me and crossing several lanes of traffic with her umbrella all out like she owned the place. She wasn't at a crosswalk, she was crossing the road a 100ish yards after a major turn, and I don't remember if I was the first car in a long line of cars or there were several cars passing and then she elected to walk in front of mine, but I'm very glad I was hyper-attentive so that I could brake in time and that my brakes were 100% up to spec, and my tires had enough tred on them.

She intentionally put herself into harms way and any number of minor failures, including me looking to where I needed to be, because it was RIGHT AFTER A TURN (think of where your eyes go when you're taking a turn, it's not to the far corner ahead, it's to where your wheel-edge is and where your lane is placed, so you don't hit someone more likely to be hit, like the car that's attempting the exact same manuever beside you), or having just that little bit less attention because I was adjusting a radio dial to not have her thumped up onto my roof.

It's not always the driver's fault. Some pedestrians need to realize that we, focused drivers, are still rocketing a couple tons of steel in a direction.

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

#58

Post by mikeash »

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'd really like to see that broken down by type of transit, as well as deaths for transit passengers versus people killed in e.g. private cars involved in accidents with busses.

My guess, and this is very much a guess, is that buses will be disproportionately dangerous, and a fair number of those killed by busses are in cars that collide with them.

For one random example, the DC metro has seen 9 deaths in the past five years and appears to run at about 1.8 billion passenger-miles per year, for a fatality rate of around 0.1 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles (or 1 per billion). This is very rough as deaths are spiky (those nine deaths happened all at once almost five years ago) and the long-term average is tough to judge.

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

#59

Post by briantakita »

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…

Moderation is key. If we can cut down on driving, things would be even better.

Making telecommuting a standard business practice would be huge in reducing pollution, energy usage, etc. It would also allow people to spend more time with their families & live where they want.

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

#60

Post by sologoub »

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…

Of the 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles, are there any statistics to show what percentage of these are the result or have a contributing factor of cars involved?

It would be fascinating to see if the 5.4 statistic would drop significantly if the car-related deaths were factored out.

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