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The day I accidentally killed a little boy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#621

Post by lsc »

hermitdev wrote: post #573
sliverstorm wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing speeds is a form of collision prevention, is it not? A typical car can just about stop on a dime at 15mph, and a pedestrian has more time to react. There's a whole slew of other pedestrian-friendly street design that we could & should adopt as well, but that doesn't make speed any less of a valid approach.

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous. What is more dangerous on highways is differential speed. i.e. if you're driving 60 mph when the traffic around you is doing 80 mph, you're the problem. Probably exponentially so if you're driving slowly in the "fast" lane. While rarely enforced, most states in the US have laws that require you to pull to the right if you're impeding traffic (usually defined as holding up +2 veh…

>What is more dangerous on highways is differential speed.

That sounds like an extraordinary statement to me, by which I mean that you need to support it.

First, let me make a distinction between crashes where drivers lose control after the collision, either due to shock to the driver or damage to the car, and crashes where they don't. In the latter case, I agree with you; a freeway scrape where both cars can slow in a controlled manner is probably pretty safe. And you are more likely to have that sort of accident when you are going at similar speeds in the same direction. But it's not a certain thing;

Cars are complex systems, and designed to operate without colliding with other vehicles. Cars are also much more likely to lose control when they are operating closer to their speed design envelope.

However, in the case where either the car or the driver is incapable of continuing to control the vehicle, at that point the car continues to hit other things until it's stopped (and is often hit then by traffic that isn't stopped.) At that point, total speed matters a lot.

There is just a whole lot more energy involved when you are moving fast than when you are moving slowly, and when energy is dispersed in an uncontrolled manner near people, those people tend to get hurt.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#622

Post by jopsen »

pixl97 wrote: post #189
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Save for the interstate highway infrastructure, most roads are done at the state or county level anyway. If you simply start doing this stuff a roads are upgraded (some can be done now and might bring in money), you aren't really spending lots more. You can change the driving culture and mindset, starting by designing roads that generally cause folks to drive slower, implemented at next upgrade. You can more strictly…

> Broken_Hippo 1 hour ago [-] Save for the interstate highway infrastructure, most roads are done at the state or county level anyway. If you simply start doing this stuff a roads are upgraded (some can be done now and might bring in money), you aren't really spending lots more. You can change the driving culture and mindset, starting by designing roads that generally cause folks to drive slower, implemented at next…

> You mean you can get voted out of office for implementing these policies.

Probably... There is nothing reasonably stopping the US from being nicer, only it's voters.

Maybe the problem is that US voters don't care much about the body count (probably an issue in most Americans politices).

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#623

Post by lsc »

todd8 wrote: post #458
jablan wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some numbers to support your claims?

Yes, From CDC: > In large central metro areas, those aged 35–44 years (2.08), 45–54 years (2.60), 55–64 years (2.60), 65–74 years (3.36), 75–84 years (5.19), and ≥85 years (5.24) had statistically higher death rates than those in the same age groups at other urbanization levels. [1] [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6215a1.htm

most US metros don't have workable public transit; most people drive to get from point a to point b even in our dense metros. Perhaps because even our metros are not dense enough, perhaps for other reasons. I would be open to data that showed there were more traffic deaths in dense areas where most people took public transit, but this isn't it.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#624

Post by lsc »

FuckOffNeemo wrote: post #608
labster wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how much death and disease we're willing to suffer for the sake of convenience, isn't it. We treat automobiles as a necessity of modern life in all places, but it wasn't always this way. In the 1910s and 20s, many writers excoriated all of the roads bringing dangerous cars into places where people live and play. It turns out they were right, but we just became blind to the danger.

More people died in those years of horse and cart related deaths proportionate to per capita than they do today by auto-mobiles. Both indirectly and directly. Read Super Freakonomics for the interesting data that they observe between the two.

but we tolerated a lot more (early) death from all causes in those days, in part be cause we didn't have technology to mitigate those risks. The argument I am trying to make is that we have technology (public transit) that would mitigate those risks now, but we choose not to use it.

(My assertion is that if we had a place where we had US standard driving safety requirements but more than half the miles traveled were via public transit, we would have fewer per capita injuries. Or more generally, that the per capita injuries goes up with miles driven in cars. I have so far failed to provide statistical evidence of this.)

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#625

Post by lsc »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #526
megy wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not more dangerous to other people on the road.

That's what I said. Danger goes both ways. If you are on a bicycle rather than in a car, you are more susceptible to the danger created by the cars around you. In effect, all of the cars around you are more dangerous than they were before, because there is a cyclist (you) on the road.

right. but... some people feel it is more ethical to take chances with their own lives than with the lives of others.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#626

Post by rootusrootus »

AznHisoka wrote: post #568
rootusrootus wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a nervous wreck? There are lots of things more dangerous to you than driving a car. A little less than 40,000 deaths a year sounds like a lot, but I think perhaps we are just not good at comprehending what that number means in the context of a country with more than 300,000,000 people.

what dangers are more dangerous?

Suicide. The flu. Accidental poisoning. Each of those claim more people every year than auto accidents. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are many risks you face that exceed that of driving a car. Especially if you are driving a fairly modern one with a responsible level of care.

Think about this. If you want to increase your probability of dying in an car accident to about 100%, then you need to drive roughly 100,000,000 miles. Of all the things to worry about, this is pretty low.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#627

Post by CalRobert »

ptaipale wrote: post #531
CalRobert wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, pretty much. Sold my car, moved to Europe, commute by bike. I do rent a car now and then when it can't be avoided and in those scenarios I drive with extreme caution. The US has a 9/11 every month on the roads and almost nobody there gives a shit. I never understood it.

It's not at all a 9/11 because not very many of traffic accidents are intentional homicide.

closer to legalized manslaughter. Anyway, it was just a way to relate the death toll.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#628

Post by lsc »

cmurf wrote: post #618
lsc wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the lesson of the article is not that weirdos or strangers make the world a dangerous and ugly place, but that we, the regular people who vote for and move to areas with zoning densities that make public transit impractical, who commute long distances in cars, make the world a dangerous and ugly place. Every time we get into a car, we are choosing to take a risk not only with our own life, but with the l…

-s- This is America, where Uncle Bob can legally teach me how to drive, and you can keep your dang ugly government driver's ed schools and regulations outta my life. And I don't have to actually be that competent because insurance makes all wrongs right. -s- It's seriously this stupid. There's no driving test after you're initially licensed, nor any recurrence training required. All you have to do in most states is p…

I personally think that the most realistic way to fix this is to just increase insurance minimums up to a reasonable level, enough to cover a car full of statistical lives.

This, if enforced, would internalize the externality of injury into the cost of driving, and probably would make driving dramatically more expensive, which would hopefully create demand for alternate systems.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#629

Post by alphaalpha101 »

trgn wrote: post #540
dm319 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping one day we'll look back on car driving as something as horrendous as gladiatorial entertainment in Rome. In the UK we have 1 child killed and 37 seriously injured every week.

I forget where I heard this joke. In the future, little Johnny and grandpa are fishing on the lake, after being driven there by their self-driving car. "You see that car there Johnny? When I was young, we had to drive these ourselves if we wanted to go fishing. It was great! You felt the wind in your hair, you could go wherever you want, whenever you want, you could make out with your sweetheart in the backseat, you…

I've never seen any convincing argument that self-driving cars will be any safer than existing cars.

Self-driving cars are not what the world needs. The world needs zero cars.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#630

Post by fulafel »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #486
Theodores wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a glancing blow at 70 mph with a car doing a similar speed coming the other way. I was in the last mile of a cross country drive and was thinking of getting to the pub. It was the bit of road I knew best. I drove a couple of times after that, but the screaming kids in the back of the other car was enough for me. Now I cycle everywhere. Or get the train. I was not prosecuted or anything but I didn't want to almo…

Not to tell you your reaction is wrong, but it's important to remember that cycling is generally more dangerous, and that while you aren't taking action dangerous to those around you, you are likely taking action that makes everyone around you dangerous to you yourself. Even so, cycling is wonderful. I certainly recommend it.

Health benefits offset the traffic risks in most studies, see eg. http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4521 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... https://archive.org/details/pubmed-PMC3831097

It's possible that local traffic circumstances invalidate these for many locations, but at least the "generally" part of your claim seems to be reaching too far.

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