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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

#851

Post by kortilla »

ok_dad wrote: post #312
WalterBright wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, the physics are you are going to be thrown into whatever your car hit. Second, I've never, ever heard of a flying body hurting someone else.

My parents were both in vehicle accident reconstruction for just such things and I don’t even know how to count how many times I watched a car accident reconstruction (dummies in crash test vehicles) end in a dummy being thrown in any direction you could imagine. It might not hit a person but it will hit a car in the other lanes and cause accidents. You’re out of your element here, stick to compilers for once.

> You’re out of your element here, stick to compilers for once.

This is an incredibly stupid way to engage people. He has a degree in aerospace engineering from Caltech and IIRC worked for Boeing on the 757 before getting into compilers.

You’re argument is “you are an expert in one thing and thus can’t know other things.” Take a moment to reflect on why that ends up just making you look really dumb.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#852

Post by ginko »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #234
flaque wrote: post #96

There’s an audio version of the same point here: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-drip-drip-drip-of-traf... 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. When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesi…

The same happened to nuclear energy, despite the fact that coal kills 100x people yearly than total nuclear energy deaths.

The "fun" part is that hydroelectric dam failures are even more localized and in many cases much more deadly, but people generally don't remember them either.

As far as I can tell the single most deadly power plant disaster in history was the 1975 Banquiao Dam failure[0] that killed 26000 to 240000 people. Yet when you try to google "most deadly power plant disasters" you'll mostly get Chernobyl with 100 attributed deaths.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#853

Post by RugnirViking »

afiori wrote: post #792
MichaelCollins wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes there isn't much you can do. One I grew up near is a T intersection, between three farm fields. The road that butts into the other crests a hill, and the other road is right behind the crest of that hill, about 20-30 meters. There is a T intersection sign on the hill before you reach the top, but some people didn't see it or heed it. If you're following the speed limit with a dry road, it's probably safe ev…

The counterintuitive thing to do is to make roads "feel" unsafe to make them safe. A example of this (here done for laugh) is [0], where a single lane muddy curvy hillside road has a speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph). The point I would like to make here is that on a street like this is it impossible to joyride and even with low visibility intersections the risk of a T-bone or a fatal crash is minuscule. This particular…

In the british countryside there are roads barely much better than that with similar speed limits. It's not good, you see people driving some crazy speeds having to brake super hard and then reverse to a passing place when they come up against a tractor.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#854

Post by sandworm101 »

diordiderot wrote: post #824
sandworm101 wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? You think the highways through the flyover states just pile up with snow all winter? All those mountain passes that connect east and west? They are in fact a higher priority than any urban street. A fleet of double-lane plows speeding down a prairie highway is a sight to see.

https://youtu.be/lkmBP-ISzKk

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#855

Post by kortilla »

flaque wrote: post #140
elil17 wrote: post #14

The NTSB actually does investigate car crashes. Typically police do the actual footwork but if the cause is unknown NTSB agents will put boots on the ground. Unfortunately most of the causes are shared across many cases (speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving), so the cases end up getting lumped together into reports which can include tens of thousands of cases. However, they are performing root cause analysis.…

Human error isn’t a root cause. Why were they able to speed on that road? Why did they feel safe being on their phone? Every software engineer understands intrinsically that blaming the user does not improve outcomes. You cannot get folks to click the right button by putting “you must click the right button” into the terms of service, and then suing the users who click the wrong one.

Yes it is. In many scenarios outside of software, things have already been optimized to a point where the human cannot be removed much further or the safety can’t be improved without violating some other constraint.

> Why were they able to speed on that road?

Every road can be sped on, especially if you’re going to crash.

> Why did they feel safe being on their phone?

They didn’t, but it was “an urgent reply”.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#856

Post by sandworm101 »

Thlom wrote: post #781
MichaelCollins wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes there isn't much you can do. One I grew up near is a T intersection, between three farm fields. The road that butts into the other crests a hill, and the other road is right behind the crest of that hill, about 20-30 meters. There is a T intersection sign on the hill before you reach the top, but some people didn't see it or heed it. If you're following the speed limit with a dry road, it's probably safe ev…

Replace the T with a roundabout and reduce the speed limit significantly 200 meters before the roundabout.

Rounding off the corners of four productive farm fields is not going to be easy/cheap/popular, especially in areas where large farm equipment needs to use the highway too. And a 200m speed zone will not be respected by much of anyone.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#857

Post by glogla »

yreg wrote: post #553
PebblesRox wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is mandatory but not everyone follows the rules. Our car has been hit three times in the past 4-5 years and only one of the drivers was insured. (One didn’t even have a license!)

Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway. I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance and then if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you. (The insurance is tied to the car, not to the driver.)

The way it works around here is that every car is registered to a person in central registry to get plates. The registry is crosschecked daily with central insurance database to make sure all vehicles have insurance, which is mandatory by law. If you don't have it you get fine automatically, which might go to collections. People without insurance are unheard of.

This of course requires the government to have central database of vehicles, insurance contracts and citizens.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#858

Post by glogla »

notch656a wrote: post #577
yreg wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there no mandatory insurance to cover damages to others in the US? In my country if I want to drive a car it has to have this insurance so if I crash into someone all of the damage I do to them is covered.

Most people have insurance but the ones doing the crashing disproportionately do not, either because their prior crashing resulted in a requirement for expensive bonded insurance or because their habit of crashing made their insurance prohibitively expensive. I think some places also won't insure drivers who don't have a license, which also correlates well with drivers who get drunk and crash into things.

The question is why people who repeatedly crash while drunk are not in prison to protect rest of the society.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#859

Post by sandworm101 »

DocTomoe wrote: post #807
MichaelCollins wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes there isn't much you can do. One I grew up near is a T intersection, between three farm fields. The road that butts into the other crests a hill, and the other road is right behind the crest of that hill, about 20-30 meters. There is a T intersection sign on the hill before you reach the top, but some people didn't see it or heed it. If you're following the speed limit with a dry road, it's probably safe ev…

Sounds like the prudent way of handling your example T-intersection is to rebuild it so it is no longer a T-intersection, or to move it in a way that forces people to slow down (e.g. by turning it 30 degrees, with curves leading into it, or by setting up a roundabout, or by moving it into a position where you see the crossing road more easily).

Curves before intersections are evil for bicycles. They create unanticipated moving blind spots for drivers, blind spots than can hide a bicycle approaching on the cross street.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#860

Post by saiya-jin »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #767
yreg wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway. I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance and then if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you. (The insurance is tied to the car, not to the driver.)

> Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway. > if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you How so? Said cop would have to stop you and check you have insurance. In almost 18 years of driving in France, some of I which I would drive twice a day, I've only been stopped for a police…

I know that french generally hate travelling to places that don't speak french, but if you ever did by car and didn't have all papers in order, you may be in for a big surprise. Ie Switzerland, they do frequent background checks especially on foreign plates, I'd say you have 20-30% chance of being checked on average as french on each crossing. With covid, practically any border crossing within Europe had 100% mandatory checks for certain parts of 2020 and 2021, and they often went deeper than just valid covid papers.

Also, France is a mess in quite a few aspects so not surprising when some bureaucracy doesn't work as intended (ie colleague who moved from Belgium ended up in dead-end process when migrating his driving license, literally the law covering his situation was so badly written it didn't make it possible at all to migrate his driving license to French one).

In Switzerland, no car dealer would give you keys to the car before having mandatory 3rd party damage insurance. Once you stop paying, all sorts of automated plate scanners would mark you and you would receive a massive fine, and probably a visit to court that would take your license for some time on top of that. I mean they take license for driving more than 20kmh over limit in certain situations.

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