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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

#121

Post by saraid216 »

mikeash wrote: post #48
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, th…

> In Beijing, the idea of yielding to pedestrians when turning doesn't seem to exist.

It's odd. I remember when people were bemused by the bicycle city, and yet I also remember when I learned that the way to cross the street in Beijing was never to indicate that you could see a car coming, because then they'd assume you'd stop. Instead, you watch for traffic out of your peripheral vision and keep your eyes forward so that they'd feel you couldn't see them.

I wonder if that's still common wisdom.

> 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.

One of the possibly most frustrating moments I had was recently in downtown San Jose. My cousin and I (and others) had finished lunch and left into an alleyway. Her four-year-old son cheerfully ran out to the sidewalk, and we panicked because it would have been so easy for him to keep going out to the street itself.

There was no harm (he indignantly pointed out that he had not gone into the street), but it perplexes me why we find these kinds of risks acceptable. Every block, we've essentially put down a death trap for the young. I could understand it if this was the edge of the untamed wilds and we couldn't really do anything about the wolf pack in the area, but... we built these cities.

> The Chinese are strangely cavalier about cars in general. Essentially nobody wears seat belts, for example,

I've noticed this is prevalent elsewhere in Asia: there are often similar claims made about Mumbai or Bangkok.

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

#122

Post by bdcravens »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #76
bdcravens wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said of telephones and the Internet.

which dont kill people in quite the same way

The lethality of cars had nothing to do with the point I was responding to.

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

#123

Post by arg01 »

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.

Honeycombs are a difficult structure to manufacture. They often get mentioned in relation to 3d printing as one of the useful application. They're actually a very strong structure for the amount of material used and were even hand pieced together from wood for some aircraft during world war 2 rather than using more easily manufactured materials due to this advantage.

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

#124

Post by bruce511 »

pdonis wrote: post #105

The article quotes the 30,000 per year number, but it only really talks about fatalities or injuries to pedestrians by cars. The 30,000 number includes fatalities or injuries to people in cars as well. So a lot of relevant data is being left out. Wikipedia has a link to NHTSA figures that give more detail. The link is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in... From the 2010 data: * 32,885 t…

There seems to be some serious low-hanging fruit here with regard to improving these numbers. Imagine if you took the billions currently spent by the TSA and applied it to road safety?

Given what the rest of world does with airport security, it's possible to maintain airport security while at the same time freeing up massive resources which could be channeled into education (seriously, no seatbelts in 2014? ), policing of drunk driving, zero tolerance for speeding and so on.

Of course this won't happen. Regardless of the fact it is waay more dangerous to drive to the airport than it is to fly on a plane - it's easy to do a big song and dance at the airport to "make flying safer" (hint: it's exactly as safe as it is everywhere else where they don't succumb to the TSA rhetoric).

Americans don't care about the TSA at airports precisely because most Americans don't fly. So politically it costs no votes, (and with enough rhetoric some Americans even believe it's making things safer) whereas if you started creating or enforcing speed restrictions or drunk driving there'd be endless Libertarian arguments about the perils of big government, and the "freedom" of motor cyclists to not wear a helmet if they so choose.

There actually could be a really useful agency with the words Trasportation and Safety in the name, but it isn't the one that currently exists.

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

#125

Post by YokoZar »

crazy1van wrote: post #116
grellas wrote: post #64

As the article points out, "auto safety" itself has had a huge push from consumer advocates at least since Ralph Nader highlighted the risks of car design defects in the 1960s. That said, a few points about the law and auto safety: 1. U.S. law is tied to individual responsibility for conduct that is wrongful. As the auto industry developed over the past century, that meant that those who sought to drive by what the l…

"While it is true that high speeds clearly enlarge such risks, it is a bit disingenuous to claim this as a primary concern while simultaneously forcing cars to be made smaller and smaller out of concern for increasing car mileage per gallon and promoting environmental goals. " Great point. In fact, I think the published collision ratings are based on colliding with a car in the same weight class. That is required bec…

Weight is also an overwhelming factor in the OTHER person's survival in an accident. We do not make the general public safer by encouraging an arms race of heavier and heavier vehicles.

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

#126

Post by Gracana »

graylights wrote: post #91
sp332 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an argument for introducing a separate class of "city car" to the USA. On a highway, I want a big comfy car that can be efficient at 55-65 MPH, and protect me in a collision at those speeds. In a city, I don't really need that.

That big comfy car that protects you from highway collisions accomplishes that by shifting the impact toward the smaller car. It doesn't increase overall highway safety, just steals it from others in your favor.

What about all the safety features found in larger cars? What about single-vehicle accidents? I don't need to drive a logging truck to feel safe, but I'd much rather drive a new corolla than an 80s model. Solid pillars and increased crumple zones and multiple airbags make a car bulkier, but the safety improvement is much greater than a simple function of weight.

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

#127

Post by socrates1998 »

I have always felt one of the saddest things about our society is that we accept these very preventable deaths.

When I was a teacher, about once a year a student would die in an accident. It just seemed so unnecessary, a 17 year healthy kid dead because we can't make cars safe.

I can't imagine cars without seat belts, but most Americans didn't bother with them before Nader came along.

It's definitely a black eye on our whole society when we can't be bothered to keep a basic right of transportation safe.

Maybe driverless cars are the answer, I don't know.

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

#128

Post by Gracana »

crazy1van wrote: post #119
_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.

"Really depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada" What is unfortunate about this? Americans on average are so rich that most of them can afford a car that allows them to both live where they want and still get to the job they want even if those two places are tens of miles apart and there is no public transportation. Sounds terrible.

You're kind of missing what was said. We're talking about the automobile being necessary to function in the majority of the US and Canada. If you don't have a car (whether you can't afford one, can't drive, or choose not to own one), you're going to struggle to get to work, get to the grocery store, visit people, etc. Even in densely populated areas where cycling is a better option, the infrastructure is heavily oriented towards cars, and cycling can be quite dangerous.

Yeah, it's great if you have a car. What's not great is that you need to have a car. And yet it doesn't have to be that way, as other countries have shown us.

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

#129

Post by kahirsch »

graylights wrote: post #91
sp332 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an argument for introducing a separate class of "city car" to the USA. On a highway, I want a big comfy car that can be efficient at 55-65 MPH, and protect me in a collision at those speeds. In a city, I don't really need that.

That big comfy car that protects you from highway collisions accomplishes that by shifting the impact toward the smaller car. It doesn't increase overall highway safety, just steals it from others in your favor.

Large cars are also safer in single-vehicle collisions, which account for 65% of traffic deaths. There is some adverse effect on occupants of other vehicles, but this is much smaller than the advantage in safety from the large vehicle.

It is definitely not true that it "just steals it from others".

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