As the article points out, "auto safety" itself has had a huge push from consumer advocates at least since Ralph Nader highlighted the risks of car design defects in the 1960s.
That said, a few points about the law and auto safety:
1. U.S. law is tied to individual responsibility for conduct that is wrongful. As the auto industry developed over the past century, that meant that those who sought to drive by what the law declared to be the rules of the road were deemed to have done something wrong only if they failed to meet a reasonable standard of care in driving - that is, if they were negligent, careless, inexcusably inattentive, or otherwise failed to exercise a sufficient degree of caution that they created safety risks to others owing to their manner of driving. Breaking rules (e.g., speeding, driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and like items) constituted one such failure to exercise proper caution. In such cases, the law developed so as to hold such drivers responsible for damages in civil proceedings for the what the law called the "tort" of negligence. A tort is a civil wrong by which the actor committing the tort ("tortfeasor") is responsible to pay in damages for all harm caused by his tortious activity. In layman's terms involving cars, this generally means careless conduct. If the degree of wrongdoing is more egregious than mere carelessness, as for example when teenagers in the 1950s used to drag race through city streets in a way that constituted reckless conduct (that is, conduct by which the wrongdoer deliberately does things that have a high risk of endangering public safety), the consequence of this to the wrongdoer is also a civil wrong for which damages will lie but it is also (usually) defined as a criminal act by which the person can be prosecuted, fined, or jailed as a consequence of such actions. As the intent to harm increases even further, such as an act by which someone deliberately seeks to inflict harm on another while using a car as an instrument of harm, this can constitute a serious crime such as murder (for example, when someone deliberately drives at high speed into a crowd of people and does so with intent to harm or kill others).
2. Underlying the system of law that has developed around accountability for auto-related collisions, fatalities, etc. is a social policy judgment that sees automobiles as a positive good for society. The article notes that such social policy judgments were made over the years more and more in favor of promoting more expansive use of the automobile at the expense of pedestrians and mass transit riders who might also use the roads, especially in urban environments. This undoubtedly happened, though it is a dubious assertion to say that some sort of sinister forces ("Motordom" is the term used in the article) made this happen in some way that somehow overrode the will of ordinary people. I am old enough to remember as a kid how people perceived automobiles in, say, the late 1950s, and there is no doubt from my personal recollection that average people rejoiced and celebrated ever-increasing uses of the high-speed automobile, cheered on the National Highway Act by which old two-lane state roads were sent into relative disuse through the creation of a vast network of interstate freeways, and, as a matter of culture, broadly celebrated what was called the "car culture." Even dissidents of the time, such as Jack Kerouac, though a counter-culture figure of his time, broadly promoted the idea of freedom in driving the open road. If anyone in that era would have suggested that cars be shut down or limited in favor of bikes, they would have been laughed at by the average person. Such ideas were basically considered crank ideas and had no form of popular support whatever. Therefore, it did not take a secret plot by General Motors (or whomever) to get people to push widespread auto use. People wanted to get away from cities generally, wanted to live in the suburbs that were growing rapidly at the time, and wanted the freedom to use cars to get around whenever and wherever they wanted with limited restrictions other than having to obey the rules of the road. Yes, individual cities deployed mass transit with varying degrees of widespread use but these were limited to a few highly localized areas. People generally wanted cars, and mainly cars, to get around.
3. So, coming to the themes of this piece, "auto safety" is one such theme and the idea of the automobile being inherently "murderous" certainly tries to highlight this theme. Yet I would say the broader theme is actually more one of saying that the rules of the road should be rewritten to strike a different social policy judgment about how roads are used. It is nowhere stated in the article, but is strongly implied, that perhaps drivers of automobiles should be subjected to stronger legal consequences than those currently existing in the event they collide with others in using a road. Given that we are here in the realm of social policy, and not existing law, this could mean almost anything. For example, it could mean strict liability for damages if you hit someone using a car, no matter what the circumstances and regardless of what the law now calls "fault." This is what happened to the law in other areas over recent decades, most notably with the expansion of strict product liability law by which manufactures (who at one time could be held liable for injuries resulting from use of their products only if the injured party could show that the manufacturer was negligent or otherwise at "fault" in making the product) had their liabilities dramatically broadened if injuries resulted from use of their products. As the law evolved in that area, the courts and legislatures eventually determined that manufacturers should be held liable regardless of fault if their products could be shown to have inherent "defects" (broadly defined). This led to a huge expansion of liability for manufacturing such products and, for example, pretty much decimated certain industries such as manufacturers of small aircraft. As a matter of social policy, the same could be done with the idea of driving an automobile. Courts and legislatures could determine that it is socially desirable that drivers be held strictly liable regardless of fault because this would promote greater driver safety and would also strike a balance in shared road usage that favors pedestrians and others more than drivers. They could also define as a crime any collision by which a motorist acts carelessly in a way that results in death or injury. They could impose strict penalties, such as losing the right to drive upon the occurrence of even one such event. This sort of change - or any other like it - would have huge social consequences for the vast majority of primarily suburban drivers who do in fact continue to value having the ability to drive freely about as their primary means of transportation. Young people flocking to cities in favor of "upscale urban lifestyles" (and others who have a particular viewpoint, in the case of such young people in favor of mass transit over cars) may see the issue differently. But the law ultimately is driven by the average people who elect politicians, etc. and I would suspect will be slow to change in this respect.
4. The article also expresses concern about high speeds and about drivers themselves being at risk of death or serious injury in driving the so-called murderous machines. While it is true that high speeds clearly enlarge such risks, it is a bit disingenuous to claim this as a primary concern while simultaneously forcing cars to be made smaller and smaller out of concern for increasing car mileage per gallon and promoting environmental goals. In modern public policy making, the same people who try to flog the auto companies for endangering drivers for this or that reason are often the first to decree that cars be made smaller and smaller even though this might create increasing safety risks to drivers who wind up in accidents. Again, this is a matter of social policy, and there are lots of arguments for why smaller cars promote broader social goals, but I rarely hear the people insisting on smaller cars acknowledge that an inherent by-product of this is to increase safety risks in case of collision (perhaps I am wrong on this point but I am going from memory in saying that this is indeed a known consequence of shrinking the car size).
The real battle here is over a strong push to have the law conform to the modern urban trends favoring bike riders, transit riders, and pedestrians over automobiles. That issue should be addressed head on by assessing not only the potential benefits of limiting auto use but also the social costs (which I believe could be substantial). The article does not do that and is flawed because of this, notwithstanding its (many) interesting points made along the way.
> I am old enough to remember as a kid how people perceived automobiles in, say, the late 1950s, .... Even dissidents of the time, such as Jack Kerouac, .... Therefore, it did not take a secret plot by General Motors (or whomever) to get people to push widespread auto use. People wanted to....
This whole paragraph is missing the point---the purported "plot" was not a product of the 1950s, but of the 1920s. The evidence that you provide in this paragraph does not support the claim that there was no plot; it might actually just support the claim that the "plot", such as it was, succeeded!
(That's not to say there was definitely a plot, although I think it's clear there was. But counterevidence for this claim would need to come in the form of recollections and data from much earlier.)
Exactly. Without a doubt there was a literal conspiracy to undermine urban mass transit during the 1930s and 1940s. Firestone, Phillips, Standard Oil, and GM were all convicted of conspiracy, for Pete's sake.
... those who sought to drive by what the law declared to be the rules of the road were deemed to have done something wrong only if they failed to meet a reasonable standard of care in driving - that is, if they were negligent, careless, inexcusably inattentive, or otherwise failed to exercise a sufficient degree of caution
But the letter of the law seems to indicate otherwise. The California "basic speed law" says: "22350. No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property." (my emphasis)
That seems to me to pretty clearly say that if you hit someone you were in fact breaking the law, not just "failing to meet a reasonable standard of care". Do you have any insight in how this plays out?
"While it is true that high speeds clearly enlarge such risks, it is a bit disingenuous to claim this as a primary concern while simultaneously forcing cars to be made smaller and smaller out of concern for increasing car mileage per gallon and promoting environmental goals. "
Great point. In fact, I think the published collision ratings are based on colliding with a car in the same weight class. That is required because weight is such an overwhelming factor in your survival in an accident.
Weight is also an overwhelming factor in the OTHER person's survival in an accident. We do not make the general public safer by encouraging an arms race of heavier and heavier vehicles.
The problem is, that there are always going to be heavier vehicles than ours on the road. Even if we make everyone drive Volkswagen Ups or Minis, there are always going to be trucks on roads which will literally ride over such a small vehicle. Not saying that you would necessarily survive in an SUV, but chances are probably better. Also - people will always drive pickups and vans because they need them for work. Even if we eliminate all SUVs from pleasure/commuting use, there is still plenty of dangers that will remain.
The thrust of the argument would be that your are upping your chance of survival against a truck by lowering the survival of the people you might hit. I don't think the chance of getting crushed by a truck is very high compared to the risk of hitting a pedestrian or cyclist.
The death rate per miles driven in the United States has fallen dramatically in my lifetime, and I can remember when the annual number of deaths was much higher.[1] That said, the article makes a very interesting claim about attitudes that we should all follow to the end of the article for further discussion here: "There’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter." My wife bike-commutes year-round (yes, even in Minnesota), and as I mention this among Facebook friends, other friends who are also bike commuters point out that car drivers can basically kill bicyclists in the United States with no legal penalty at all. That's not a good social environment for getting more people out for exercise and energy conservation by substituting bicycling for driving cars.
The history reported in this article is very interesting. There are a lot of contemporary photographs of changing American cities. The quotations from experts provide perspective on the visuals: "'If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, "What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,"' says Norton.
"'In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, "What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?" That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed."
Indeed. Are we really thinking carefully about how to spread the risk around, when so much of our living space is dominated by cars?
AFTER EDIT: The video link shared by pugz[2] in a reply comment elsewhere in this thread is not to be missed. Car safety standards have improved enormously in my lifetime, but those protect the occupants of cars better than they protect pedestrians and bicyclists who are hit by cars.
I don't think the solution to unsafe roads is to throw everyone that is at-fault in an accident in jail.
I understand the frustration cyclists have with auto traffic, but we've seen a million times that harsher penalties don't always have the intended outcome. And we have a habit in the US of using prison as the answer for every malady.
Instead, I think the answer is better road design, separating cars and cyclists using dedicated lanes, and automated vehicles.
Sure, lets do all of that. But there is plenty of low-hanging fruit. Maximum of 20 mph everywhere you have pedestrians, certainly in any city or city center - the simple reasoning being that higher speed only reduces time to travel some distance linearly, but the forces at work in a potential collision increase quadratically. So this is a complete no-brainer tradeoff that is directly reflected in survival rates for pedestrians in ped-car crashes:
(There need to be legal repercussions regardless. If you are involved in a collision as a car driver, you can not be allowed to be driving again the very next day, regardless of fault. People that operate multi-ton machinery producing enough kW to provide power for a whole block take on a massive gamble at the cost of other people, and so that in and of itself needs to be remedied legally.)
I think the premise of the 20mph speed limit is good, but the way car transmissions are geared, doing a sustained slow speed could actually be dangerous as well. Doing 15mph through the parking lot at my office means I'm feathering the throttle quite a bit, and paying close attention to my speedometer and less attention to the things in front of me. I've never driven a car that "wants" to do 15mph or 20mph. I can't just keep the throttle at one position and stay at 20mph, the pedal, the foot controlling it, and the sense of speed related by the brain just aren't designed for fine adjustments.
The point being, I believe that setting low and strict speed limits could be counter productive and could lead to drivers being more distracted and less prepared to stop. If my hunch is right, there would be an increase in car-pedestrian accidents at exactly 20mph, and fewer at 10mph or below due to people being less likely to get their foot on the brake because of the effort required to keep the car moving at 20mph and watching the speedometer.
I've actually hit a pedestrian once. My light turned green as the person stepped into the crosswalk, and I hit them less than a second after I was stopped at 0mph. The pedestrian and the car were both fine with no injuries. Perhaps rather than dropping the city speed limit from the 25mph it already is down to 20mph, we should be focusing on getting pedestrians to cross in locations where cars are naturally going very slowly to begin with. I don't want to shift the blame of an accident from the perpetrator to the victim, but for pedestrian safety, crossing at a light (and following crosswalk signals) is worlds safer because the cars there will already be either stopped or going very slowly.
This sounds like an argument for introducing a separate class of "city car" to the USA. On a highway, I want a big comfy car that can be efficient at 55-65 MPH, and protect me in a collision at those speeds. In a city, I don't really need that.
That big comfy car that protects you from highway collisions accomplishes that by shifting the impact toward the smaller car. It doesn't increase overall highway safety, just steals it from others in your favor.
Large cars are also safer in single-vehicle collisions, which account for 65% of traffic deaths. There is some adverse effect on occupants of other vehicles, but this is much smaller than the advantage in safety from the large vehicle.
It is definitely not true that it "just steals it from others".
It definitely is true. In a collision the vehicles absorb the energy of the collision inversely proportional to their relative masses i.e. the lighter car takes the brunt of the crash.
Safety researchers are responding by using active protection systems: in vehicles equippped with v2v transcievers will stiffen or soften their crash protection systems based upon the relative masses of the vehicles.
- two people driving paper-thin cars crash into each other head-on at 60 mph. The cars divide the energy of the collision evenly, disintegrate, and pass on a lot of energy to their passengers.
- two people driving huge voluminous and massive SUVs crash into each other head-on at 60 mph. The SUVs divide the energy of the collision evenly, warping into unrecognizable crumply wads of steel. The passengers take less damage than in the earlier scenario.
Yes, the question mark indicates that I want you to confirm I'm understanding correctly. Seems so. Why is that impossible? We know from the trivial case of a person flying along at 60 mph with no car (maybe they were fired out of a cannon?) that you can reduce damage to the passenger by adding mass.
Of that 65% that is single vehicle collisions, what causes are responsible for most of those and where do most of those collisions take place? suburbs, rural, city?
I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of single vehicle collisions are in low density suburbs.
I would also imagine that the overwhelming majority of those deaths involved colliding with a stationary, immovable object, such as a tree or traffic pole. In such a case, smaller vehicles will much less kinetic energy, but still as much thought given to their safety designs, should be much safer.
Big doesn't have to mean particularly heavy, and it's ridiculous of you to suggest that a couple extra feet of crumple zone isn't going to make impacts less forceful.
What about all the safety features found in larger cars? What about single-vehicle accidents? I don't need to drive a logging truck to feel safe, but I'd much rather drive a new corolla than an 80s model. Solid pillars and increased crumple zones and multiple airbags make a car bulkier, but the safety improvement is much greater than a simple function of weight.
I don't think that's true. Consider the two extremes.
1. You somehow manage to get a cardboard box up to 70MPH. You strike another fellow pulling the same trick. How badly are the two of you hurt? I believe the chances are excellent that you both die immediately.
2. You somehow manage to get a container ship up to 70MPH. You strike another fellow pulling the same trick. How badly are you hurt? If you're strapped in and not near the front, I believe chances are excellent that you'll both walk (swim) away.
When people decry using the prison system as a cure-all, it's usually for things like drugs or mental illness. In essence, why punish people for things that either don't harm others, or aren't their fault?
You're applying this to a serious crime, at least manslaughter if not murder. If prison isn't appropriate for that, what is prison appropriate for? I imagine an argument could be made that prison is never the right thing, but I don't think you're making that argument.
Harsher penalties don't always have the intended outcome, sure. But this isn't so much advocating a harsher penalty as advocating a penalty at all.
If I'm driving a car, what is my incentive to pay attention and try to avoid killing cyclists? Simple morals, obviously, but that doesn't work on everybody. If I'm a selfish asshole (lots of those out there) and I know I won't suffer legal penalties, why would I care about cyclists?
If you kill someone while driving a car and you are at fault, why should you not go to jail? That is the standard punishment in that scenario without the car, so why should adding a car make it go away?
Simple, "at fault" takes on a different meaning in driving. Often it's a cluster of mistakes that causes an accident, mistakes by either vehicle or even mistakes by someone not a part of the collision itself. If I'm 51% at fault should I go to jail?
But also everyone makes mistakes occasionally behind the wheel, most often nothing bad happens. And by everyone I mean every single driver without exception. That's why the law mostly operates with concept of Mens Rea, a guilty mind. Negligence only comes into play under a reasonable person standard and since we know those reasonable persons are also making same mistakes... it goes to civil court.
"There is credible subjective evidence that the particular accused neither foresaw nor desired the particular outcome, thus potentially excluding both intention and recklessness. But a reasonable person with the same abilities and skills as the accused would have foreseen and taken precautions to prevent the loss and damage being sustained"
That's the tricky phrase. How do you prove fault in a car collision, to the same degree that's required for a charge and conviction of manslaughter or murder?
In New Jersey, we have "no-fault" laws for insurance, which basically means that when there is an accident there's no way to prove that either party is more at-fault than the other, so legally neither is at fault. In practice, both parties are treated as if the accident is their fault, and both are penalized with higher insurance rates at minimum.
My concern with any law that holds drivers responsible for deaths in accidents they're involved in by charging them with manslaughter or murder is that the same logic will be applied: every driver in every accident where someone dies will go to jail, unless they're rich enough to bend the rules and escape the charge. That's unfair, because many accidents really are accidents, and many people who die in accidents are at least as responsible as the people who survive.
Besides, there are already additional penalties for drivers in these situations. Their insurance pays out substantially to the victims or their families, and the driver's insurance rates go up, potentially to the point that the driver is no longer insurable and they can't drive anymore. So the article is wrong in saying that drivers can get away with murder with no consequences.
Why would the same logic be applied? Surely a conviction for vehicular manslaughter would be held to the same standard as a conviction for regular manslaughter, which is to say proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
If guilt can't be proven for sufficiently to assess which driver's insurance should pay for the costs of an accident, how can guilt be proven for the much stricter requirements needed for manslaughter? I think this would be especially difficult if the courts are overloaded with all accidents that involve deaths, instead of only the ones where drivers today are being charged with manslaughter and murder. (eg: cases where there appears to be intent to kill, rather than just accidental killings.)
There are many cases where guilt can be proven sufficiently, both to assess insurance responsibility and legal culpability.
Just because New Jersey has decided to punt on the whole question doesn't mean it's impossible to answer in all cases. Sure, there will be cases where somebody kills somebody else due to negligence and they get away with it because it can't be proven. People sometimes go free after murdering people with guns and knives because the crime can't be proven too, but that's not a reason to give up on prosecuting all murders.
> If guilt can't be proven for sufficiently to assess which driver's insurance should pay for the costs of an accident, how can guilt be proven for the much stricter requirements needed for manslaughter?
Guilt could be proven for more cases but the cost is prohibitive. It is cheaper for all concerned to just say "we know what happened, let's not bother finding out how and just split the costs of repair", the drivers pay higher premiums for a while, they probably share the blame anyway and both will drive more carefully from now on.
When one of the parties could go to prison for life, society decides to accept the burden and does a full investigation.
Increased insurance premiums aren't enough. That just punishes those too poor to handle the increased premiums. Everyone else just gets back on the road after the accident is "resolved" legally. A lifetime ban on driving or at least a ban of 10 years is far reasonable. Moving a multi-ton vehicle at speeds of ~40-70 mph is the ultimate privilege and it should be a privilege that is incredibly easy to lose.
All reckless driving citations should carry with them a minimum 1-5 year loss in driving privilege that no lawyer can get you out of.
Only a tiny majority of drivers will ever wilfully put cyclists at risk. Most people will genuinely believe that they are good drivers and nice people because that is exactly how everyone they know also behaves. There is simply no strong social pressure to be careful beyond a basic minimum standards. Cyclists are seen as breaking a basic social convention.
But as a cyclist, you realise how basically selfish people are and how unfair traffic accidents are. Motorists have an unrealistic idea of "fairness" and would feel that excessive penalties would be "unfair" when they made an honest mistake that is commonly made.
Personally I think that the penalties of bad driving should match the unfairness of the effects. Do not punish 99% of people who get a ticket. The other 1% are picked at random and get a very large fine (say $10,000).
Every driver on his cellphone or sending text messages is willfully putting cyclists at risk. Considering how common both those scenarios are, I would say that many if not the majority of drivers put cyclists (and pedestrians, other drivers and themselves) at risk on a regular basis.
> When people decry using the prison system as a cure-all, it's usually for things like [...] mental illness. [...] why punish people for things that [...] aren't their fault?
Because they're dangerous to society. Whether or not it's their fault, there are some people we can't have on the streets. If you plead insanity in a murder case, we don't want to release you, we want to imprison you in an asylum instead of a jail.
I'm actually not fond of separating cars and cyclists using dedicated lanes. My experience has been that roads with bike lanes tend to be more dangerous - cars stop paying as much attention to bikes, so you get a lot more instances of them forgetting you're there and making a right hand turn right in front of you. Not to mention that they often force cyclists to ride within swinging distance of car doors - which is a far more popular way to injure cyclists than actually running into them is.
My preference would be to have designated bike thoroughfares where cars are permitted, but the speed limit is kept to something low enough that cars and bikes are going at approximately the same speed so bikes can ride in the lane without (reasonable) motorists feeling obstructed.
Since bike lanes integrated into the road are common enough, I think when people demand dedicated bike lanes, they mean »not part of the road, but instead physically separated«. And those are indeed better, safety-wise.
At the very least loss of privilege is warranted. If you are responsible for a motor vehicle accident, you should not be allowed to drive again. This at least provides some permanent hazard to being careless. If you can cause an accident, clean it up because you can afford a good lawyer and be back on the road with business as usual, you're far less likely to be careful.
I was recently in Beijing, where the supremacy of the automobile over the pedestrian is just about taken to its logical conclusion.
The US puts cars on a high footing compared to pedestrians, with pedestrians restricted to crossing roads at certain points, generally better signaling and routes for cars, etc. Yet cars are still required to yield to pedestrians when e.g. turning or at a marked crosswalk.
In Beijing, the idea of yielding to pedestrians when turning doesn't seem to exist. Crossing a major intersection, even with full signaling, is an adventure and an exercise in attempting to look in all directions simultaneously. It's even worse than you might think, because the sidewalk often doubles as a parking lot, so somebody might by trying to drive up where you're waiting, or worse, come up behind you! And you are expected to yield. It got to the point where I measured the difficulty of any walk not in terms of distance but in terms of how many intersections I'd have to cross.
Beijing is pretty walkable overall but at the same time this can make it extremely unpleasant, depending on where you are. I wonder if that might not be where the US is heading if we're not careful about it.
(The Chinese are strangely cavalier about cars in general. Essentially nobody wears seat belts, for example, and drunk driving is common. No surprise that their death rate per vehicle is three times higher than the US's. Seat belts would be such an easy way to reduce that. It's hard to understand.)
> In Beijing, the idea of yielding to pedestrians when turning doesn't seem to exist.
It's odd. I remember when people were bemused by the bicycle city, and yet I also remember when I learned that the way to cross the street in Beijing was never to indicate that you could see a car coming, because then they'd assume you'd stop. Instead, you watch for traffic out of your peripheral vision and keep your eyes forward so that they'd feel you couldn't see them.
I wonder if that's still common wisdom.
> It got to the point where I measured the difficulty of any walk not in terms of distance but in terms of how many intersections I'd have to cross.
One of the possibly most frustrating moments I had was recently in downtown San Jose. My cousin and I (and others) had finished lunch and left into an alleyway. Her four-year-old son cheerfully ran out to the sidewalk, and we panicked because it would have been so easy for him to keep going out to the street itself.
There was no harm (he indignantly pointed out that he had not gone into the street), but it perplexes me why we find these kinds of risks acceptable. Every block, we've essentially put down a death trap for the young. I could understand it if this was the edge of the untamed wilds and we couldn't really do anything about the wolf pack in the area, but... we built these cities.
> The Chinese are strangely cavalier about cars in general. Essentially nobody wears seat belts, for example,
I've noticed this is prevalent elsewhere in Asia: there are often similar claims made about Mumbai or Bangkok.
Personally, I think that not indicating you can see cars coming and crossing that way would be a good way to get killed. However, I haven't actually tried it. I haven't observed the natives using this tactic either as far as I can tell.
It's ironic. Peking was considered a beautiful city of clean air (except dust storm season) full of bicyclists during the oppressive communist era.
Now in the time of industrial crony capitalism, it's famous as the most polluted capital in the world. The streets are dangerous and cars have replaced bikes making the powerful insiders even more oppressive against individuals because now they can kill people with impunity.
Surely this is better than communism, but unlike the Taiwanese the Red China capitalists have imported every Western vice tenfold.
Only during the Dèng era was Peking open to new ideas and businesses, full of pedestrians and bicycles free from fear, and able to look up to clear skies.
Yes! Having seen the "Nixon in China" images of a surging wave of bicycles at every green light at an intersection, I was shocked to see in person how completely cars have taken over, and how badly Beijing drivers treat cyclists, driving within inches of them. The only reason there isn't carnage on every block is that nothing moves faster than 10mph.
Taipei, meanwhile, is overrun with gas scooters. These pollute worse than cars. The mainland Chinese could not allow gas scooters because of their pollution output. Every office in Taipei has racks in the stairwells for hanging up your very necessary rain poncho.
A great irony is that the Chinese have mastered the ability to make cheap electric bikes. Some Chinese use them. Very few Taiwanese, because they can't keep up with gas scooters. But you'll see lots of Chinese electric bikes in New York.
In Beijing, the idea of yielding to pedestrians when turning doesn't seem to exist.
In parts of the US, too. Travelling across the US, there were a couple of places where as a pedestrian I had the right of way (pedestrian crossing light illuminated) and I actually had to stop crossing otherwise I would walk into the side of the car turning right in front of me, cutting me off.
I also noticed wandering around some inner suburbs of Austin that it was hostile to pedestrians - some houses just decided to stretch their gardens all the way to the road, blocking the footpath. Pedestrian traffic had to step out onto the road, in one case a secondary thoroughfare, to get past the property.
Is a lawn legally allowed to block a sidewalk? I know the right-of-way stretches well past the boundaries of the road. I've always walked on the edge of people's lawns when there's no sidewalk, because I'm fairly certain it's legal to do so. If there's no sidewalk, pedestrians walk on your lawn within a few feet of the road, and there's nothing you can do about it.
One thing I would never do is step into the street to walk, regardless of how angry a homeowner might be about it.
Your edit is an important point: As far as I am aware, there are no safety standards or ratings for how likely a vehicle is to injure occupants of other vehicles, let alone unprotected pedestrians or bicyclists. If anything, the focus on occupant safety to the exclusion of others has supported the "race to the top" in terms of vehicle mass and size.
The Australasian New Car Assessment Program provides a website howsafeisyourcar.com.au. A recent interesting addition is precisely what you say: it measures pedestrian safety in collisions with specific car models. For example, the 2013 VW Polo:
"The bumper provided mixed protection for pedestrians' legs. The front edge of the bonnet was marginal to poor. The centre of the bonnet offered good protection to a child's head but poorer protection towards the edges. In most areas likely to be struck by an adult's head, poor protection was provided."
EDIT: Seems three of us posted in the same minute. :)
Holy crap. That's the most heart-breaking web page I've ever read. I literally had to stop reading after just a couple so that I'd have any chance of sleeping tonight.
I don't know this for certain, but I think there are at least some safety standards. One thing I've noticed while driving around my town is that school buses have an odd design. In most vehicles the tires are placed fairly close to the corners of the vehicle, which I assume increases stability and improves maneuverability.
But in school buses the tires are set far back from the corners, especially the rear tires. In a large bus the tires are 5-10 feet from the rear bumper. School buses also tend to have a very high ground clearance. I assume that these design features are for safety: if the bus hits a child while starting to move, either backward or forward, the driver will have a lot more time to react to the thud against the bumper before the tires reach the child. It takes a moment for the driver to notice the thud and move his foot from the gas to the brake; if the tires were at the corners that moment is all it would take for the bus to roll over the child.
So, I think this is an example where the vehicle is designed explicitly to protect pedestrians, even though it probably makes the vehicle less stable and harder to maneuver.
In 2004, 42,836 Americans were killed in motor vehicle accidents. So this number actually represents a huge improvement.
Something to realize is that potential replacements to cars are not that much safer. Highway travel is responsible for 7.7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Mass transit is responsible for 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Given the less-direct routings used by transit, it's not totally clear this is a meaningful difference.
All of this sucks - but it's the price we pay for being able to move a long distance quickly, something that seems to be a net benefit to society. (How many lives are saved by ambulances each year? How about by being able to easily visit a doctor?)
These are all statistics for the US in 2011. Sources are:
I'd really like to see that broken down by type of transit, as well as deaths for transit passengers versus people killed in e.g. private cars involved in accidents with busses.
My guess, and this is very much a guess, is that buses will be disproportionately dangerous, and a fair number of those killed by busses are in cars that collide with them.
For one random example, the DC metro has seen 9 deaths in the past five years and appears to run at about 1.8 billion passenger-miles per year, for a fatality rate of around 0.1 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles (or 1 per billion). This is very rough as deaths are spiky (those nine deaths happened all at once almost five years ago) and the long-term average is tough to judge.
In my town and the towns around me (suburbs of NYC in New Jersey) there are a lot of deaths from people being hit by commuter trains. It's quite possible that we have more people dying that way than in traffic accidents, especially if you don't count deaths on the highways in the area which don't have any pedestrians.
The problem here is that the trains mostly run at ground level, and the stations are mostly completely open. It's very easy to walk around behind of or in front of the train while it's still in the station or approaching the station. We've had incidents where individuals or groups of commuters who just got off the train try to cross the track behind the train, assuming that the gates are down because the train hadn't left yet, only to be struck by a train arriving on the other track. There was a big public education campaign after the last incident like that, but the town had to resort to a police officer stationed there during rush hour handing out jay-walking tickets before people would stop trying to cross while the gates were down.
There's also a strong suspicion that a lot of these deaths are suicides, but that's pretty hard to prove.
That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. I imagine that the safety of commuter trains with open stations and at-grade crossings must be vastly different from the safety of subways with closed stations and full grade separation. But I would love to see real numbers.
>All of this sucks - but it's the price we pay for being able to move a long distance quickly, something that seems to be a net benefit to society. (How many lives are saved by ambulances each year? How about by being able to easily visit a doctor?)
They are not mutually exclusives. You could ban private cars but still have ambulances. Or make the speed limits absurdly slow or something like that. I'm not saying that we should do this, but we are definitely choosing to sacrifice lives for our convenience.
Of the 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles, are there any statistics to show what percentage of these are the result or have a contributing factor of cars involved?
It would be fascinating to see if the 5.4 statistic would drop significantly if the car-related deaths were factored out.
Moderation is key. If we can cut down on driving, things would be even better.
Making telecommuting a standard business practice would be huge in reducing pollution, energy usage, etc. It would also allow people to spend more time with their families & live where they want.
I agree that having exactly the same urban design but just replacing the transit modality is likely to produce only a minimal improvement (not to mention being difficult to do, since transit modality and urban layout are interlinked). I think the bigger wins come from shifts in commute patterns. People who take transit typically also take it for fewer miles, making the annual per-person death rates of transit riders considerably lower than the smaller per-mile gap would imply. I think having an urban layout where transit could even work is the big change. But those are pretty deeply tied, e.g. people won't move into denser "transit-oriented development" if there's no good transit to it.
That's the main factor impacting the total number, also. Americans are about 2-3x more likely to die each year while commuting than Germans are, but mostly because they have longer commutes, not because the per-mile safety is worse (though it is slightly worse).
"Murder Machines"? Come on. Not all deaths are murder.
We Americans have this idea that nothing bad should ever happen, that we should find a way to prevent it. It's a goal to shoot for, certainly. But calling it murder if you don't reach that goal? No.
Can we climb down from the overheated rhetoric? It smells like propaganda.
I came here looking for this comment, I was not disappointed :-)
The headline is hyperbole, but it is common hyperbole. Factories pumping out pollutants are "murdering" our people, Cigarette manufacturers are "murdering" their customers, Etc.
The interesting point in the story is how we went from 'cars need to look out for people' to 'people need to look out for cars' in a relatively short time frame. The discussion of the various articles and points of view and how they gained favor over time is similar to things like Nuclear power which went from 'power to cheap to measure' to 'tool of the devil', or gun ownership, or Television ownership, or any number of things that have impacted the community at large.
The thing to remember for this community is that these are emotional arguments presented as rational arguments. Hence the term 'murder' which evokes the desired emotion (outrage) rather than 'dangerous' which evokes a statistical mindset of potential harm.
Intentionally releasing poisons is a hell of a lot closer to murder than performing an activity with risks (aka any activity). Factories are a poor leading point, because I could see a world where they are required to capture toxins to the point that only uncommon accidents release non-negligible amounts. But driving would still be okay in comparison.
I agree that we should pay the attention to traffic deaths that the death toll warrants.
But don't call accidental deaths murder. That's the "overheated" part. Murder has a definition, and traffic deaths aren't it.
Even if you are a fervent advocate of traffic safety, this kind of manipulative rhetoric does you no favors. It makes people tune you out as a demagogue.
(Why do I call this "manipulative"? Because it tries to play on peoples' view of the horror of murder to make people realize the horror of traffic deaths. Traffic deaths are horrible, but the technique is still manipulative.)
Of course it's not technically murder. I interpreted the headline as pointing to the fact that, like murder, traffic deaths are "premeditated" in the sense that we know full well that they will occur but do little to prevent them.
Is it not? There are certainly some outliers (e.g. terrorism), but overall, traffic deaths seem to get more attention given its death rate than other causes of death.
For example, annual traffic deaths in the US are about the same as annual deaths from chronic liver disease or suicide. Suicide gets some attention, liver disease very little, while traffic deaths get all sorts of attention, from massive R&D efforts by car makers to seat belt campaigns to heavy police enforcement of safety-related traffic laws.
As another example, heart disease and stroke kill about 20 times as many Americans as traffic accidents, but it's legal for me to eat 6,000 calories of bacon a day while it's illegal for me not to wear my seat belt. (This is not a complaint against seat belt laws. I think they're a fine idea. I'm just pointing out a disparity in legal attention.)
Also, cars are not killing people. Drivers are. Unless we're talking about self-driving cars that spontaneously turn themselves on, back down the driveway, and mow down pedestrians on their own.
People don't intentionally mow down pedestrians. Our current system, which includes both cars and drivers acting with the best of intentions, kills huge numbers of people each year. Instead of trying to assign blame to a particular actor in the system, we should be thinking about ways to change the system as a whole so it kills fewer people.
Ugh, when 'cars' is used in this context, it's obvious it means a car and driver together, not the inanimate car.
If you ask someone how they got to the meetup and they say "Bus", do you say "yeah, right, like a bus can drive itself. It was probably a bus driver responsible. Unless we're talking about self-driving buses that can spontaneously turn themselves on (blah blah blah)"?
"I'm going to fly to Berlin next summer" -> "What? Humans can't fly. Don't you mean that a pilot (blah blah blah)"?
What about things like Toyota's unintended acceleration debacle?
Just because driver's actions count for a lot of accidents doesn't mean that car manufacturer are absolved from doing anything. Considering how many accidents there are, cars need to be designed with that in mind, much like how touch keyboards work around our fat finger inputs.
User error is a design consideration (or else we wouldn't have undo commands in all of our software).
It's clever marketing. It seems Americans really listen to re-branding of terms.
We have been playing this game where Americans live in burbs and spend time commuting. That has a huge psychological, familial, physical, environmental, financial, economic, & diplomatic toll.
Our landscape is dominated by asphalt & concrete to support the norm.
I think we can do better. If it takes some stigma to turn the discussion and to show more attention on the alternatives, then bring on the stigma.
In reality, not enough attention is paid. America seems to be more afraid of flying in an airplane or terrorists than the ubiquity of automobiles.
That's not entirely fair. Maybe in some of the cases; but, I've seen people do some really, really, REALLY unwise things as pedestrians that they're lucky someone was paying a huge amount of attention so they weren't hit.
The most pressing example in my mind is a woman cross the street in the middle of a rain shower, within 15 yards, probably much less (my mind's eye paints the memory as 'the edge of my car was here and the lady was RIGHT THERE!!!'), of me and crossing several lanes of traffic with her umbrella all out like she owned the place. She wasn't at a crosswalk, she was crossing the road a 100ish yards after a major turn, and I don't remember if I was the first car in a long line of cars or there were several cars passing and then she elected to walk in front of mine, but I'm very glad I was hyper-attentive so that I could brake in time and that my brakes were 100% up to spec, and my tires had enough tred on them.
She intentionally put herself into harms way and any number of minor failures, including me looking to where I needed to be, because it was RIGHT AFTER A TURN (think of where your eyes go when you're taking a turn, it's not to the far corner ahead, it's to where your wheel-edge is and where your lane is placed, so you don't hit someone more likely to be hit, like the car that's attempting the exact same manuever beside you), or having just that little bit less attention because I was adjusting a radio dial to not have her thumped up onto my roof.
It's not always the driver's fault. Some pedestrians need to realize that we, focused drivers, are still rocketing a couple tons of steel in a direction.
A driver paying full attention will still have that attention divided among several tasks. He should be monitoring what is happening behind the car. He should be checking the instrument panel. Even looking forward has subtasks. His forward scan should spend some time on things nearby, and some time looking far down the road.
get back to me after you've been driving every day for ten years and we will see what your interpretation of "full attention"means. you can't be 100% vigilante 100% of the time.
Probably what you're not experiencing 100% of the time. You have plenty of examples of cars being bad, but I'm sure you also have examples of cars not being bad. Of not trying to hit you and of giving you a wide berth when you're riding your bike.
But on the note of your bike, full attention includes things other than you. It includes the opposite lane, the speed limit, people behind them that might not stop if he hits his brakes and so on.
As a side note, there's a lot of sharp emotions directed at what people are saying and the verbage people are choosing is, I think, unnecessarily harsh and in some cases mocking. We need to tone that back.
I'd love to see some numbers on how many deaths are due to bad pedestrian behavior like that.
Anecdotally, I've never encountered that sort of thing from a pedestrian while driving, but I've almost been run down several times by drivers not obeying the law while I was legally crossing the street with the right of way. All it would take is crossing the street at the wrong time with a walk signal without checking both ways and splat.
Certainly there are cases with fault on either side, but I'd love to know which one dominates (if either).
> Anecdotally, I've never encountered that sort of thing from a pedestrian while driving,
You must not live anywhere near Seattle. Even after fourteen years of dealing with attention-not-paying pedestrians who believe it to be their deity-given right to walk into the street at any moment without even a sideways glance at traffic conditions, I'm still amazed that more of them don't bounce off of car hoods.
> All it would take is crossing the street at the wrong time with a walk signal without checking both ways and splat.
It's called "not assuming the other person is always going to do the right thing". Look both ways? Duh. The same brilliant pedestrians I reference above have been known to occasionally drive a car, of course I look both ways whether I'm on foot, in a car, on a motorcycle, or a bicycle.
I live in a suburban town that's mostly single-family homes, with lots of children. I also work in the area and often drive home for lunch, so I'm driving around a lot when the children are out. I've had a bunch of close calls over the years with kids wandering out in front of me without looking to see if there's any traffic in the street.
The closest was a teenage girl who literally walked into the side of my car by the passenger-side front wheel just as I was about to make a right turn. I looked right, I was clear. I looked left, I was clear. I looked right again and took my foot off the brake to start my turn, and there she was with her hands on my hood and a surprised look on her face. We're both very lucky her feet weren't under my wheel.
I don't know if this really answers your question, but supposedly about half the times when a pedestrian gets hit by a car, the pedestrian is intoxicated at the time.
Anecdotally, there are few situations I find more stressful as a motorist than driving in the vicinity of a university on a Friday night.
In 1885 Karl Benz construct the first automobile.
It had three wheels, like an invalid car,
And ran on alcohol, like many drivers.
Since then about seventeen million people have been killed by them
In an undeclared war;
And the whole of the rest of the world is in danger of being run over
Due to squabbles about their oil.
-Heathcote Williams (Autogeddon extract).
That was about how car deaths will probably be the leading killer in the developing world within a few years exceeding HIV.
But without the incorrect shock title it wasn't getting posted around the net nearly as much.
Also, technically there would very probably be a few murders committed with cars each year. But it would be a vastly lower number than the total number of fatalities.
Really depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada. Not true in the biggest North American city (NYC), though. Also not true in much of Europe.
Europe generally resisted the authoritarianism of the car, and lashed back against it fairly strongly. In the US, many cities were literally gutted in favor of making sure cars could move fast. Then we started designing with the assumption that anyone worth caring about had a car.
I wonder to what extent some of that is a fortunate combination of circumstances. Many European countries were quite positive on highways in the mid 20th century. But city centers mostly escaped having American-style freeways bulldozed through them, I think out of urban-preservation reasons more than anti-car or pro-transit sentiment. Same reason NYC ended up finally pushing back on Robert Moses's plans. So the freeways mostly stopped at the edges.
At the height of the uncontrolled car-ification of Copenhagen in the '70s the place was totally crawling with automobiles to the exclusion of other modalities, though. It's pretty weird to look at some photos from that era, with car traffic taking up almost the whole width of narrow streets in the city center, pedestrians confined to narrow ledge-like sidewalks, and bikes either absent or trying their luck in traffic. Now most of those streets have been either pedestrianized, turned into mixed-traffic, low-speed "living streets", or had the roads narrowed to one lane to make room for bike lanes and/or wider sidewalks.
"Really depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada"
What is unfortunate about this? Americans on average are so rich that most of them can afford a car that allows them to both live where they want and still get to the job they want even if those two places are tens of miles apart and there is no public transportation.
You're kind of missing what was said. We're talking about the automobile being necessary to function in the majority of the US and Canada. If you don't have a car (whether you can't afford one, can't drive, or choose not to own one), you're going to struggle to get to work, get to the grocery store, visit people, etc. Even in densely populated areas where cycling is a better option, the infrastructure is heavily oriented towards cars, and cycling can be quite dangerous.
Yeah, it's great if you have a car. What's not great is that you need to have a car. And yet it doesn't have to be that way, as other countries have shown us.
I grew up in American suburbia and have lived most of my life there, and I generally found it unfortunate— one reason I left. I don't like driving, but in most of the U.S. it is a practical necessity, whether you like driving or not. It's not that I lived where I wanted to, but that there was simply no way to choose a place to live that wouldn't result in needing a car, because everything was too sprawling. If people who liked driving could choose to drive, and I could choose not to drive, that would be much less objectionable. (There are a few places where I could make such a choice, like Manhattan, but not many.)
So I had to commute daily by car, which sucked. I had to drive to get to work, drive to buy groceries, even drive to go to a coffee shop. Besides just being unpleasant, I also had to spend a bunch of money maintaining a car, which is a fairly expensive proposition, between purchase price, insurance, gas, maintenance & repairs, etc.
Now I walk and/or take the metro, and it's much less stressful. I never have to call a tow truck, either. (Contrary to the local norm, I don't really bike, but I could also do that if I chose.)
What happened to those concept cars that were encased in rubber/(or some other bouncy material) so when they bumped against each other, they would harmlessly bounce off ? I distinctly remember reading about them in Wired some years back.
Any amount of rubber would only work up to a certain speed. And all modern cars are designed to provide 100% safety to passangers up to 30mph - crumple zones, multiple airbags, engine block sliding underneath the body of the vehicle, early collision warning, automatic breaking and so on. Encasing cars in rubber would not improve anything above 30mph, while I am fairly certain would increase the weight of the vehicle - making it consume more fuel and also heavier vehicles take longer to stop,so the benefit might actually be null.
Yeah, wired runs lots of stories about stuff that quite simply never happens.
I used to keep a lot of back issues of wired, which I saved because I thought they had some cool stories. Surprisingly, many are packed with examples of very obvious vapor ware, and have aged really poorly.
A small handful, however, still read like notes from an exciting future, and I find myself returning to them, when searching for inspiration.
The dedicated bike lane is surely a great invention, but the implementation is often luck-luster and I think causes more harm than good.
Santa Monica probably has more good bike lanes than most other US cities, but I am terrified to even try the new on 28th leading from Ocean Park to Pico and beyond to Olympic. They basically took a narrow street and tried to leave space for parking and add a bike lane on top of that. As a result, most SUVs or wider cars don't fit into the designated lanes.
As the result, they either try to leave room for bicycles and drive slightly over the center or in the bike lane. If they try the former, they end up swerving violently into the bike lane to avoid on-coming traffic, so I don't know which is worse.
If the bike lanes were actually well implemented the entire way to the office, I would leave my car parked most days... as it stands now, that's not happening any time soon.
As a result of issues with those kinds of lanes, Copenhagen changed direction a bit ago and now puts in only bike lanes physically separated by a curb from the car lanes, at least where possible (excluding some narrow streets). If there's street parking, the lane is also typically on the other side of the parked cars (the sidewalk side), making it even more impossible for someone to swerve from the car lanes into the bike lane. Also reduces "door" incidents, since the lane isn't on the driver-door side of parked cars. In addition to being much safer for cyclists, it also helps reduce drivers' need to watch out for the other direction, cyclists unexpectedly swerving into the auto lanes, e.g. to pass another cyclist. That part becomes particularly important if getting people to bike is actually successful: if you have a major route with a steady stream of >10 cyclists/minute, you really want that stream managed in its own space, segregated from both the cars and pedestrians.
I believe some of these kinds of "really separated" bike lanes exist in the U.S., but not many. The last statistics I saw were that the U.S. (in total) has about 200 miles of physically protected bike lanes (including bike-only routes), while Greater Copenhagen alone has 600 miles of them.
I have big hopes for the metro line project in SM that includes a dedicated bike path that is linked with the path along the beach. The beach path is fully separated and the link that is not would only be a few blocks long.
The ocean bike path stretches from past Redondo beach to Pacific Palicades.
> In contrast, traffic fatalities in countries like the United Kingdom, where drivers are uniformly viewed as the greatest danger on streets, are about a third of U.S. rates.
Britain here.
This is absolutely false. We uniformly view cyclists as the greatest danger on the streets. No joke, ask around.
I would suggest the reason for our better stats is down to a) a bloody difficult driving test; b) the thing inside a lot of us that makes the nervous/apologetic stereotype actually be true also makes a lot of us quite risk averse and cautious; c) drink driving is a big no-no with very practical consequences near 100% of the time; d) education of how to cross a road starts at a very young age, the result being no jaywalking laws required and watching people cross busy, fast moving roads in cities looks like doing the same in some developing country except we're proper pro at it; e) the speedbump pandemic, an enormous pain in the arse to have them every 3 ft in residential areas but probably highly effective; f) many, many (most?) pedestrian-accessible roads predate almost all vehicles and are twisty, narrow, and generally difficult to navigate; f) motorways/dual carriageways (70mph) were designed in such a way that they are not at all accessible on foot; g) B-roads (60mph usually, narrow) join 2 interesting places through vast expanses of farmland, there's rarely a reason to be on foot near them.
I think this is key. I'm always amazed at how easy the US "driving test" is. I put it in quotes because it's barely more than a check to see whether or not you're capable of writing your own name. You can pass the practical test without ever exceeding 25MPH.
Worse, you never re-test. I haven't had anyone check my driving in almost two decades. License renewals come in the mail by magic. For all they know, I could have gone blind and senile, but here I am, legal to drive a car. I have to prove my ability to fly a plane every two years to keep doing it legally, but the car is far more dangerous to others when mishandled.
I think we would benefit enormously in the US if we enacted a real driving test that requires actual skill and knowledge, and required re-testing every couple of years. Unfortunately it will never happen. While the American public doesn't really care if their government wastes trillions and invades countries for no reason and spies on everybody and tortures people, try to get between them and their cars and you will see politicians' heads on pikes on the National Mall.
I have always felt one of the saddest things about our society is that we accept these very preventable deaths.
When I was a teacher, about once a year a student would die in an accident. It just seemed so unnecessary, a 17 year healthy kid dead because we can't make cars safe.
I can't imagine cars without seat belts, but most Americans didn't bother with them before Nader came along.
It's definitely a black eye on our whole society when we can't be bothered to keep a basic right of transportation safe.
Maybe driverless cars are the answer, I don't know.
Still lower than suicide, sadly. Not many articles about that except the ones about statistics. No real op-ed pieces? Not as newsworthy or good for business?
The article quotes the 30,000 per year number, but it only really talks about fatalities or injuries to pedestrians by cars. The 30,000 number includes fatalities or injuries to people in cars as well. So a lot of relevant data is being left out.
Wikipedia has a link to NHTSA figures that give more detail. The link is here:
* 23,303 (70.8 percent) of those were vehicle occupants
* 4,502 (13.7 percent) were on motorcycles (drivers or passengers)
* 4,280 (13.0 percent) were pedestrians
* 618 (1.9 percent) were cyclists
* 182 (0.6 percent) were "other/unknown non-occupants"
So the article is focusing in on something that's, at most, only 15 percent or so (counting pedestrians and cyclists, since the article talks about both) of the problem. I say "at most" because of other interesting statistics from the NHTSA report:
* 31 percent of fatalities were in incidents involving alcohol-impaired drivers.
* 47 percent of the crashes that resulted in pedestrian fatalities had alcohol use reported by either the driver or the pedestrian or both. Interestingly, 33 percent of the pedestrians involved in these crashes were alcohol impaired, but only 14 percent of the drivers involved were; in 6 percent of the crashes, both the driver and the pedestrian were alcohol impaired.
* 32 percent of fatalities were in incidents where the driver was speeding. (42 percent of the drivers who were speeding were alcohol-impaired.)
* 42 percent of motorcycle drivers, and 51 percent of motorcycle passengers, who were fatally injured were not wearing helmets.
* 51 percent of vehicle occupants killed were not restrained (not wearing seat belts, or not in child seats/restraints).
* 11 percent of fatalities involved large trucks (gross vehicle weight over 10,000 pounds); of those, 76 percent were occupants of other vehicles, 14 percent were occupants of the trucks, and 10 percent were pedestrians.
Taking all this into consideration, I see a very different picture from "vehicles are murder machines". It looks to me like the major factors causing fatalities are individual choices made by people that put them at higher risk. And it's not like those choices are difficult, or about things that most people don't know. How hard is it to wear a seat belt? To put a helmet on if you're on a motorcycle? To not drink and drive?
There seems to be some serious low-hanging fruit here with regard to improving these numbers. Imagine if you took the billions currently spent by the TSA and applied it to road safety?
Given what the rest of world does with airport security, it's possible to maintain airport security while at the same time freeing up massive resources which could be channeled into education (seriously, no seatbelts in 2014? ), policing of drunk driving, zero tolerance for speeding and so on.
Of course this won't happen. Regardless of the fact it is waay more dangerous to drive to the airport than it is to fly on a plane - it's easy to do a big song and dance at the airport to "make flying safer" (hint: it's exactly as safe as it is everywhere else where they don't succumb to the TSA rhetoric).
Americans don't care about the TSA at airports precisely because most Americans don't fly. So politically it costs no votes, (and with enough rhetoric some Americans even believe it's making things safer) whereas if you started creating or enforcing speed restrictions or drunk driving there'd be endless Libertarian arguments about the perils of big government, and the "freedom" of motor cyclists to not wear a helmet if they so choose.
There actually could be a really useful agency with the words Trasportation and Safety in the name, but it isn't the one that currently exists.
I'm not sure that's actually true. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 646 million enplaned passengers in 2013. ("Enplaned passengers" means passengers boarding originating flights, i.e., either nonstops to the destination or the first leg of an itinerary with at least one connection.) That's more than twice the population of the US, and about 2.7 times the population of the US that's over 18. Even allowing for the fact that many business travelers take many trips per year, there are still a lot of people who only take one or two airline trips per year, for vacations or special events, so it's hard for me to see how the percentage of Americans who don't fly can amount to "most"; I'd be surprised if it was half.
if you started creating or enforcing speed restrictions or drunk driving there'd be endless Libertarian arguments about the perils of big government, and the "freedom" of motor cyclists to not wear a helmet if they so choose
I think you're seriously underestimating the costs of enforcing driving regulations to the extent that you would need to to improve the numbers significantly by that means; I suspect that a more realistic estimate of those costs is what would lead most people (including me) to oppose such regulations. Whatever one's opinion about airport security, the amount spent on it is still a small fraction of government budgets and an even smaller fraction of GDP; and even for business travelers that take many trips per year, the overall cost in time of security screening is not that much compared to the time spent on the flight itself, particularly since most business travelers are easier to screen since they're familiar with the process and so get through it more quickly than people who only fly occasionally. (Note that I'm not arguing here that what is spent is justified by the benefits; I'm merely trying to compare the cost of airport security, in both time and money, with the cost of the sort of traffic regulation you're proposing.)
On the other hand, the kind of regulation you would need to have in order to, for example, make a serious dent in the rate of speeding, would be extremely draconian and would have huge costs. You would need traffic police on every major road, stopping people left and right; and you would need to do this continuously, or at least often enough that people would have a fairly high probability of getting caught if they speed. After all, most people do not speed just for the fun of it; they speed because it benefits them, because they get to wherever they are going faster. (I would also argue that most speed limits on highways are set too low, particularly given how the performance and handling of cars has improved over the years.) To make people not speed, you would have to raise its costs, in money and time lost, enough to outweigh the benefits, and that's a very tall order. Plus, you would have to hire all those traffic police, and pay them, and all the time they spend catching speeders would not be spent dealing with other issues that might actually be more important.
Similar remarks apply, although possibly with less force, to other types of regulations: for example, trying to enforce seat belt laws, or motorcycle helmet laws, or drunk driving laws. I say "possibly with less force" because the "benefits" to people of doing these things are less clear than the obvious benefit in time saved of speeding. I don't understand any more than you do why anyone would fail to use a seat belt; it only takes a few seconds to buckle up. (I don't ride motorcycles so I won't try to speculate on why people would not wear helmets.) People obviously derive pleasure from drinking, but that doesn't mean they necessarily derive pleasure from drunk driving; that seems more like bad planning than anything else. So it might not be quite as costly to try to regulate these behaviors as it would be to try to regulate speeding. But I think it would still be a lot more costly than airport security is.
Education is a different matter; but I'm not sure there's much that can be done with education that isn't already being done. Are there really many people who haven't been told that seat belts are a good idea?
The only other suggestion I have is to impose more severe consequences on the kinds of decisions that can significantly affect risk. For example, consider this modest proposal: if you are involved in any accident and you are found to be driving drunk, even if no one is injured or killed, you lose your driver's license, forever. Or consider this: allow auto insurance companies, and health insurance companies to the extent that their coverage extends to injuries suffered in auto accidents, to make you pay a higher deductible, or possibly even deny part or all of your coverage, if you are injured in an accident and are found not to have been wearing a seat belt, or you are found to be at fault and to have been driving at a clearly unsafe speed. (This would have to be explicitly stated in the policy, of course.) That would make people stop and think.
Speed enforcement is a political issue these days, not a cost issue, it is quite cheap to put speed cameras everywhere and many countries do. We could eliminate speeding if we wanted to, Americans just don't want to. So what if a few more people die every year...freedom!
The problem I have with speed enforcement as such is that speeding, in and of itself, doesn't harm anyone. Note that in my suggestions above I didn't say anything about speeding by itself; I said if you are involved in an accident and your speeding is a contributing factor, that should increase the negative consequences you suffer. That would give people an incentive to properly consider the risks of speeding; and the person who is actually driving the vehicle, and sees the road conditions and other variables as they are, is in a much better position to judge what is a safe speed than a bureaucrat writing speeding laws.
Oh shut up with half-baked emotional arguments, if a 'few people' dying in accidents was always a good enough reason to slow down traffic there wouldn't be a road in the world faster than 20mph.
At any rate, speed limits are set extra low with the expectation that people will go faster than the number on the sign. Trying to 'eliminate speeding' by itself is a nonsense goal.
I'm not making any arguments. Is it ok to go 90mph when the speed limit is 75mph? Even if its straight I90 freeway in the middle of Central Washington? I'm not sure, but today we have that choice as enforcement is choppy.
Anyways, we'll be into self driving cars in 10 or 15 years regardless, the question is almost outdated.
"So what if a few more people die every year...freedom!" is the emotional and clearly-wrong argument I'm referring to.
As to your question, it depends on the road and 15mph is an unusually large number. I'm used to things more like '70-72 in a 65 zone' and '39 in a 35 zone'. On a straight freeway 90 is probably safe.
But my point was that the current system is broken in such a way that rigorous enforcement of the exact numbers on speed limit signs would make things even worse.
Do you go to Canada often? There speed limits are more strict than ours and they have pretty sophisticated enforcement (speed cameras). The world didn't come to an end there. It is even worse in Europe and Japan; I think our American ideas of "broken" is a bit warped, but I actually like going 90 mph to get from Seattle to Spokane; once you get across the mountains it is a boring trip. Europe and Canada annoy me. But then maybe we could have something like the German Autobahn.
I don't drive anymore. In my city, people barely get up to 80 kph given the traffic, but sometimes I get a crazy Beijing taxi driver who knows where all the cameras are, then I fear for my life.
I did drive back when I lived in the states, got my license at 15 (in a state where that was possible), you have to drive there as a matter of reality. I live in a city right now where driving is very expensive, and taxis are very cheap, so it makes sense not to. I get that America is completely different than the rest of the world.
The article says a lot about the politics and legal aspects of car deaths but the way forward is through engineering. With existing technology you can make a big difference by segregating fast traffic from pedestrian areas. Slow the traffic in towns and residential areas by speed bumps, closed streets, 20mph limits and the like and build multilane pedestrian free roads for people to get from A to B.
In the future self driving cars and similar safety systems are the way forward and probably the only practical way to drop the death toll from 30,000 to below 10,000.
I've always seen this as "30,000 deaths and 120,000 permanent disabilities is the price we pay for allowing the sale of cars that can go faster than 25 mph."
Some Context: in 2010 the 121,000 annual US accidental deaths are roughly evenly split between vehicles (35,000), unintentional poisoning (33,000), falls (26,000) and other causes. Collectively accidents are the 5th leading cause of death after heart attack, cancer, respiratory disease and stroke.
First, our attitude toward speed in the U.S. is self-contradictory and bizarre. It's far worse to drive 35 mph on a city street in Manhattan than 90 mph (assuming no or low traffic) on the highway. The first is "only 5 over" (the NYC speed limit is 30, which is way too high) and might get you a small fine; the second can put you in jail, in some states.
The issue with cars is that the vehicle that is best for highways (capable of speeds up to at least 80 mph) is not great for city driving. Automatic transmissions make it even worse, because there are now idiots who have no idea how fast they're driving (yeah, I'm a stick snob).
Second, the car did a great job of something in the 1950s. It was a rent/house-price control mechanism that actually worked-- without causing a shortage. It scaled back the power of landlords by allowing development of low-value land. Suburbia turned into something ugly-- racist, detached, gluttonous, environmentally harmful, and ultimately (paradoxically?) expensive-- for a variety of reasons, including increased specialization in the economy (more driving, more scaling problems with traffic) and a Parkinson's Law effect of consumer capitalism. Isolated people turned out to be more needy, confused, and liable to overspend, making a market for gigantic houses, ridiculous cars, and tons of low-quality consumer dreck (bought on credit) that no one really needed. Slowly, the tyranny of the landlords crept back in, and things people actually needed (healthcare, education, and finally housing) became again expensive, then extortionate. That's where we are now.
The car is actually a huge money-hole for most working families, and auto loans a "gateway drug" to yet more unnecessary consumer debt. The car was supposed to liberate them from landlords. Now, it's a white elephant they can only afford because they have no choice: the jobs are all 10-50 miles away, public transportation is expensive and emasculated in most places-- even Amtrak is unaffordable for most; and the roads are unsafe to bike or walk (highways and ghettos, both products of suburbanization). So people drop hundreds of dollars per month on car payments, fuel, insurance, parking, tolls, and repairs (plus the involuntary payment through taxes, but that could be argued to be a win for most; if you eat, you use the roads). For people out of cities, the car has become the new landlord.
In the 1930s to '50s, however, no one saw all these unintended consequences. Now, it's an open question whether the benefits of widespread automobile usage merit the risk to public safety and the slashing of public spaces. I'd say "no". On the other hand, if you were a working-class person in the 1940s and this new invention had the promise of liberating you from the landlord so you could send your kids to school and actually retire, you might think differently. They didn't have the foresight to see all the negative unintended consequences or car-reliance.
In Romanian 'car crash' is called literally 'accident' [0]. Something that's always baffled me is how friggin' thin the metal plates that make up the car are. Why the fuck does a whole industry consider this normal?! [1]
Edit: thanks for the info (and for the downvotes <3)
Because you WANT it to deform. A stiff structure would increase deceleration on the occupants - in addition to being more likely to get in accident in the first place - additional weight will cause the vehicle to brake less rapidly, be more likely to roll over, etc, in addition to reducing efficiency.
Indeed. You can drive some older cars right into a brick wall at 50mph and only need to replace the bumper. But that's less good for the occupants who would be killed during a crash like that. Modern car design sacrifices the vehicle for the sake of protecting the occupants.
I've often wondered about this. Instead of just having a single thin metal skin that deforms, wouldn't it be even better to have multiple skins sandwiching a kind of honeycomb structure? That way you have even more stuff to deform and absorb the impact.
The only stuff that actually matters is keeping people from being squashed and the occupant's deceleration profile which you can already customize by changing how the car deforms. To really make a difference vs a high end car we could mandate 3 point seat-belts and helmets like you have in racing world.
Still a 70MPH a head on collision is already fairly safe assuming people are belted the real killers are unbelted passengers, collision debris, and rolling. Edit: Head on collisions still kill a lot of people but they tend to be higher speeds accidents and often involve unbelted individuals. Also we are slightly below 1 death per 2 million hours in a car we just spend a lot of time in our cars.
They do this; for front (especially) and rear impact, you have the entire crumple zone, with lots of cross-hatched struts and other components to take away energy in deformation.
There are various side impact technologies to try to 1) prevent ultimate penetration and 2) absorb energy. The problem is the doors need to be relatively thin, relatively light, and contain a bunch of other components, as well as function as doors. Multiple layers is one.
The best right now seems to be use the door to prevent penetration, and use a side curtain airbag to reduce peak acceleration on passenger (along with seat design and seat belts).
I personally picked used cars no earlier than ABS and side curtain airbags whenever friends asked for cheap used car options.
Honeycombs are a difficult structure to manufacture. They often get mentioned in relation to 3d printing as one of the useful application. They're actually a very strong structure for the amount of material used and were even hand pieced together from wood for some aircraft during world war 2 rather than using more easily manufactured materials due to this advantage.
You know how the original Volkswagen Bugs had that empty front hood, because the engine was in the rear? My dad advocated filling the front hood with bags full of empty aluminum cans.
Modern car design saves lives. Cars in the 1950's had stiff, thick plates and it didn't do them much good. Have a look at the excellent 2009 vs 1959 car crash test video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U
Car crashes are often called "accidents" in America too. I found it interesting and insightful when my driving instructor back in highschool spent a good 10 minutes ranting about there not being any such thing as a car 'accident' (students mentioning the word "accident" later in the course were scolded, to drive home the point). Obviously you can dream up scenarios that you might be able to really call an accident, but the point was that even when legal blame or liability cannot be found, nearly all car crashes could have been prevented by both drivers driving more defensively and being more alert.
Edit
""You can do things to reduce your risk of accidents" is a vital message, using words in an atypical way can be a pedagogical tool to drive it home"
That was the instructors intent. He wasn't trying to propose a new way for insurance companies or the courts to look at liability, but rather trying to combat thought terminating cliches like "shit happens" (by arguably introducing his own).
On it's face, it is a silly thing to say because obviously a gun can be unloaded. The point however is to drive home a respectful attitude towards guns, for the sake of safety.
This is silly. Nearly all accidents car or not can be avoided by being more defensive and alert. I dropped a glass - if I'd taken more care in handling it and been more aware of my surroundings, I probably wouldn't have. I said something dumb and accidentally hurt your feelings? Jeeze, if I'd only taken more care, been more aware of what I was saying. I accidentally deleted that file? Shoot, should have been more careful and considered better what folder I was in.
"You can do things to reduce your risk of accidents" is a vital message, using words in an atypical way can be a pedagogical tool to drive it home, but insisting that there's some deep sense in which that's genuinely the case is silly.
An airbag weighs 10 lbs max, usually 5-8 lbs. Anybody who removes this for "performance" or "fuel savings" is a blithering idiot who should not be allowed near a motor vehicle.
I'm not sure I buy your 10# claim, but even if that's accurate there are six of them in a modern sedan and that's not a trivial amount of weight for a car.
What? Seriously? Why don't they strip out the seat belts and headrests while they are at it. In fact, they should strip everything out, so the car is rally-style: nothing but seats, steering wheel and gear stick inside. They would get absolutely AWESOME milage then. Fuck the safety then, eh?
That said, a few points about the law and auto safety:
1. U.S. law is tied to individual responsibility for conduct that is wrongful. As the auto industry developed over the past century, that meant that those who sought to drive by what the law declared to be the rules of the road were deemed to have done something wrong only if they failed to meet a reasonable standard of care in driving - that is, if they were negligent, careless, inexcusably inattentive, or otherwise failed to exercise a sufficient degree of caution that they created safety risks to others owing to their manner of driving. Breaking rules (e.g., speeding, driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and like items) constituted one such failure to exercise proper caution. In such cases, the law developed so as to hold such drivers responsible for damages in civil proceedings for the what the law called the "tort" of negligence. A tort is a civil wrong by which the actor committing the tort ("tortfeasor") is responsible to pay in damages for all harm caused by his tortious activity. In layman's terms involving cars, this generally means careless conduct. If the degree of wrongdoing is more egregious than mere carelessness, as for example when teenagers in the 1950s used to drag race through city streets in a way that constituted reckless conduct (that is, conduct by which the wrongdoer deliberately does things that have a high risk of endangering public safety), the consequence of this to the wrongdoer is also a civil wrong for which damages will lie but it is also (usually) defined as a criminal act by which the person can be prosecuted, fined, or jailed as a consequence of such actions. As the intent to harm increases even further, such as an act by which someone deliberately seeks to inflict harm on another while using a car as an instrument of harm, this can constitute a serious crime such as murder (for example, when someone deliberately drives at high speed into a crowd of people and does so with intent to harm or kill others).
2. Underlying the system of law that has developed around accountability for auto-related collisions, fatalities, etc. is a social policy judgment that sees automobiles as a positive good for society. The article notes that such social policy judgments were made over the years more and more in favor of promoting more expansive use of the automobile at the expense of pedestrians and mass transit riders who might also use the roads, especially in urban environments. This undoubtedly happened, though it is a dubious assertion to say that some sort of sinister forces ("Motordom" is the term used in the article) made this happen in some way that somehow overrode the will of ordinary people. I am old enough to remember as a kid how people perceived automobiles in, say, the late 1950s, and there is no doubt from my personal recollection that average people rejoiced and celebrated ever-increasing uses of the high-speed automobile, cheered on the National Highway Act by which old two-lane state roads were sent into relative disuse through the creation of a vast network of interstate freeways, and, as a matter of culture, broadly celebrated what was called the "car culture." Even dissidents of the time, such as Jack Kerouac, though a counter-culture figure of his time, broadly promoted the idea of freedom in driving the open road. If anyone in that era would have suggested that cars be shut down or limited in favor of bikes, they would have been laughed at by the average person. Such ideas were basically considered crank ideas and had no form of popular support whatever. Therefore, it did not take a secret plot by General Motors (or whomever) to get people to push widespread auto use. People wanted to get away from cities generally, wanted to live in the suburbs that were growing rapidly at the time, and wanted the freedom to use cars to get around whenever and wherever they wanted with limited restrictions other than having to obey the rules of the road. Yes, individual cities deployed mass transit with varying degrees of widespread use but these were limited to a few highly localized areas. People generally wanted cars, and mainly cars, to get around.
3. So, coming to the themes of this piece, "auto safety" is one such theme and the idea of the automobile being inherently "murderous" certainly tries to highlight this theme. Yet I would say the broader theme is actually more one of saying that the rules of the road should be rewritten to strike a different social policy judgment about how roads are used. It is nowhere stated in the article, but is strongly implied, that perhaps drivers of automobiles should be subjected to stronger legal consequences than those currently existing in the event they collide with others in using a road. Given that we are here in the realm of social policy, and not existing law, this could mean almost anything. For example, it could mean strict liability for damages if you hit someone using a car, no matter what the circumstances and regardless of what the law now calls "fault." This is what happened to the law in other areas over recent decades, most notably with the expansion of strict product liability law by which manufactures (who at one time could be held liable for injuries resulting from use of their products only if the injured party could show that the manufacturer was negligent or otherwise at "fault" in making the product) had their liabilities dramatically broadened if injuries resulted from use of their products. As the law evolved in that area, the courts and legislatures eventually determined that manufacturers should be held liable regardless of fault if their products could be shown to have inherent "defects" (broadly defined). This led to a huge expansion of liability for manufacturing such products and, for example, pretty much decimated certain industries such as manufacturers of small aircraft. As a matter of social policy, the same could be done with the idea of driving an automobile. Courts and legislatures could determine that it is socially desirable that drivers be held strictly liable regardless of fault because this would promote greater driver safety and would also strike a balance in shared road usage that favors pedestrians and others more than drivers. They could also define as a crime any collision by which a motorist acts carelessly in a way that results in death or injury. They could impose strict penalties, such as losing the right to drive upon the occurrence of even one such event. This sort of change - or any other like it - would have huge social consequences for the vast majority of primarily suburban drivers who do in fact continue to value having the ability to drive freely about as their primary means of transportation. Young people flocking to cities in favor of "upscale urban lifestyles" (and others who have a particular viewpoint, in the case of such young people in favor of mass transit over cars) may see the issue differently. But the law ultimately is driven by the average people who elect politicians, etc. and I would suspect will be slow to change in this respect.
4. The article also expresses concern about high speeds and about drivers themselves being at risk of death or serious injury in driving the so-called murderous machines. While it is true that high speeds clearly enlarge such risks, it is a bit disingenuous to claim this as a primary concern while simultaneously forcing cars to be made smaller and smaller out of concern for increasing car mileage per gallon and promoting environmental goals. In modern public policy making, the same people who try to flog the auto companies for endangering drivers for this or that reason are often the first to decree that cars be made smaller and smaller even though this might create increasing safety risks to drivers who wind up in accidents. Again, this is a matter of social policy, and there are lots of arguments for why smaller cars promote broader social goals, but I rarely hear the people insisting on smaller cars acknowledge that an inherent by-product of this is to increase safety risks in case of collision (perhaps I am wrong on this point but I am going from memory in saying that this is indeed a known consequence of shrinking the car size).
The real battle here is over a strong push to have the law conform to the modern urban trends favoring bike riders, transit riders, and pedestrians over automobiles. That issue should be addressed head on by assessing not only the potential benefits of limiting auto use but also the social costs (which I believe could be substantial). The article does not do that and is flawed because of this, notwithstanding its (many) interesting points made along the way.