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Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

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Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#141

Post by Lio »

mudita wrote: post #58
analog31 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's that famous video of people dancing, where a person in a gorilla suit enters and leaves the action, and at the end, people don't remember seeing the gorilla. I think drivers are creatures of habit, especially in heavy traffic on a familiar route such as their daily work commute. They are not really in complete control of their cars -- certainly if traffic is heavy enough that nobody is following at a safe dis…

You slightly misremembered the invisible gorilla test, a classical study about inattentional blindness. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness#Invi... Somewhat fittingly "the basic Simons and Chabris study was reused on British television as a public safety advert designed to point out the potential dangers to cyclists caused by inattentional blindness in motorists."

I beleive that the paper was originally titled "Gorillas In Our Midst" which is a wonderful play on the title of the Dian Fossey book Gorillas in the Mist.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#142

Post by bzzzt »

stef25 wrote: post #80
asdff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, shape. Go look at the front end of a car like a ford F150. The hood is flat and sits 4 feet high. Now go look at a more compact car like a prius. The hood is low, and is angled like a wedge smooth into the windshield. When a prius hits you, its liable that you will just roll up and off of it and not get much of the force from the impact as a result. When an F150 hits you with its 4 foot tall wall of a grill str…

Some passenger cars also have a nifty feature where if an impact is detected, the hood on the side of the windshield is instantly propped up by some springs to provide a cushioning effect to whoever ends up on the hood. I've seen it action when a guy who I was riding motorcycles with got hit on the side by a car (his fault, low speed, he was fine). My car also has the feature. Obviously impossible if the hood's too h…

The 2012 Volvo V40 (now discontinued) did one-up that by including an airbag under the hood which covers the A-pillars when detecting pedestrian impact.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#143

Post by atoav »

Ygg2 wrote: post #95
atoav wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but landing on the round hood of a VW Polo vs being hit by the equivalent of a rolling brick wall makes a difference. If you look at the formula for acceleration (a = ∆v/∆t) and acceleration force (F = a⋅m) the only two things we can truly influence here are speed (slower collisions are less dangerous) and time (collisions where the force transfer takes longer produce less force). The latter is what makes the d…

Mass also affects force transferred, during contact. Newton's 3rd law, implies the more mass you have the less recoil you feel. For example hitting a massive box will hurt a lot more than a light box, because light box will get some acceleration of its own vs massive box.

I neglected mass here, because I don't think it really makes much of a difference in the deadliness of the collision (car is always much heavier than cyclist).

One thing it would definitely affect tho is the time within which the car could brake, provided they react in time.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#145

Post by zeendo »

Nick87633 wrote: post #97
DangitBobby wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had plenty of people in sedans pass me in my lane with less than 1 foot of space.

Bobby That is a consideration I hadn't thought of... I always take the full lane unless there is a dedicated bike lane.

I advocate taking the lane in many situations but it's worth noting that you can be passed in your lane with less than 1 ft of space even if you're taking the lane.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#146

Post by kqr »

david-gpu wrote: post #138
kqr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point when biking to work I stopped at an intersection and filtered to the front. The head vehicle was a huge yellow thing built for construction work. I turned my head to see if I could see the driver (then at least he would have a chance of seeing me) and you know what he did? He understood what I was doing and pointed straight at me to indicate he had noticed me. This is something I've started doing when I'…

I'm in my 40s, I've never had a car, and the only thing that makes me feel somewhat safe when I cross in front of a vehicle is making eye contact with the driver, which is sometimes difficult with the prevalence of tinted windows. In my experience, drivers look for other cars, not for pedestrians. We are not a danger to them, so they subconsciously filter us out, as we are not a threat to them. To make things worse,…

The difficulty with eye contact is that it's easy to interpret as being there when the other person really just looks through you. Very common to hear about accidents when one person was confident they had eye contact and then the other just had no idea they were there.

In fact, eye contact works so badly for me that I prefer looking at the front tyres – their direction and angular acceleration tells me a lot more about where the vehicle is about to be.

Pointing, however, is very explicit and rarely happens by accident.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#147

Post by samatman »

yboris wrote: post #14

Exactly on topic: a philosophy paper " Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked? " by Douglas Husak. Author argues that because of the high crash incompatibility with other vehicles (and pedestrians), SUV driving is immoral - imposing an oversized amount of harm to others with no proportional safety for self. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447

I'm willing to go along with this so long as blame is apportioned where it belongs: with the Federal government of the United States.

My case is that manufacturing vehicles is a public good. We can talk about restoring city centers to human beings and I'll agree with you all day, but if you want to make the case that motor vehicles, cars included, are themselves immoral, we don't share enough values to have a productive conversation.

So these companies, to provide this benefit, must comply with the law. Consumers have choice in what to buy, but strictly limited by price tag and availability.

Note that we don't have a cultural trend of buying cars with enormous rotating blades on the bumpers. It's not so much because this is illegal, as none are available for purchase.

The government decided, correctly, that the fleet should be more fuel efficient. All the reasons for this are good. So they did the obvious thing: imposed increasing taxes on gasoline.

Ok, let's back up: no, they passed insane regulations leading directly to the prevalence of SUVs and the increasingly hostile road profile of pickup trucks.

The law allows them less fuel efficiency if they make the wheelbase bigger. That's insane. Shall we apportion some of the blame to the car lobby? Ok. Sure.

Ultimately the government is responsible for the law, and the manufacturers are responsible for following it. End the insanity, and the problem goes away over a decade or so.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#148

Post by Chris2048 »

david-gpu wrote: post #139
Chris2048 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Gorilla study: > failure to attend to it while engaged in the difficult task of counting passes of the ball I'm not sure how this applies to commuting, except when the driver is attentively looking at other cars.

It applies because drivers tend to look for other cars, which are a threat to them, while filtering out pedestrians and bicycles. It is very noticeable as a pedestrian, e.g. when a driver enters a road through a right turn and only looks left to avoid incoming traffic, ignoring the possibility of a pedestrian coming from their right.

Why would a driver filter out pedestrians and bicycles?

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#149

Post by [deleted] »

austinjp wrote: post #114
astrobe_ wrote: post #104

Bigger vehicles are heavier; at the same speed as a passenger car, they have more kinetic energy. It is even worse when the victim is lighter, as per the momentum conservation principle. The study confirms the physics. What's unexpected is the last line of the abstract.

The line in question: "By race, Blacks are also found to be overrepresented as pedestrian and pedalcyclist crash victims."

[deleted]

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#150

Post by pfortuny »

globular-toast wrote: post #125
choeger wrote: post #117

The sad thing is that at least some part of the growth of vehicles on the road is because few people can afford to own (and park) multiple cars or other vehicles larger than a bike. I have to move 3 kids and 2 adults regularly over longer distances, so I am pretty much constrained to a van (say a VW T7). But unfortunately, I cannot afford to accompany this expensive car with a smaller, preferrably electric, vehicle.…

A VW Golf from the 70s could fit two adults and three children. Or you could rent the van when you really need it. The trouble is when a society accepts non-sustainable solutions it's very difficult to go back to anything remotely sustainable as any technological progress is always expected to deliver "more". It also leads to people thinking their ridiculous lifestyles are baseline necessity when, in fact, they could…

Not if two of the children are under 5? (need a safety seat).

And that is one of the horrid consequences of hyper-risk-averse government.

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