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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

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Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#821

Post by oliwarner »

scoofy wrote: post #641
oliwarner wrote: post #616

Author obviously has a service to sell but the illustrative comparisons here bother me. Amtrak runs 300 trains a day, very rarely has accidents because the environment is so controlled. The US runs 120 million cars and trucks a day. 93 fatal accidents a day, many through driver fault. The risk profile is entirely different. We expect people to crash cars. It's why cars have seatbelts and airbags, and why Amtrak doesn…

Again... if you don't compare the US to any other countries, this line of reasoning might seem plausible. It's not. The US outpaces comparative countries significantly, exactly because our infrastructure and culture of driving is inherently more unsafe.

Even in the safest road-user countries[1], train incidents make the news, while most car accidents don't. We know trains (and planes) are outstandingly safe by design, and we know cars are driven by idiots and lawbreakers.

Just as we intuitively expect that going to war, seeing and doing what needs to be done will have an enduring effect on people's mental health. We expect that from all higher-stress jobs.

It's the deviation from our expectations that makes it "newsworthy" or not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do stuff about it, or that we should be happy with our expectations, but they're big fish outside the scope of the point I'm trying to lean on here.

[1]: I'm British. Not the safest, but up there and relatively high density.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#822

Post by karussell »

mywittyname wrote: post #105

"We" don't ignore them. Every major government has a body dedicated entirely to automobile safety. In the USA, this is NHSTA - National Highway Safety & Transportation Administration. They maintain an information system of traffic fatality statistics in the USA, called FARS (fatality analysis reporting system). This system is used to determine new safety devices and standards for vehicles and to test their effectiven…

Surely we as a society try to ignore the risks. If we would not ignore them we would immediately stop allowing cars in our cities or completely separate the roads for them. Because a fatal accident with a pedestrian or bike is just a matter of high numbers, i.e. a logical consequence.

And btw: I already find the fatality numbers from Germany more than concerning (~3000/year) but in the US you have 13x more although only 4x more people live there. So there is a huge potential for improvement I guess ...

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#823

Post by [deleted] »

gernb wrote: post #732
cafard wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From San Francisco to Los Angeles, sure. From San Francisco to any one of the many small towns within 300 miles, well, that's a lot of track to lay.

not really. The population of the bay area is on par with the entire population of the country of Switzerland yet they manage to have tons of trains in a much larger area https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32180236

[deleted]

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#824

Post by diordiderot »

sandworm101 wrote: post #793
diordiderot wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speedbumps are inexpensive and last a very long time.

In warm climates. Speedbumps are a problem in cold/rural areas that need continuous plowing in winter.

Rural areas don't normally get plowed. Can you imagine the expense of plowing all of USAs rural roads. An alternative is a little swerve that requires slowing down.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#825

Post by tifik »

teakettle42 wrote: post #810
montag wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another pet peeve: The effect of gun ownership on suicide rates goes totally ignored. Suicide accounts for 21k out of 33k annual gun deaths in the US[1]. If we're outraged by school shootings, we should be apoplectic about facilitating suicide. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Nobody needs a gun to commit suicide. In countries where guns are less available, they use hanging or poison. Putting that aside, it’s not our role to forcibly limit the choices of healthy, responsible people just because some unhealthy, unresponsible people might make the wrong choices when given the freedom to do so. It’s not a societal-level tragedy if someone chooses to eliminate themselves. While it’s abhorrent…

> there’s very likely a net economic/social gain.

I see your point, but I strongly disagree. Providing a suicidal person with the right resources to help them avoid suicide will (imo) yield a net gain over the rest of that persons life, as opposed to the gain from selling a gun and a bullet and giving him a quick out.

One example that comes to might right away is Alan Turing. Whose contributions to modern society can hardly be overstated. And I know he didn't use a gun, I'm making a point about helping people out of depression, to oppose your opinion about it being beneficial to let them kill themselves.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#826

Post by smcl »

Nition wrote: post #478
staticautomatic wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally those things are helpful but I think China has pretty well demonstrated that there’s no alternative universe where fully locking everything down eliminates Covid.

It worked for us in New Zealand. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ When we tried the same thing a second time it didn't work, but that was due to people not following the rules.

The first time round wasn't the main thing that NZ basically shut itself off from the world? I was generally supportive of the sort of measures much of the world implemented restrict the spread of covid (widespread testing, masks, vaccinations, encouraging WFH, etc) however to me both NZ and China's approaches didn't seem feasible for most of the world.

So if I understand correctly NZ had a short hard lockdown to reduce cases to zero and then maintained it by severely restricting and controlling arrivals from abroad. I live in a Central European country that simply cannot seal itself off from the world like NZ did, we have open borders within the EU via Schengen (a good thing IMO) but there's very little chance of every country in the Schengen area agreeing to follow this model. This means virus carriers would inevitably enter the country, cause an outbreak of cases, necessitating repeated lockdowns and the public would quickly rebel against the measures.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#827

Post by ascar »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #398
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #382

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…

People shouldn't really drive 300 miles in individual private vehicles. Apart from the chance of accidentally killing oneself or others, it's hugely inefficient. If we changed an interstate full of cars to high speed trains (or hyperloop or whatever) which depart every half hour, it'd be safer, cheaper, cleaner... you name it.

Biggest problem for any non big-city to big-city transit are the last few miles. In the end my options are often to use a taxi or get a rental car. In both cases the price needs to be added to the cost of public transit making my personal car cheaper, more convenient and often also faster. It's a tough nut to crack. And I'm saying that as a German with one of the best public transport systems in the world.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#828

Post by karussell »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #691
mywittyname wrote: post #105

"We" don't ignore them. Every major government has a body dedicated entirely to automobile safety. In the USA, this is NHSTA - National Highway Safety & Transportation Administration. They maintain an information system of traffic fatality statistics in the USA, called FARS (fatality analysis reporting system). This system is used to determine new safety devices and standards for vehicles and to test their effectiven…

Different countries deal with this problem in different ways. Roads in the Netherlands have changed dramatically in recent decades. This is due to systematic focus on reducing accident rates, improved standards for road construction, and the roll out of traffic measures to reduce risk; including some of the strictest speed controls in the world. It works. Bureaucracies are really good at data driven improvements, onc…

Interesting read, thanks. I also see the Netherlands (and Denmark) as much less car centric and like what I see, including the effort the change the car dominance in the cities.

btw: I just picked the car crash fatalities (per million) and it is indeed better in Netherlands: 35 vs 38.5. The numbers for Netherlands seemed a bit high to me at first, but very likely it is not that easy to compare these numbers and one has to consider other things like the population density, which is only 232/km² vs 423/km² in Netherlands.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#829

Post by Thorrez »

teakettle42 wrote: post #808
jacobolus wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> If you could systematically reduce the speed on all urban/suburban streets to no more than 20 mph (actual driving speed, not posted limit), it would be a huge safety win for humans living in those places. What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society? Furthermore, is safety the highest priority, or is it balanced with other concerns, including road efficiency…

>What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?

What does "attrition" mean? People killed in car crashes? How could that not be a net loss? Your second sentence says "furthermore" to introduce the idea of the cost of safety measures, so that seems to imply the first sentence isn't considering the cost of safety measures.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#830

Post by Aeolun »

dcsommer wrote: post #594
hibikir wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be like this though: Other countries pay attention to crashes, especially with fatalities. One of my uncles was a civil engineer working in Spain's government, now retired. All crashes reported to the police would be marked in maps, with an extra layer for fatalities. Then they'd be grouped by the kilometer of road, to look for the sections of road that were the most dangerous. The worst locations…

The US has this concept of "black spots" too. However, they are ironically named "safety corridors." We get a nice sign [0] to mark the death zone and then traffic continues unabated. [0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...

Wtf? They put up a sign saying it was a safety corridor, but then didn’t bother to actually add it to the list of safety corridors, and they are surprised that police officers get it wrong?

What kind of lunacy is that.

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