It's getting harder than ever to see out of modern "safer" cars, too. I regularly entirely lose cars hidden by the B-pillar on my Model 3. I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there. It's compounded by the fact that the driver's side mirror doesn't physically move far enough to the left to cover the blind spot like it would in most cars, and our terrible flat mirrors in the US don't provide the wide angle that european driver's side mirrors have. (still working on sourcing a european mirror glass; currently Tesla only sells the entire mirror body+motors+glass as a single part, for $400ish)
It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags.
Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver.
>It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.
A couple of weeks ago I was driving along a steep valley with constant winding hairpin turns for over an hour, and I'd never been more aware of the fact that the pillars prevented me from seeing any oncoming traffic whatsoever when curving (extremely) left, even if I craned my neck as far as I could to the right. The pillar just blocks it all out.
It was really disturbing to drive knowing you just can't see if there's oncoming traffic or not, and if they're in their lane or drifting into yours. You just have to hope and pray everybody's staying in their (narrow) lane.
Absolutely sucks from a safety and awareness perspective. I consider myself a really responsible and careful driver, and I hated being put in such a literally blind situation.
Some manufactures keep great visibility. My Subaru has very narrow A pillars and good blind spot visibility. I can adjust my mirrors to get rid of almost all blind spots on my Impreza.
My wife (unfortunately) has a Jeep Renegade. Every time I get in it I'm surprised she doesn't get in more accidents. Never mind the A/B pillars, the C pillar is like a solid foot and a half wide: https://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/10/2016/05/2016-jeep...
If you try and back out of somewhere at an angle you're backing out 100% blind.
I too drive a plain ole 2006 Impreza with a manual transmission. Every appendage is fully engaged in driving my car.
There is a lot of concern over a lot of these auto-assist features reducing the engagement of a driver. It is a trade-off of course. An automated system with good sensors can react faster than a human driver to prevent some types of wrecks, but they do have limits. Over reliance can lead to the situation where that Tesla drove full speed into an exit ramp barrier.
Until ever street has guide rails and ever vehicle can attach to a track, truly safe autonomous vehicles are a very difficult problem and a long way off. A standard street track system would probably be cheaper honestly (and it's a solved problem).
Subaru improved the A-piller visibility a bit in recent models, I think! My '13 Crosstrek has good visibility; the '08 Forester I used to drive was much worse.
I mostly ride motorcycle. always super annoyed/amazed when I drive a car at how shit visibility is. Not only all the blind spots but also how low your vision is. I can see over most cars and can always lift up on pegs if I need to see further.
Low vision is not a problem when one actually knows how to properly drive. The problem is, tons of people don't (or don't know their cars well), and they compensate with buying SUVs although they hardly use them on terrain/situation that would require them. My bmw is already lowish as standard, and previous owner lowered it significantly, and being very low ain't a problem in the traffic at all.
Generally SUVs are the worst mix of properties you want from cars - center of gravity is too high (bad handling), rolling in case of accident is much easier to achieve, too heavy so pretty bad acceleration, more expensive maintenance (ie tyres, more oil, heavier taxation in many places etc.), more consumption because of the weight and crappy aerodynamics etc.
Those pillars are full of de-facto mandatory extra air bags. Crash safety (probability of crash survival) is more easily measured than probability of crash occurrence.
How tall are you? I'm 6'5" and don't have the issues you describe with the B pillars and I sit back pretty far.
The Model 3 ended up being a breath of fresh air for me in terms of visibility overall, it has dramatically better visibility compared to the Leaf, Accord, and Corolla I had been accustomed to driving.
I should note the Leaf has absolutely atrocious visibility and stands out as the worst I've encountered in a car.
5'10" with short legs. It's possible sitting further back w/r/t the B pillar helps 'solve' the problem. Although you should absolutely have issues with the side mirror not adjusting out far enough.
I've not driven a Leaf or current Accord or Corolla. I find the rear 3/4 visibility out of the 3 to be TERRIBLE (rear deck is too high), same for rearward visibility in the mirror (can't even see the headlights of the car behind you). However, the forward visibility is AWESOME. I love the low dash.
I’m the same height. Do you mean elevation or azimuth visibility? My Leaf is awesome for elevation as I’m not staring into the visor like I am with all other vehicles. In the Leaf, I’m looking several inches below the visor.
My biggest complaints with the Leaf are obstructions in the horizontal field of view. The A Pillars are literally A shaped triangles that are just massive obstructions and the large side mirrors protrude upward and outward further obstructing my forward view. The center rear view mirror always manages to be obstructing my view of signs or traffic lights, especially when cresting hills, and I find myself bobbing and weaving to look around it.
In the Leaf I have the seat all the way back and bottomed out as low as it goes. At that position I can see forward just fine though at some traffic lights I do have to lean forward and lookup. However at that position my shoulder is still forward of the B pillar so when look left I have an obstructed over the shoulder view. Looking right isn't much better as the rear passenger window tapers upward so I can only see up and out, not down.
If the A pillars were narrow and not triangular, the side mirrors smaller and lower, and the rear windows didn't taper up but were just horizontal then it wouldn't bother me so much. As it stands, I just find myself bobbing and weaving a lot like I'm trying to find something I dropped under the kitchen table trying to look around a dozen chair legs.
Contrast that with the Model 3 where I also have the seat mostly back and bottomed out. The low hood and high ceiling give great elevation view and the narrower A pillars and smaller lower side mirrors offer much less obstruction. That combined with the glass roof gives a very open air feel to the car.
In the Model 3 my shoulder sits behind the B pillar so when I look left the pillar is in the middle of my FOV so my left eye can look out the rear driver side window. This is how it was in the last 3 Accords I owned and my partner's Corolla. When I look right out the passenger side the low window line that's mostly horizontal affords excellent visibility out the rear passenger window over my shoulder.
In the Leaf I'm occasionally surprised by cars, something I've not experienced with any other car or even truck that I've driven.
> I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there.
Keep in mind some of your behavioral changes are associated with you becoming a more experienced driver and learning just what sort of evil can lurk in curious places. As much as my car's blind spot irks me, there's no way it's as bad the 1979 Crown Vic I learned in.
I definitely believe in lifelong learning, but I'm 38 and have easily 500,000 miles of driving under my belt, so I'm not really a novice. Others could easily have the same issue. I've found a workaround, but I can't guarantee I use it to the same effectiveness every time I drive the car, and someone new to the car (or any other car with a similar issue) could have a collision before learning such a workaround.
Seems like you're in the market for a Mercedes-Benz E400: it has no B pillar, and a reasonably sized rear window [0].
Though I guess it could always be better, for me I'd personally prefer if they shifted the the hard panel further forward, trading some sunroof for rear window.. and of course there's the drivetrain which I'm sure is not your first pick.
For now, given the current limits of structural engineering, the only hardtop cars without B pillars are coupes.
Cars in the EU have aspherical mirrors that work like this: https://i.imgur.com/rJI3UR0l.jpg . Much like a stick-on but less unsightly. These are pretty good, but they're not installed in the US due to some archaic regulation or another. The Ford system with an inset towing-style mirror is great too.
I have a set of those on a Mazda Miata and the better version built right into the tow mirrors on my truck. I love them -- much easier to see into the large blindspots on both. I really wish that they were built into more vehicles. I trust that much more than blindspot warning lights.
I was just going suggest the same. While my main daily driver is a Renault Trafic van (which has AMAZING mirrors, with a built-in blind-spot/parking mirror at the bottom as well), others don't, and adding a convex mini mirror has helped see what's in the blind spot.
As someone who learned to ride a motorbike before driving a car, I got used to needing to know where everything is around you at all times (because you pay the price, regardless of whose fault it is). I think this has helped with my driving generally, but also means I do 'lifesaver' looks before every lane change, which I sometimes get asked about.
Hmm... how about adding displays on the pillars connected to cameras that fill in the view (adjusted to whatever the driver's head position is at any time)?
My wife's Honda CR-V has a camera in the passenger side mirror and when you turn the blinkers toward the passenger side, it shows that camera on the entertainment center display. It's one of those things, that once I experienced it, i don't know why all cars don't have this. It completely eliminated the blind spot problem.
I have two Hondas with this feature and once you have it, it feels frankly unsafe to drive other cars (even with various other tricks). Once you realize how wide the angle of the camera is you basically never have to turn your head away from looking forwards.
I only wish that it also worked for the left-side mirror as well. My understanding is that Hondas new all electric cars will feature cameras instead of mirrors entirely.
I recently saw a review for a car that offers this feature for left and right mirrors. I believe it was the Polestar, Volvo's new EV brand. They're much pricier than Hondas, but hopefully they'll popularize features like this so that they become common in less expensive vehicles.
For blind spots, newer VWs have a blind spot indicator in the mirrors that light up if something is next to you. For the A pillar, the cameras would be a massive improvement in any car I've driven.
Well, you could look at the center screen in the 3 before changing lanes, but that's not a habit I have, and I'm not sure relying on a video screen that shows a computer-generated representation of an obstacle it thinks might be there is a habit I want to take up.
Isn't that the usual automaker tradeoff, though? Safety improvements for the occupants of a vehicle, even at the expense of additional hazards for those outside it.
There are obvious market reasons for it to be this way, but it seems like a failure of regulations that it is. And given this reality, it's not surprising that pedestrian fatalities are way up per TFA.
> That's a direct benefit for your own safety, though.
Only given a crash. Better visibility improves your own safety by reducing the likelihood of a crash.
Ideally, we would analyze the whole solution and only increase the pillar sizes to the point at which more increases caused net-greater morbidity and mortality rates, both for the driver and passengers, and for others outside the car.
I don't know if there is any research or not but it certainly helps me to be able to see a car doing an overtake move from my rear view mirror in the vehicle to seeing them in the side mirror all the way to where they are right beside me and I can see them without mirrors. Never is there a moment when they are not visible.
Depth perception might come into play when you are timing your own move in front of a car that is already overtaking you. I would caution against that; you already have a double light path to deal with in the mirror and you are also looking in front of you. Just stick to your lane and wait until it is obvious that you can make a move; for instance when the lane is completely clear or when there is ample space, not a space that may or may not be narrow enough to slot your car in.
I don’t need research other than the one I can do myself where it allows me to see cars in my blind spots that I can’t see otherwise.
With a normal mirror watch a car pass you and watch it disappear for a bit before it is visible in your window. The blind spot mirrors show you a car is there all the way until it is past you.
One of the reasons I am reluctant to drive anything other than a pickup truck. Visibility is just so atrocious in most vehicles, and the trend of making mirrors roughly the size of my palm for aerodynamic reasons is problematic.
I had to trade in a newer crossover with blind spot detection warning (sound and light) for an older truck. I was really worried that I would have a hard time getting used to driving without the blindspot detection, but the truck came with mirrors like this:
https://accessories.ford.com/exterior/trailer-towing/kit-rea...
Those are phenomenal... I honestly don't miss the blind spot detection / warning system at all, you can see so much.
I am assuming the downvotes are from people who can’t verify this, but it is true. The fish eye camera captures the cars in the blind spots where the side mirrors can’t see them. You can see the front of the car on your side window and still see the rear of the car in the camera.
I love cars, driving, and freedom in general. Just wanted to put that up front, because I'm going to suggest this isn't an issue with the manufacturer of motor vehicles, but with the massive government system(s) built around regulating them.
There is nothing stopping this terrific government thing everyone is raving about from passing some regulations that require people who operate motor vehicles on the roadways, actually be capable of operating motor vehicles on the roadways. Instead, we get short HS drivers education classes, that really only teach you what the 2 pedals in American cars does what, and perhaps a quick refresher on how "wheels" work.Then you get put on the highway, and taught to speed, but not too much, and generally ignore every other major rule there is.
I ride motorcycles, have taken several high performance driving classes, as well as drive in an amateur (wheel to wheel) auto racing series, and I still catch myself making mistakes on the roads. Its not an easy task, and the current system is woefully under performing when it comes to equipping people to handle it. This needs to be fixed by changing the culture around driving, if for no other reason than because sometimes machines fail, and the person behind the wheel needs to be responsible.
I don’t think you can simply educate people not to text and drive.
Governments are ramping up signs and laws against texting and driving and it doesn’t appear to be doing anything to stop the problem. People know it’s bad but they don’t care because they haven’t personally killed someone yet. Just like they’ve treated speeding laws for decades.
Surveillance apparatus that directly hits people in the pocketbook on a frequent basis with fines is the only way to solve this problem that keeps humans behind the wheel IMO (we had a thread recently about such cameras that are being tried in Australia). Or autonomous cars or a massive and incredibly expensive redesign of our cities and transportation network to get people out of cars.
I agree, and I'm not even American - it's criminal how little is required from people to let them drive on public roads, and their ability is pretty much never tested to any kind of standard again after passing their licence.
Maybe not everyone uses it the same way but to me judgement in this context about values, risk appetite and empathy.
I just signed my youngest daughter up to a pretty extensive defensive driving course at a regional racing facility. When she's done, her skills will have improved but her judgement will be largely unchanged. If she was going to speed before and value her time over the safety of others around her, the same will likely be true afterwards. Fortunately (unlike her sister) she has taken after her mother and proven to be an extremely cautious driver. Her sister drives a smidge too fast for my liking, but we're working on it.
They seem to heavily overlap. I ride a motorcycle and move through traffic quickly. Is it skill? Or that I can judge the flow of traffic, that I do not ride next to any vehicle (or in their blind spot), that I slow down for intersections, especially blind ones or if I do not have a car with me to discourage a left on green.
I just don't see much difference. I consider good judgment to be inherently baked into driving.
Someone exercising poor judgment is not a skilled driver.
Are there studies that show countries where you have to pay lots of money and have to pass rigorous exams have better pedestrian road safety? Maybe it’s so.
There are traffic fatality statistics by nearly all countries. Parts of Western Europe and Japan are much safer (like half the fatality rate) per capita but in my experience a lot of that is due to their infrastructure not allowing high speeds, though some of it is probably stricter licensing.
Wow, given how poorly people drive down here in FL I'm glad the speed limits are also significantly lower. Most highways are 40-50mph and the interstate is 50-70mph. People tend to drive around the speed limit or about 5-10mph over. Only exception (that I regularly see) is one part of I-4 people always seem to go 70mph when the posted limit is 50mph...
Last time I drove down to Miami on the 95 people were flying on that freeway going 90+ mph. I didn't see a single cop until I actually got to Miami and saw a few cops hauling screeching people out of the bars and throwing them into the street later that night.
Then be careful what you wish for lest you incite the DMV to morph into the FAA, FCC, or ATF.
I'm serious. You have not even begun to contemplate how miserable, soul killing, and inaccessible regulations can make something until you have really dug into something like that.
If you do love it, teach! Don't seek to lock a student out! Help them become better, faster, that they can do the same for someone they know!
Sure, if you have an E-AB airplane. If your airplane is certified you can’t do much as run a USB charger out to the panel without the FAA coming down on you like a ton of bricks.
Lately my (foot) commute has come to involve a whole lot of people blasting down residential streets at 40mph while staring at their phones and only barely slowing down in acknowledgement of stop signs.
My current belief is that the single most effective pedestrian safety feature that car manufacturers could possibly implement is some mechanism for preventing Waze from working.
>a whole lot of people blasting down residential streets at 40mph while staring at their phones and only barely slowing down in acknowledgement of stop signs.
Same where I live in Europe. When I commute by car, over 50% of drivers I look at are on their phones and another 25% are doing another semi-distracting activity(eating, smoking, fiddling with stuff). Maybe on the highway it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm talking about city streets that are full of cyclists and people running to catch their bus.
It's one of the reason I'm super afraid of biking on some streets, thinking that one day someone's gonna run me down since he was texting his wife and didn't see me(had some near misses already).
Anecdotally, a friend of mine was hit on a zebra crossing by a texting driver while he was with me. Broke his collar bone and definitely left both of us with some mental scars that will not heal too soon.
It got me to feel like smartphones are a huge issue for traffic safety as some drivers simply can't leave it alone during their commute.
>Anecdotally, a friend of mine was hit on a zebra crossing by a texting driver while he was with me. It definitely left both of us with some mental scars that will not heal too soon.
Wait, was your friend crossing the street riding on a zebra with you, or walking across a street at a marked zebra crossing? Or was your friend a zebra, which you were crossing the street with, so you figured the zebra crossing was the most appropriate place to do it?
I need details. This is very important. I need to make sure to file this in the proper "things I never thought I'd hear, but happened anyway" drawer.
I hope everything turned out okay for all involved though, regardless!
Little bit of international enlightenment never hurts.
And jeez people, lighten up. Not everybody is guaranteed to be aware of your vernacular. To me it quite literally had a touch of incedulity to it.
You try to accept that another human being could miss someone with a bloody zebra walking by with them anywhere because they were staring at a smartphone!
I wasn't trying to be snide or clever. I just honestly thought he was describing the most unlikely scenario I could ever imagine running into happening to him because someone was that damned intent on checking their feed!
>You try to accept that another human being could miss someone with a bloody zebra walking by with them _anywhere_ because they were staring at a smartphone!
Totally agree. Waze is increasingly awful and ineffective as more people use it.
My block ended up being selected as a detour around an intersection that gets gummed up by a poorly programmed traffic light. After a few near misses, a couple of the neighbors got together to basically double park with blinkers on in such a way that the traffic slows down.
Waze's new revenue stream will be shaking down neighborhoods for detour exemptions. "Nice street you got here... it'd be a shame if some assholes in BMWs started speeding through."
Put your car out in front of the street, put the blinker on and watch the traffic go around... takes about 20 minutes for a single lane two way to be removed out of waze completely.
Well if not for them it could have been us, good guys driving Priuses at mere 90, yet thanks to the ones like that Corvette guy who just passed at 120+ and a minute later got tagged we are able to continue uninterrupted as result of his sacrifice.
The correct reaction is to fix the root cause of the problem.
Have the various GPS navigation services generate flow-through rate reports for every intersection at different times of the day and use those as a sample to actually program light cycles for traffic volume.
Also while we're at it, make it so that the lights actually sync up and so that out of flow merges (lefts/rights/etc) only need to speed up a little to hit the next light wave.
Have the various GPS navigation services generate flow-through rate reports for every intersection at different times of the day and use those as a sample to actually program light cycles for traffic volume.
Don't the traffic lights already know the flow rate through their intersections?
No. For the most part, they're programmed in a fixed cycle from static estimates (usually made once and unchanged since who-knows-when); the more advanced types allow for skipping through phases if there's no (car) traffic detected for them. Actual traffic measuring and dynamic control is rare.
Then those lights aren't going to take a feed from Waze to adjust themselves anyway. My point is that if analyzing traffic flows would let cities adjust light cycles to manage traffic, they could already do it -- they don't need a data feed from Waze.
I see that a lot during my morning dog walks. I have made it a habit to step into the car’s path to freak out people and make it really clear that I am there. You just have to get ready to jump quickly...
And after that, the second thing I'd love is for all cars to force safe driving distance. I'm sick of people driving 1 meter from my bumper when we're all going 100km/h.
"There is very little accountability for drivers. In this case, Reardon only had to show she was not texting, not drunk, and not speeding. Meanwhile, pedestrians are faulted for not doing things that go above and beyond their legal requirements: like wearing bright clothing, or walking after dark."
Sure, and nor is it a good idea for women to walk home late at night in their clubbing attire. But failure to heed this "common sense" very much does not make it their fault if bad things happen to them in those circumstances.
It's fine to counsel people to dress brightly when crossing the road at night, but it's really important that that not be the focal point of a discussion about road safety— dressing brightly is a common sense coping strategy to handle the fact that there has been a cascade of failures elsewhere in the system that has led to an environment of unsafe roads, unsafe vehicles, and unsafe drivers.
Blaming pedestrian choices instead of examining root causes just excuses and justifies the unacceptable status quo.
It can be very very hard to spot someone in all black clothing walking in the same direction at traffic beside the road. That's what causes these cases to go from criminal acts to be classified as an accident.
>Blaming pedestrian choices instead of examining root causes just excuses and justifies the unacceptable status quo.
It of course varies wildly by case if the pedestrian can be faulted at all. In my examples, I would argue yes. If crossing at a crosswalk, with the light, and someone making a right turn hits them? It'd be different.
My experience is limited, but from what I can tell from my local coverage in Kitchener ON, it's rare that a driver is faulted for hitting a person walking, regardless of the circumstances. And even when a driver is charged following a collision, when you follow those up a few months later, they all end up dropped or being settled— either way, the person driving is back on the road almost immediately.
That quote is disingenuously conflating the driver's legal fault with the pedestrian's non-legal fault. The pedestrians aren't being sued for being hit.
Well, I mean... the woman died. Which really just underscores how gross it is to be advancing a "both sides" equivocation around this issue.
The driver may be inconvenienced, financially impacted by repair bills or a lawsuit, or suffer minor injuries like whiplash. The pedestrian will be seriously injured or killed. This inequality is why cars basically just do what they want and it's the implicit responsibility of people walking to jump out of the way.
Or at least stop carrying a black umbrella dressed in all black, the umbrella doesn't need to be fluorescent yellow, but at least non-black -- I think pedestrians don't realize how hard they are to see on a rainy night. My umbrella is yellow (not fluorescent), my jacket is brightly colored with reflective accents and my backpack has reflective tape.
I call them ninjas. They're quite common in my country, especially in dimly lit or not lit at all rural areas, usually coming back from work or worse - drunk from the pub. There's also a worse kind, the ninja cyclist, who rides a bicycle equipped with no lights while being dressed in black/grey and usually also drunk.
Eye contact is only meaningful between drivers. When you are asymmetrically squishy (as a pedestrian or cyclist), some drivers will take eye contact as "good, they have seen me, they will know to stay out of my way".
> Nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in U.S. traffic accidents in 2017, the latest year data were available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That was up 35% from 2008
I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit.
This is where the material from the college engineering ethics course I was required to take kicks in. It's stuff like this we should pay attention to.
> At 20 miles an hour, the cars struggled with each test, AAA found. The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. The systems were generally ineffective if the car was going 30 mph. The systems were also completely ineffective at night
When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving.
I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it.
Another factor is increased number of trucks and SUVs. Pedestrians are struck higher in their body and are less likely to slide off the hood, but are instead underneath the vehicle.
Consumers who choose these kinds of vehicles for no other reason than aesthetics are also a big part of the problem. In my view, a responsible vendor would steer buyers away from an inefficient use of materials & fuel unless particular use cases were presented.
The fact that the scenario I just described seems ludicrous to us is a pretty solid example of the abandonment of long-term thinking in our current marketplace, I think. I'm hoping to live to see the day when the right company figures out how to flip this around and win a huge pile of lifelong customer-fans in the process.
And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit. SUVs are also the most profitable cars on the market, for the simple reason buyers are willing to pay more for them. As with speeding, there appears to be a self-perpetuating cycle at work: the increased presence of large cars on the road makes them feel more dangerous, which makes owning a large car yourself feel more comforting.
I think it's a vicious circle. People want to feel safe on the road, so they buy a SUV or a truck because it's less likely to get smashed and squashed in a car crash.
This is probably also why "sport futility vehicles" like the BMW X6 or the Mercedes GLW Coupe have appeared: they are cramped inside and their off road performance is utter crap (too heavy, built for the road).
> When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving.
> I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it.
When you're improving on nothing, everything is an improvement. That is, until marketing hears about it and starts hyping the hell out of it, and then then it's worse than nothing. This is true for all features, not just safety features.
I doubt QA was asked to evaluate how the technology compared to the marketing.
It just needs basic engineering. If fucking electric scooters have geofenced speed limits (and drones much longer even) there is zero excuse for cars exceeding speed limits.
Why would anyone buy a scooter that has a geofenced governor? Scooter rental companies might do that, but then they'll have more competition from modes of transportation that don't have such restrictions (such as rental bicycles).
I couldn't see lots of people buying a car with a built in governor, especially since speed limits are a joke in many places in the US. Also, such a device would be a hazard in a life threatening situation (such as escaping a disaster or driving a family member to the hospital).
Fun fact, Utah has Prima Facia speed limits. This means it's legal to exceed the posted limit when it's safe to do so. You'll get a ticket anyway, but you can make the argument.
If all cars went the speed limit then cities, towns, and counties would lose speeding ticket revenue. I suspect the money would cause attempts to force safe speeds to fail. On the flip side there's a certain amount of freedom inherent in being allowed to speed. So, it seems like there might not be enough support, on any side, to make this feasible.
Around here, going the speed limit typically means going slower than the rest of traffic. If all of our cars forced us not to speed, I wonder if speed limits would naturally increase to safer limits. I also wonder how much of what I just said is a result of Prima Facia speed limits here.
Speed limits in cities and towns where pedestrians are walking are already typically the highest safe speed limit, or even higher. The odds of a car-pedestrian collision resulting in a fatality increase dramatically in the gradient from 20 to 40 mph, and people love to speed in cities and towns where the limits are usually 25 or 30 mph.
Limited-access highway speed limits are a different story of course and a lot of highways still have old 55 or 65 mph speed limits that are set for fuel efficiency due to the 1970s oil crisis, not necessarily the maximum safe speed.
> But I'm sure most normie commuter types aren't willing to drop $1000 + labor just so they can speed.
Not sure about demand at that price, but I'd guess most people would pay not to have a "nanny car". I could also see significant economies of scale for what is currently a very niche product.
Nevermind that many vehicles are way easier to ECU program than actually buying a new $1000 unit. Some can simply use a $100 programmer that comes with built in programs for multiple cars!
> I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit.
Not just drivers. Plenty of pedestrians which just walk straight across the road with their eyes firmly fixed on their screens and earbuds protecting their ears from the sounds of the world around them.
People should pay attention to the world around them, but keep in mind that the pedestrians aren't the people doing the activity that causes the damage.
In the same way that if I stick my hand in the table saw, it's not me causing the damage.
Of course drivers who can't pay attention to the things they should pay attention to don't really deserve to drive. But physics is physics, and there's a limit to how fast a driver can react and a car in motion can stop. And a lot of pedestrians at least here seem to not keep that in mind when roaming about.
I know I'm somewhat of an outlier but I really don't like wearing earphones when I'm out and about. I don't even like walking in the woods with them in. I certainly don't like wearing them anywhere there's traffic or other potential hazards. Just makes me feel cut-off from the environment.
If you hit someone hard enough to kill them then you were definitely speeding and/or not paying attention. Even going 45mph, which is the highest speed road around me where you'd encounter a crosswalk wile driving, you still have plenty of time to slam on the brakes and bleed speed to a nonfatal speed. Probably takes 1 second to go from 45mph to 20mph.
When drivers kill people in my town, it seems like it's mostly hit and runs which should give you a hint on who was at fault.
At least where I'm from, cars by default at fault if they hit a pedestrian. I'm not saying they account for the majority, but I do see a lot of very close calls on a regular basis due to pedestrians behaving as if they're alone in the world.
In the same way that the pedestrian who carelessly walks into the road without sensing their surroundings makes a decision (maybe uninformed, but nevertheless) to step in front of said two-ton killing machine.
How well can you hear the outside world from your car? Should all drivers be required to drive convertibles without stereos so they can hear the sounds of the world around them?
Car companies seem complicit in promoting distracted driving in their commercials, too, by promoting automatic braking for drivers who aren't paying attention:
Only one of the people in that interaction is wielding a deadly weapon. Perhaps the burden of responsibility should be slightly greater for the one who can kill half a dozen people with five seconds of inattention.
I think the burden of responsibility when there is an injury or death should fall on the car, because, yes, a ton of steel and plastic tends to win over a couple hundred pounds of meat and bone, and drivers should keep that in mind when driving.
But I think it's reasonable to expect pedestrians to take at least some responsibility for keeping safe. I'm primarily a pedestrian. I'll sometimes be doing something on my phone while walking on a sidewalk (though I try to keep even that to a minimum), but as soon as I'm about to step off a curb into the street, the phone goes away. I watch where I'm going, and where the cars around me are going, for however long I'm in the street.
I see plenty of people who are still buried in their phones while crossing the street, and it's just stupid. If they get hit and die while crossing the street, it's (probably) not their fault, but that's little consolation: they're still dead. If they could have prevented that by taking the entirely reasonable step of making sure they're aware of their surroundings, isn't it worth it? I'm talking about outcomes here, not responsibility. If you can do something to keep yourself safer, and that thing is an entirely reasonable, non-burdensome thing to do, then you should probably do it, no?
And that's what the parent's post was about, anyway: no one is talking about responsibility. It seems pretty likely to me that at least some of the increased rate of pedestrian-involved accidents can be attributed to increased pedestrian inattention.
Re the last sentence in your comment: the New York DOT performed an analysis that "found little concrete evidence that device-induced distracted walking contributes significantly
to pedestrian fatalities and injuries": https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/distraction-shou...
Interesting, but I'd like to see a broader study. Note that this was the New York City DOT, not the state DOT. The study does reference some national figures, but otherwise mostly focuses on NYC itself.
Given the volume of people walking around in NYC at most hours of the day, I'd expect a sort of "herd immunity" to come into play: sure, you might be on your phone, but you're surrounded by 15 other people while crossing the street, and a car is going to be hard pressed to not see all of you. At least one of those people is likely paying attention, at any rate.
Also I was a little confused by their conclusion, given this statistic in the linked report, under "Pedestrian Self-Reports of Distraction":
"Using emergency room data from 1,075 pedestrian injuries (2008–2011), researchers at Bellevue Hospital found that 7.7% of admitted pedestrians were using an electronic device at the time of the crash."
How is 7.7% not "significant"? I'm sure those 83 people would rather not have been in the emergency room, and maybe have changed their behavior for the better. And that's just injuries; obviously dead pedestrians can't self-report what they were up to in the moments leading up to their death. Also consider that 7.7% is a lower bound. While it's unlikely that someone would lie to say they were using a device when they weren't, it's likely that there are quite a few people who were actually using a device during the incident but didn't want to admit it out of embarrassment or fear of fault or blame being assigned to them (legally, even).
Because we rely on data that shows that in most injuries with pedestrians, pedestrian had the right of way. That’s just data. Cars are getting more dangerous, bigger, people are more distracted, and pedestrian deaths are increasing.
Your experience is anecdata. Just look at hard numbers.
When the risk of an incident goes down, most likely the effort to prevent an incident also goes down, possibly causing total # of incidents to increase
Some notes: Pedestrian fatalities are up in the last decade and there isn't a great smoking gun on why. The "every driver is starring at a smartphone" explanation doesn't have much evidence. The vast majority of pedestrian deaths happen at night, and not at an intersection. Almost all the additional pedestrian deaths are at night; daytime fatalities have been flat since 2008.
The general common-sense level of the population seems to have dipped, causing pedestrians to make stupid decisions, like running across a road at night(I see this a lot).
Pedestrians are also capable of being distracted by their phones.
That's an interesting point. Alcohol consumption and opioid consumption are both up over that period of time, and either the driver or the pedestrian consuming those could lead to more crashes.
Actually, one of the big changes in that report is that more pedestrians are drunk.
A drunk pedestrian is likely to indictate 1) nighttime, 2) walking in a target rich environment (most bars exist near other bars) and 3) lots of distracted Uber/Lyft drivers.
What is interesting is that Texas/Arizona/Florida/Georgia have increases in deaths that completely cancel out California's decrease.
I'll never forget the night I was cycling home from a bar, quite inebriated, and was passed with plenty of space (this was on a stroad) by a convertible (driven by a drunkard who'd just left the same bar) at high speed. Just after the car passed, my eye discerned in the dark another drunkard who just happened to have been crossing the road (not in an "official" crossing) right then. The car couldn't have missed him by more than six inches, and neither the pedestrian nor the driver even noticed. Holy shit.
That is an issue that was touched on in one of the Freakonomics books too: increased DUI enforcement has lead to many would-be drunk drivers instead being drunk pedestrians, which is much more dangerous (for the drunk).
We're getting into the realm of Trolly Problem-esque ethical thought experiments, but how many drunk pedestrians should be allowed to die to save one victim of drunk driving? Consider also that those dead pedestrians are often not really at fault, but just unable to avoid a bad driver due to poor reaction times that would also affect children and elderly pedestrians.
I'm not saying that driving drunk is ever morally acceptable, of course. There are just some interesting unintended consequences of public policy at play.
If pedestrian fatalities are up, and other traffic fatalities aren't (I don't know if that's true), I'd lean toward pedestrians are staring at their phones, rather than drivers. Personally, I walk around while reading all the time.
I assume driveways/parking lot entrances count as non-intersections. I pay attention when I cross an intersection while reading. I pay somewhat less attention (though not none) when passing the entrance to a parking garage or a driveway.
(But this is all conjecture. No data to back this up.)
You can also look this from a completely different mentality.
> The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn.
That means that in that simple no-turn circumstance, the car DOESN’T hit the child 11% of the time.
It’s better than nothing, and it’s a start. You still have to drive your car. You still need to stay off your phone. But these systems only have to work sometimes for them to be worth installing.
The main issue here IMO is that these systems are being advertised in a way that gives people a false sense of confidence, leading to them being less attentive. Autopilot might have some useful safety features, but that won't improve overall driving safety if people believe (to some degree) that it can actually automatically pilot your car.
I think a huge part of the problem is that car companies aren't properly incentivized to protect pedestrians. It's easier and cheaper to prevent my car from hitting something that can damage it than to prevent my car from hitting something that it can damage (easier to detect buildings and other cars than to detect children). If you were the CEO of a car company and had a finite amount of money to spend on research on driver assist features would you rather spend it on the easy problem of protecting your customers or the expensive problem of protecting other people? Furthermore, as a consumer, would you rather buy a car that costs x dollars that protects you or costs x+y that protects other people?
This is a fundamentally uncharitable take. Protecting pedestrians with technology solely mounted on a car is basically impossible given the regulations on size of vehicle and such. I suppose you could make a vehicle sized squishy balloon tied to a motorcycle within the legal limits, but other than that, if you accept the general shape of a vehicle, the problem is really hard. Automatic braking is becoming regulatorily required in the nearer future and in general the ability of a car to stop quickly in more situations has improved. What else should a car company be doing in your opinion?
If I were a car company I'd lobby to improve infrastructure. Like you said, the technology does not exist to package everything on every vehicle without beefing up cars (the last thing we need in congested cities).
Make jaywalking a huge fuck you ticket and put sensors and cameras over every crosswalk to detect everyone from the 7 foot basketball player to their chihuahua the minute they set foot on asphalt, and send that data to the car to make it physically impossible to go forward while the crosswalk is in use. Put up a gate on the sidewalk like a train crossing if you need to really manage people, maybe a short little fence along non crossable parts of the curb too to make it even more difficult to jaywalk (ideally doubling as bike lane protection).
... people just don't give a shit. They are so self absorbed that they only care about getting where they need to go and everyone and everything else can piss off.
Including the pedestrians in my college town that walk out in the middle of the road nowhere near a crosswalk without looking at anything but their phone while I was doing 5 under. This is in no way unique to drivers or car companies or road designers or Waze or anything else.
It... kinda doesn't matter? If you're stepping out into a street, not at a crosswalk, not looking where you're going, with your face buried in your phone, you're not only an idiot, you're being incredibly self-centered.
Obviously a driver should be paying attention in that situation, and if they still hit the person, unless it was impossible to stop in time, they should be held responsible. But that's not really the point. Someone just got hurt or died, and it was completely avoidable if the pedestrian had taken some very basic steps to be aware of their surroundings.
Kind of does. Person who isn't paying attention and walks in the road only has themselves to blame if they get killed. People who get killed because some jackass has decided that they want to answer text messages while they drive is completely different.
Please don't set up a strawman to attack; I'm not claiming what you are suggesting. My response was directly to [0] which was specifically about people walking into a road randomly without paying attention to their surroundings.
> Furthermore, as a consumer, would you rather buy a car that costs x dollars that protects you or costs x+y that protects other people?
Reducing the chance of having to live with the fact that I ran somebody over and seriously harmed or even killed them, that's indeed worth an extra y dollars to me.
Furthermore, it is in the interest of my insurance company too, they might factor that into the premium.
I seem to remember somewhere that insurance companies have been reluctant to factor the risk of injury to others into the liability premiums for cars. This was in the context of a discussion of the externalities when SUVs and trucks became popular.
It's hard to separate driver inattention from the effect of having vehicles that are much more deadly these days, too. If you get hit by a sedan, it'll take out your legs and you'll get flung up on the sloping hood/windshield. If you're hit by a truck/SUV, on the other hand, the majority of your body will take the direct hit.
> Reducing the chance of having to live with the fact that I ran somebody over and seriously harmed or even killed them, that's indeed worth an extra y dollars to me.
It seems to me this encouragement of partial attention while driving just doesn't work for human reasons. The more you give people an excuse not to participate the more they will withdraw and blame technology when something goes wrong. You're either driving or you're not - there is no middle ground.
The in-car distractions that come factory standard are absolutely ridiculous at this point.
Everyone is such a lazy asshole now that you probably couldn't hope to start moving the needle back in the other direction though. The consequences of ripping out all of these driver 'assist' technologies at this point would probably cause a Mad Max episode to unfold on our roadways every morning.
It's also really sad the impact this has all had on the car market as a whole. The diversity of options has radically diminished in my opinion. Look at 2007 lineups and compare to 2019 lineups. Every car today is just the same goddamn turbocharged V6/I4 with whatever arbitrary body tacked on top. Everything. Ford has what? Like 4 unique chassis now for the consumer market? I think BMW finally got down to monochassis. I bet that higher degree of coupling makes their lives a lot easier, but it makes my experience as a driving enthusiast dull.
yes, and to be fair, most driving is pure drudgery, going back and forth to the same places over and over, often zoning out on the tail lights of the car creeping along in front of you. it's understandable how things got this way, but it's certainly not desirable.
All the more reason for people to remain vigilant. Truck driving is often described as 95% tedium and 5% of unexpected nerve wrenching events. It's that 5% we all have to be in good shape for even if you are 'zoning out on the tail lights of the car creeping along in front' - that's when something might come flying out of nowhere at you and you need to be ready...
Pedestrian safety is of almost not value to us manufacturers. The could improve it significantly but there were actually a couple cases where manufacturers would strip off pedestrian safety features off cars originally designed to European standards to make them more aggressive looking.
Further there are almost no regulations in the US that would prevent the end user from removing or negating the manufacturer supplied pedestrian safety features. People routinely drive massively lifted trucks that would be deadly. Just like tampering with the emissions systems is illegal in some areas so should removing or negating pedestrian safety features.
It took a bunch of old NIMBYs to have scooter companies install speed limits within certain locations. We have the technology to have cars automatically limit speeds to the maximum allowed on the given road. We choose not to. Instead people keep getting killed.
This is not pie in the sky science fiction to drool about. We could do it now. We could do it 5 years ago.
Huh? Are you actively advocating for everyone's car to send location data, and have the ability to be remotely controlled? Terrible idea. The difference between cars and scooters is that you buy a car that you OWN, and you rent a scooter for 10 minutes.
No, remote control is not required. It would probably be implemented as every car having machine vision to recognise road signs, or a built-in sat nav with the map data including speed limits. Both of which are already available on production cars - the new "feature" would be linking those to a speed limiter.
Of course, whether this would be popular with voters or car companies is another matter...
My 2018 Honda regularly detects the wrong speed limit (45 miles per hour limit, but it detects 70) and will fail to detect any speed limit. It also seems like it can't detect Florida's interstate speed limit signs at all, since they have both the maximum and minimum speed limit on the same sign.
This, on a software discussion board. So many horrible errors in such a small package! I sort of have ~3 different map+nav systems, and they won't even agree with each other what the situation is, never mind the Real World (tm). Speed limits specifically: they are in agreement about 80% of the time.
Machine vision, triple meh. Even with strictly standardized set of easily recognizable shapes, this is useful for post facto mapping ( https://blog.mapillary.com/tutorials/2017/08/21/mapping-traf... ), but nowhere near realtime without false negatives.
Machine vision is okay for ex post detection (e.g. https://blog.mapillary.com/tutorials/2017/08/21/mapping-traf... ), but realtime decision making? Nope. Never mind detecting people (RIP EH), even detecting a standardized set of basic shapes is harder in practice than in theory.
As for built in sat nav - I have three (3). Their notion of current max speed matches about 80% of the time...and that doesn't always match the actual max speed in meatspace.
State provided speed limits by city block can be stored in a chip the size of a lentil, and easily updated over the air. No need to broadcast anyone's location.
It's absolutely political. Automated traffic enforcement remains extremely unpopular among Americans, because there's still a cultural expectation that driving should be a relatively unrestricted activity. Until that perception changes, driving and alternate methods of transportation in America are just a form of prisoner's dilemma, where it always makes sense to choose a car.
Are you retrofitting tens of millions of existing vehicles on the road? Be realistic.
Nobody ever thinks these kinds of statements through. It's just, oh we'll sign the regulation, and poof, everything instantly falls in compliance. No. No, the world just does not work that way.
You're putting words in my mouth. We stopped selling lead gasoline. We mandated seat belts, anti-block breaks, airbags and more. Nobody asked to retrofit every car on the road, but that's not a valid excuse.
Well the question I have posted before is simple, with self driving cars who is at fault when they break the speed limit. I am pretty sure distracted driving accounts for far more accidents than speed alone does. Even taking people's licenses won't stop many from driving.
however - we could force the issue of speed limits within city spaces for cars that are newer, like you said we certainly have the tech and any car with traffic aware cruise control should be able to have a limit forced upon it within city limits
We also have the technology to capture your license plate as you zoom down the road. Do we want to have tickets just mailed out for violating the limit? Perhaps make it random which roads are enforced so to make it feel as if all are enforced?
as for scooters
scooters stand a good chance of being out right banned in many cities. right now Atlanta has a curfew hours on them and considering that four deaths this year occurred on them as well as over two hundred responded to calls for injury I would not be unhappy if they were.
How much does speeding increase accidents? Is it more than everything else we could do? Is there something else, cellphone banning, driver skill requirements that we would be much more effective we should be putting our effort into?
There's a similar (yet generally not as bad) problem with airliner automation: the less a pilot has to do, the less experience they will have actually actively flying the plane. And when the automation hits a corner case where it can't control the plane, the pilot has fewer skills and experience on hand to keep the plane in the air.
The more automation allows people to avoid paying full attention to driving, the more crashes we will have when the automation fails and the human driver is unable to take control or react appropriately fast enough to avoid a collision.
This problem all goes away when we have perfect automation (or at least automation that performs better than humans do without the automation), but we're certainly not there yet, and it's not clear that we're even close.
And even if you have automation that's better than a human driver, when the automation does fail, and people die, there's an emotional backlash because, even if they're entirely wrong, people feel like they could have done better, if they just had control of the situation themselves. And even without that, you still need to assign blame. Does it go to the human in the car, even though they weren't driving? Does it go to the manufacturer of the automation? Or do we have to go through a huge cultural shift and dispense with the notion of blame in these sorts of situations?
It's funny... I am an adamant stickshift driver. I don't like driving cars with automatic transmissions. I feel less in control, less attentive. If even the difference between shifting myself and having some hydraulics do it for me bothers me, what about all this automatic other stuff?
We also hang on to cars for a long time, but my spouse recently got a new car and it has, among other things, a lane-keeping feature. It annoys the crap out of me. I use it on highway driving, but not in urban driving. On the other hand, it has a context-sensitive cruise control I really like.
I've had a car with a manual transmission for 12 years now; I dunno about feeling more in control. I personally find it more fun to drive a manual transmission car, but I recognize that I have no logical basis for this. Modern automatic transmissions (or CVTs) likely get better fuel economy than I do.
And I honestly don't even really think about shifting that much when I'm driving; after doing it for so long, it just comes automatically (despite the fact that I drive very little, on the order of 1500 miles per year at most).
It's extremely annoying if I'm ever in stop-and-go traffic, to the point that I'll probably get an automatic transmission car whenever I need a new one. I can also count on one hand the number of friends who can drive stick, so if I'm ever driving people on a long road trip, there's no one to share the driving.
I am 100% blind. This article confirms my fears. In the future, it will be more dangerous to walk the streets then it already is. I was born with an deep fear of automatic doors. And I will likely die due to the autonomous car revolution.
”Our founders said: “Cars are driven by people – the guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo, therefore, is and must remain safety.” Those values have never changed, and in 2008 we set out our vision – that by 2020 nobody should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car.”
They probably won’t reach this, but they worked hard towards it. For example:
In that case, be sure to buy a sedan, it's more dangerous to hit a pedestrian with a truck or SUV due to their higher ground clearance and taller fronts.
Maybe the http://www.arielatom.com/ ? Excellent visibility and low to the ground so you won't hit any vital parts in the event of a collision. Plus most people will probably notice you... ;-)
Honestly a gen1 prius is the ideal shape. It's small and the car is one big bulbous wedge. Pedestrians hit the car at the legs, topple over the hood, and roll off.
SUVs and trucks have a huge front end that can rip people in half or slam them under the car rather than have them roll up and off. I saw an SUV hit a deer and the poor thing exploded like a grenade.
You, the driver, have much much more control over pedestrian safety than any tool. Tech is not silver bullet, it fails (rta). If you believe the tech will "protect you", do you job for you, that is dangerous. Get skilled first, augment those skills with tech second.
That's a naive approach. Sure - technology shouldn't replace safe driving, but it sure does help a lot. It was amazing when the collision avoidance system kicked in on my Volvo V60 and did an emergency breaking, stopping in time when some kids snow sled into traffic. I think could have been able to stop in time, but that would have been a much closer call.
Relatedly, a 1939 vision of the future (discussed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104762 ) shows a simple --- but probably quite expensive --- solution; people and cars can't collide if they're separated:
Sadly, this is well known inside the industry. The functionality of these systems significantly degraded when dark.
I've been told that there is similar degradation in the performance of autonomous emergency braking and forward-collision warning not only when dealing with pedestrians, but with cars that have their lights on and are perfectly visible to human drivers.
If any of those systems use deep learning, they _by design_ will not necessarily recognize a _dummy_ as a _person_, particularly in difficult lighting conditions or if the dummy does not show up on IR (if the system is multi-spectral).
That headline seems exceedingly tautological to me. If a safety feature fails, then the situation isn't going to be the safest, or if it was, who would notice?
> the Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and Tesla Model 3 ... When testers drove the cars directly at a dummy crossing the road in the dark, however, the system failed not only to stop or slow the car but also to provide any alert of a pedestrian’s presence before a collision.
It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags.
Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver.
https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s...
>It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.