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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

strongtowns.org

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#811

Never owned a car of my own until two years ago. Our car has been hit three times in the last two years. Once totaled on the high way (another drivers fault) and twice while parked. Roughly 50K in damages across the two cars and 3 months in the shop doing repairs. We spent 20K on a new car after the old one was totaled and insurance paid out a fraction of what a similar car would cost. We've paid close to 2K in deduc…

Another anecdote on the other side of this: I've been driving since I was 15 for many thousands of miles and have only been involved in two incidents. Both my fault involving icy roads, but both where so minor that only paint damage occurred (no insurance involved). I live in the north-eastern United States for reference. Edit: I wouldn't say that my driving style is cautious either, I do drive attentively though.

Kind of similar for me but my cars tend to get hit now and again a lot whilst parked. One time almost written off because it was hit at high speed and the offender kept on going despite leaving several piece of his own car at the scene. The police couldn't do anything because, well, I was insured so 'they can deal with it'.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you're not suggesting the United States is a 3rd world country... Based on data from the NCSA[1] for the US and SSB[2] for Norway, I get the following for 2019 (before COVID-19 hit): USA: 36096 fatalities and 3.262e12 miles[3] driven = 1.1 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. Norway: 108 fatalities and 45.562e9 km driven = 0.38 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. Might be I did my math wrong. If…

I'm not sure how you interpreted "many third world countries" have notoriously dangerous roads as literally everybody worse than Norway (one of if not the safest in the world) fatalities as being a 3rd world. I think you also failed to control for race and income, including the vast (per capita) oil production (which Norway taxes the shit out of) that is used towards the benefit of the average Norwegian (Norways is a…

I don't need to control for race or income. The point made was that the traffic fatalities in the US is only 0.012% of the population. My point was simply that while it's not a huge percentage in absolute terms, it could be lower.

While I'm not entirely convinced our more restrictive traffic laws aren't part of the equation, I'll agree that socioeconomic factors are probably important.

Thankfully, both countries have a vision for zero traffic fatalities by 2050. Lets hope they make it.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name two countries/areas that you want to use as an example in this argument. Otherwise if anyone else gives a counterexample you can easily move goalposts on them.

That's pretty easy. Sweden is the poster child of a rational covid19 response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_... Sweden deaths per million: 1834 U.S. deaths per million: 3043 However you can also choose various European countries that avoided masking children and minimized school disruption. France and UK for starters, but also all the Nordic countries. Sweden being quite different from…

Sweden had a higher death rate than its neighbours combined. Also just like Denmark no very large, densely populated cities.

Paris proper is 2mln people squeezed into a 100km^2 city. Greater Paris is 10mln at a definitely urban density. It's no wonder they had larger death rates and this is a apples to oranges comparison.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name two countries/areas that you want to use as an example in this argument. Otherwise if anyone else gives a counterexample you can easily move goalposts on them.

That's pretty easy. Sweden is the poster child of a rational covid19 response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_... Sweden deaths per million: 1834 U.S. deaths per million: 3043 However you can also choose various European countries that avoided masking children and minimized school disruption. France and UK for starters, but also all the Nordic countries. Sweden being quite different from…

All the European countries that you listed have good public heath care systems, especially when compared with the US situation. That’s the main reason they had less deaths per capita, not their lockdown policies.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#815
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these are clearly not universal human issues if somewhere like Japan can maintain clean, relatively safe, efficient public transportation. It should be obvious we should be looking outside of the US as to why certain societies are able to solve this issues and others are not.

> why certain societies are able to solve this issues and others are not. You mean by enforcing a racially homogenous society which does not allow poor (or anyone really) people from other parts of the world?

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation” – Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá

> enforcing a racially homogenous society

Are you implying that criminality is genetic...?

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#816

Never owned a car of my own until two years ago. Our car has been hit three times in the last two years. Once totaled on the high way (another drivers fault) and twice while parked. Roughly 50K in damages across the two cars and 3 months in the shop doing repairs. We spent 20K on a new car after the old one was totaled and insurance paid out a fraction of what a similar car would cost. We've paid close to 2K in deduc…

Move to Europe - we have good buses, trains and cycle lanes :)

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the liberal response is to decrease the speed for a road that was previously 45mph, down to 30mph. Of course, the road is perfectly straight, downhill, has a center turn lane, and a multiuse pathway to the side. There's absolutely no reason for 30mph, other than for enhanced revenue generation aka cop theft.. Basically the city I lived in is going anti-car, which would be cool... if it weren't for ALSO de-priorit…

> absolutely no reason There is a very good reason: > Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. https://aaafoundation.…

Wow Americans really have tough bones don't they. In drivers ed, here in Europe students are still being taught that the fatality rate for pedestrians hit by a car at a speed of 70 kph or more is 100 percent, and people here drive fast

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#819
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tilting at windmills here but: US is not some unique country designed for cars and other countries are not some car-free utopias. Per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand and just above Poland. Yet this is upteenth time I read that US is "designed" around cars as if dependance on cars was some unique property of US.

Polish count includes millions of vehicles that does not exist but were never "deregistered". Amount of active insurance policies is slightly below 27 million: https://piu.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ubezpieczenia-... That would rate us below Canada but before France. What's also interesting is that Poland is absolutely not designed around cars. Most communist blocks were designed for few times less cars. The m…

Public transit is severy lacking in most cities (the whole, rather urbanised, country, has just 1.5 subway lines...), trains are crap, there are few bike lanes. Most of the money in the past 30 years went into improving the road network, and it made driving a mostly pleasant and convenient experience. Transport-wise, everything else (apart from building a lot of airports) was pretty much neglected though. This is slowly changing, thanks to EU money (it's now being directed more towards public transit and trains), and should get better in the next 10-20 years, but for now it is what it is.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#820
post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sparse population argument seems kind of BS Switzerland has a low population and is covered in trains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32180236

> sparse population > low population These are not the same thing. Switzerland has a pretty dense population. The section with low population is the Alps, where you're not going to put trains anyway. https://www.atlas.bfs.admin.ch/maps/13/de/12614_75_3501_70/2... Most people that live in remote areas have cars anyway, since sometimes busses only run twice a day. It's a tricky problem to measure "access to public tran…

Switzerland has a similar number of people the bay area, 7-8 million, and is twice as large. So it stands to reason the bay area could have a system as large, useful, and as efficient as Switzerland if not better given it has the amount of same people in a smaller less mountainous area.
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