501–510 of 1001 posts
Cars are glorified and incredibly ingrained in culture Some people can't even imagine walking anymore and are blind to even how much road furniture and infrastructure they litter everywhere Some of the biggest structures we have are roads created in the last 100 years Absolutely crazy
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This maximum would barely change your time to destination Yes it would. The drive from LA to San Francisco is about 300 miles on Interstate 5. Much of this highway is completely straight, with excellent visibility through an unpopulated desert. When sparsely trafficked (as it is much of the time), it is safe to drive 80+ MPH on I5 for hours at a time. At 80 MPH, this is a 3 hour 45 minute drive. At your proposed 60…
> How many lives do you think would be saved by capping speeds to 60 MPH on I5? If alcohol or distracted driving are not factors, I would say probably close to zero. Amazing how you'd think it's actually close to zero. So many dangerous situations are removed once speeding is at least attempted to be removed from the equation. To name two: reaction times are increased, stopping distances are reduced. I probably know…
Although, as far as I understand, fatalities on highways are somewhat rare anyway, with most vehicular deaths happening at intersections. After all, it's the stopping force that kills you, and two vehicles doing 80 and 60 in the same direction will collide with less force than one doing 40 and one crossing the path in a perpendicular direction, or two going 20 and hitting head on.
Cars are glorified and incredibly ingrained in culture Some people can't even imagine walking anymore and are blind to even how much road furniture and infrastructure they litter everywhere Some of the biggest structures we have are roads created in the last 100 years Absolutely crazy
I think the real issue is that people are just incredibly lazy. My area isn't "walkable", but its what I could call "walkable enough" -- you can get a meal and a hair cut and lots of kids could walk to school. Of course, the sidewalks are empty here. Just an occasional cyclist. Even areas around here that are much more walkable like a grouping of shops, people all seem to prefer driving shop to shop! We're talking li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cyclists take note.
Riding a bicycle is incredibly safe. It’s cars that are dangerous, around bicyclists and pedestrians alike (and even other car drivers).
I'd say bicycling should be outlawed before driving without a seatbelt is (although I'd prefer both be legal).
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS1901....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
no, speeding hardly changes risk at all, but reckless driving certainly can, but that’s beside the point. the point is that changing your own behavior (i.e., “control”) has a negligible marginal effect on reducing your overall risk. nearly all of the practical risk is external and therefore out of your control (unless you manufacture additional risk by being distracted, reckless, and/or impaired). you can’t really lo…
A quick google is telling me that 26.8% of drivers who were killed or severely injured had alcohol in their bloodstream. Assuming that's true, then wouldn't never drinking and driving reduce your risk of death or serious injury by around 26.8%? That seems like a substantial reduction that is completely in the control of the driver.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life. But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause, where the massacre of a…
Yes the author seems to state that there are many more traffic deaths than commercial transport deaths as if the point is self evident but I do not see it. From my perspective its a minor miracle that there aren't more traffic deaths. We let any private individual drive up to a 20,000 something pound vehicle with pretty minimal licensing requirements (in most places in the US). The news story is that it mostly goes o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how low the actual rate of fatalities is compared to miles driven, you are proposing that we significantly lower the bar for when we think government intervention is the right answer.
the government already owns the roads and enforces speed limits. speed governors are already required for scooters and e-bikes in many jurisdictions. requiring cars to have the same limiters as scooters if they want to access the government-owned roads is not a huge change in scope.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes sense because, for most of America, we have designed our environment to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up for us. It is not the same with air or train travel. Those are useful, but not necessary for almost all people.
It doesn't though. We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be made a lot safer. I've also lived in 6 different car dependent places in my life, and all of them are amenable to biking, its just a scary proposition with the current infrastructure. I think a lot of the deaths are put in the realm of "personal responsibility" - we don't pursue safer options, even for cars, because it's always someone's fault…
Related, Americans encountering a traffic circle, presumably for the first time and with their brains turned off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same happened to nuclear energy, despite the fact that coal kills 100x people yearly than total nuclear energy deaths.
The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths, 80 square miles around Fukushima and 1,000 square miles around Chernobyl are effectively ruined forever.