Maybe the problem is that more pedestrians are occupying space in roads intended for large, heavy, dangerous, automobiles than in previous years? I have hundreds of miles of bike trails within minutes of my residence (as do most Americans), yet people continue to ride bikes in the middle of major roads used for mass transit, freight, etc. I just don't understand why people think this is a good idea.
Because people are riding their bikes and walking to get places, not just recreationally . Those bike trails are probably great for a nice weekend trip, but not getting groceries or going to work.
Maybe the problem is not only the failure of planners to provide safe spaces for pedestrians and cyclists, but also the drivers of these "large heavy dangerous automobiles" who behave like the roads belong to them alone...
I constantly see cyclists fail to stop at stop signs/signals, dart into oncoming traffic, ride multiple riders abreast across roads, etc. Cyclists need to take some responsibility here.
Also, do cyclists register their bikes within the states that they ride them? Do they pay taxes on tires, fuel, etc.? Maybe cyclists should consider that roads were designed and intended for automobiles...
> Also, do cyclists register their bikes within the states that they ride them? Do they pay taxes on tires, fuel, etc.? Maybe cyclists should consider that roads were designed and intended for automobiles...
Should pedestrians also have to do this? Also it really doesn't make much sense since drivers are typing charged by weight, because that's what matters when it comes to wear and tear on the roads. Bicycles weight nothing compared to cars. Having such a system and charging bicyclist by weight would be orders of magnitude more expensive then the money it brings in.
Yes, if pedestrians want to slow the flow of traffic and create a hazard on the road then they should have a license plate attached to their backs and should be expected to register, take safety courses, maintain a license, and pay taxes for their obtuseness.
As a cyclist I did register my bicycle with the local police.
I pay taxes on my tires. I pay tax on the food I eat. I pay tax on the gasoline I buy too. I also volunteer to help build new trails for bikes.
I wasn’t aware that roads were ‘designed and intended for automobiles’ given that so many of them existed long before the automobile, and so many of them also include provisions for cyclists, pedestrians, buses, trucks, trams, motorcycles etc.
Planners usually do add bike lanes when re-thinking streets. Politicians usually fail to implement these improvements. Sometimes NIMBY groups block them or have them removed after the fact.
The article leaves it ambiguous over why Lucy Le was in the road.
So to clarify for anyone thinking "that's not the car's fault, they would've been watching for pedestrians on the sidewalk," there were no sidewalks. Only road.
Not uncommon for suburbs in the US, because why would anyone want to walk when you could drive a 4000 lb SUV everywhere?
Regarding your actual point, obviously the roads meant for automobiles and similar are the only way to get from A to B for almost all A and B, leaving many cyclists no other choice than to ride among automobiles.
They have as much right to use that road as cars. If they can't share that space safely, saying that they should stay out of the road is exacly as reasonable or unreasonable as saying that cars should stay out of that rooad, what's sauce for goose is sauce for gander.
If you want to get away with murder, use a car as your weapon. Drivers are almost never considered at fault and are almost never punished for killing pedestrians. Actual consequences would be a good start to addressing this.
>Actual consequences would be a good start to addressing this.
Sorry, but no they wouldn't. They might make YOU feel better, but it would do VERY little to solve the problem. In fact, I'd bet a fair amount of money that you'd end up with deadlier vehicle vs pedestrian accidents because you'd dramatically increase the number of hit-and-runs, reducing the number of pedestrians that receive prompt care.
The consequences are already quite severe, though subject to some uncertainty and heavily based on the circumstances of the accident which... is probably pretty appropriate. In basically every other context in criminal policy, increasing penalties beyond a certain point really doesn't affect the underlying rate of the target crime by very much, and can actually be harmful. Three strikes laws are a good example where a run-of-the-mill crime gets turned into a situation where you might as well go for broke and murder every policeman you see because you're going to prison for life anyway so criminals are incentivized to do whatever they can do to escape.
Based on your source, that seems very much up for debate. Also, those statistics probably don't include civil liabilities which can be significant. But... this quote says it all:
"While 25 percent of pedestrian deaths are attributed to the driver’s failure to yield, pedestrian behavior looks pretty bad too — they lie down in the street, dart into the road, cross improperly, and so on"
So it would make sense, at least ostensibly, that the majority of drivers receive little punishment. Now, in a place like New York, I have a hard time believing that in the majority of instances drivers are the only witnesses.
Agreed. The most effective solution to this problem is designing infrastructure that intuitively trains people to drive better - narrower roads force people to pay more attention, for example. More speed bumps, more roundabouts, lower speed limits and better enforcement, etc.
You might have missed the point. The point is that if you kill someone with a car, authorities are FAR more likely to write it off as an ‘accident’ with no charges filed than any other time one person dies at the hand of another.
The actual consequences would be charging someone appropriately with vehicular manslaughter.
The point was that killing someone with a car is a crime that is almost never prosecuted, not that the penalties are too low.
Valid point. Prosecution varies widely in the US, according to stories from friends.
Unless it's malicious road rage with video evidence of the incident and intent, it's probably not going to be the penalty they deserve.
I get it, everyone makes mistakes. But when your mistake costs someone else their life, you deserve to have the book thrown at you.
I'm hopeful the increasing amount of cameras in cars will allow for more strict prosecution, as they establish a clearer record of fault (e.g. did biker zoom out of nowhere across a red, or did driver miss obvious biker).
Would you please stop posting flamebait and flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it increasingly lately, and it's a problem. It contributes to destroying what this site is supposed to be for.
It's an article about pedestrian deaths, my comment was entirely on topic and relevant. I'm not going to be artificially polite about it, I've long since noticed that being polite doesn't matter here. In the past when I've made polite "political" posts I get the same vitriolic replies from people trying to score karma points off my "unpopular" opinions.
The net effect of a moderation policy like yours is further entrenching of the status quo, since that's always the most "polite" opinion. Any challenge to power structures or other entrenched ideas is always read as "impolite", because that's how power reacts to a challenge.
It's not "politeness" we're after—it's respect and kindness. That has to start with you (i.e. each of us) individually.
If you go by how badly other commenters behave, how vitriolic various replies are or you feel they are, and so on, that's a recipe for a downward spiral, because literally everybody feels that way. I'm not saying everybody behaves equally badly (that's not so), or that everybody is equally right on the issues (also not so). I'm saying that everybody is subject to the same cognitive biases, which have hugely distorting effects on perceptions and therefore on behavior.
Another bias is that our image of the group is determined by the datapoints that we notice and place the greatest weight on, and those unfortunately tend to be the ones we dislike or find painful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That means that people have a distorted tendency to see the group as worse and more hostile to themselves than it really is, which leads to a "why bother" and eventually a "fuck it" sentiment which you seem to be feeling when you say things like "I've long since noticed that being polite doesn't matter here". The problem with these perceptions is that they end up creating the very situation they feel they're reacting to.
The solution is to prioritize taking care of the commons, no matter how badly others are behaving or one feels they are.
Pedestrians are getting dumber. I was taught as a child, never wear headphones when walking down the street or crossing the street. People today routinely are not only listening to music that completely drowns out the world around them, they're staring at a phone and completely oblivious.
Drivers are also to blame because they're doing the same dang thing!
Drivers have the sole responsibility to safely pilot the multi-ton vehicle under their control. Stop blaming the victim and blame the perpetrator instead.
So if I'm walking along the sidewalk and a drunk guy wanders into my path it's okay for me to push him to the ground where he dies from cracking his skull? If not, why is that okay when I use a car?
When riding my bicycle I am just appalled at how almost suicidal many pedestrians are. Not only it's par for the course to not look around, it somehow became normalized to cross the street in a diagonal facing AWAY from incoming traffic.
Cyclists are also completely unaware, it's almost depressing to stop at a red light and just watch swaths of riders zoom past into incoming traffic.
One thing i'd like is diagonal crossings that would force you to look in the traffic direction. But then, most people don't bother to walk 10 meters to use the crossing anyways.
In a lot of cities, sidewalks aren't available along common pedestrian routes. And sometimes, when they are, are too narrow.
Not listening to music or a podcast seems a reasonable sacrifice to make, in exchange for being within a few feet of multi-ton vehicles at 30+ mph relative velocity.
I don't want the police harassing pedestrians based on what their notion of safe phone use is. Look at how the NYPD uses jaywalking laws? In 2019 90% of the tickets were issued to black or Hispanic individuals.
There is a large difference between people ought not do <> and cops ought to be given the privilege of harassing and imprisoning people who do <>.
It's perfectly possible to wear headphones and use your eyeballs to ensure the path ahead is clear in fact your ears aren't all that useful. I can SEE an oncoming car as much as a mile away if I am hearing a car about to crease me its already too late.
Let's be fair. If you can't cross the road carefully and accordingly to the rules maybe you should not be allowed to walk either? It takes two to tango. All too often I see idiots suddenly and arbitrary crossing the road in front of oncoming traffic while staring at their phone screens.
It's mostly down to vehicles being larger over the timespan measured. More mass means you're more likely to die. And taller wider vehicles have larger blind spots for pedestrians.
There are infrastructure issues too, but vehicle size alone is sufficient to explain most of the increase.
This sounds like a testable theory. What's the pedestrian death rate for city buses? They've always been in high-pedestrian areas and are much larger than the average vehicle.
From the article, as a share of new cars sold over the time span considered larger vehicles represent a higher and higher share. What this means is that a larger share of vehicles on the road are trucks and SUVs which are more lethal in a collision with a pedestrian. Even if the rate of crashes was the same you would expect more people to die given the increase in average vehicle mass.
Given vehicle size trends, holding all else equal, this is exactly the outcome you would expect.
The title is just a title. The article is more complicated than the title.
> I don't hold all else equal, because nothing is equal.
Well yes, obviously. My point is that the observed outcome is in line with the expected outcome based on the increase in car sizes. But still it's a bit more complicated.
note the following:
> In 2019, 6,301 pedestrians were killed by vehicles on American streets — up 46% from 2010. Over the same timespan, the total for all traffic deaths rose by 5%.
This implies that distracted driving could be partially responsible, but something else is probably going on with pedestrians.
and:
> And in the first half of 2020, while driving was down because of the pandemic, the pedestrian death rate — the number of people struck and killed compared with the number of miles driven — soared by 20%, putting 2020 on track for the largest one-year increase in the death rate ever.
The article goes on to posit the popular theory that increased vehicle speed is the key factor in the last year. In fact a lot of the advocacy around the issue is focused on traffic calming in urban centers which has been shown repeatedly to lower the number of pedestrian deaths.
> It's mostly down to vehicles being larger over the timespan measured.
My neighbor's Smart Car and Cooper Mini beg to differ. Also, the proliferation of electric cars requires shedding weight in order to get more mileage. Sure, we still have lots of massive SUVs on the road but I would dispute the notion that vehicles overall are getting heavier on average.
> Larger vehicles, such as the popular SUVs and trucks that dominate new car sales, are more dangerous for pedestrians than sedans
Most new car sales are now SUVs and trucks. The share of SUVs and trucks sold is up over the period considered in the article, your neighbor notwithstanding.
The data do not support your anecdotal evidence. The difference is less than I had thought, about 20% heavier on average relative to the minimum in the 1970s, but car size is increasing on average. (Section 4 in the below link.)
I haven't checked the sales numbers, but I see far fewer Smart Cars today compared to even 5 years ago. Also the latest Mini Coopers are massive. Much larger than most normal cars.
I don't think that works out. The statistic is that pedestrian deaths are up 46% since 2010. There are possibly scenarios where vehicle mass or configuration makes a difference, but cars and trucks haven't changed that much in a decade. A spot check of an F150 and a Toyota Camry don't really yield any substantial change in that time frame.
This attitude is pretty clearly victim blaming. You don't blame women for being sexually harassed for what they wear or black people shot by the police for wearing a hoodie or something, I don't think you should blame victims of traffic deaths for their deaths over the perpetrators.
But you have to admit that some behaviors are inherently more risky. If the pedestrian is actively engaging in high risk behaviors...why is it wrong to point out those behaviors are higher risk and therefore potentially more likely to be victims of an accident. If someone sprints across an intersection at a green light with no warning to the drivers, isn't that more irresponsible than waiting for the light?
It doesn't matter who you blame and who's the victim, the people are dead, often times because they failed to take their own basic safety into account. Always assume that cars don't see you, won't stop for you, might run lights, might make illegal turns, and will kill you.
That's rather fatalist outlook on life. We should strive for infrastructure that does not result in death when someone makes a mistake. Especially since to err is human.
We're talking about literal fatalities for people that aren't behaving that way. I'm all for improving the infrastructure and reducing death, but until we do, put your dang phone down!
Unpopular opinion -- you can victim blame to a reasonable level. If a pedestrian is walking backwards, blindfolded with music blaring in their ears into a crowded highway, then they do bear some responsibility for what happens. Same with your (morally reprehensible) examples, its possible to construct a case where the "victim" all but guarantees the outcome by their own actions (e.g. suicide by cop).
The point of discussion is "what level of responsibility if any do pedestrians bear in these accidents". Your point tries to make a false moral-equivalency with rape and makes the claim "0 responsibility". I argue there is nuance and just like rape, its possible to make it more / less probable with reasonable measures, but beyond that point, it is wrong to blame the victim.
So if you disagree, then address the point: should we consider the effect that pedestrians looking at phones, J-walking or ignoring signals, and listening to music has on safety or _only_ a single factor (drivers)? If you want to actually save lives then I'd argue for examining all reasons pedestrians are being hit by cars (and not resort to moral reasons to avoid even asking the question).
That said, I will agree vehicles and traffic laws are probably the most important contributors in this case -- I'm only arguing we shouldn't ignore information or use racism / rape as moral equivalents to simply asking "are there any pedestrian behaviors that contribute to this phenomenon?"
A pedestrian could easily be the cause of a traffic accident for the reasons OP mentioned. They could cause an accident by jaywalking, not obeying pedestrian signals, etc., whereby a driver avoids hitting them and swerves into another vehicle(s).
Who's "the victim" here that should not be blamed?
Or, negligence from the driver, as the OP mentioned.
Since going back to school, I moved close enough to where I can commute to and from school using an electric bike. I recommend it whole heartly if you can do it, but I have noticed a few things as a cyclist (Note I am in the USA in a medium sized city, and the law in my state is if you are on the road, you follow the same laws as a cyclist):
- There are a LOT of cyclists that don't bother respecting traffic laws (e.g. blow past red lights without even stopping, not respecting right of way, etc.). It's to the point that when I stop at a stop sign and let the other person go because they have the right of way, they are actually surprised I do it. I have noticed similar things with pedestrians as well (e.g. walk where there isn't a cross walk, jump out when there isn't a walk).
- There are a staggering amount of motorists that are on their phones texting/checking facrbook/I don't know what they are doing. I really wish this would have a much harsher penealty and it was enforced much more.
> "Slower speed limits and street redesigns such as wider sidewalks, narrow roads and rumble strips are among the group's priorities."
A lot of motorists DO NOT care about the speed limit. 25 mph in a neighboorhgood with kids? yeah it's still amazingly common to be cycling at 25 mph on a road to be pasted by a car going 40-50 mph.
I say those things to say I think there are bad actors on both sides, and to be honest, I don't know much of a solution.
Most of those people on their phones are probably using the GPS to get to their destination. I know that some of them are being irresponsible and using Facebook or something, but phone navigation has replaced the map quest printout of my day with everyone young and old in my circle.
That be be so, but having it on your lap or at the transmission shifter so you have to look away from the road to look at it causes the same effect I see: the driver is not paying attention to the road.
You get people doing 40-50 in a 25 when the road is as wide and straight as a 40-50 mph but the speed limit has been reduced because there are homes with kids nearby.
Make the road narrow, add curves to it, and suddenly people will do lower speeds naturally because they don't feel like they have as much of a buffer.
Same reason you're more likely to find someone speeding on a highway than down a narrow side street
> Make the road narrow, add curves to it, and suddenly people will do lower speeds naturally because they don't feel like they have as much of a buffer.
I am not sure how that would be possible where I live. This would involve destroying a bunch of residential homes to add curves (the neighborhood I am in goes back at least to the 1930s, as thats when the house I am in was originally built).
How does narrowing roads lead to destroying houses? You can also add curves to road while narrowing it without changing the overall width of the road. If nothing else works just add speed bumps.
The roads where I live are quite narrow to begin with, and many houses do not have driveways, so street parking is the only choice for many houses. I don't think there is a possiblity of narrowing them in the first place.
"Traffic calming" features are retrofitted to roads all the time. Things like bringing the curb outward (often creating divided bike lanes in the process), speed bumps, and adding center islands to intersections.
It's 2021. There is no reason cars should be able to speed at all if every gimmick drone from Amazon can refuse to fly into protected airspace. Half of HN is expecting that by 2025 they will sell their car and permanently ride on some Waymo taxi; are they going to reach over the separator and push down on the gas pedal, if one exists anymore? No, nobody will give a fuck that the thing is doing 20mph in a 20mph zone. We can have that today even we can't have the autonomous driving part.
This article is going off of incidents per miles driven, but that doesn't make any sense. It's the level of walking that matters, not the level of driving. Especially when one has gone way up and one has gone way down.
The statistic only says that cars are more likely to hit pedestrians, not that being a pedestrian is itself more dangerous. If people were walking 2x as much in 2020 then this 20% increase would actually mean pedestrians were relatively safer. There's no conclusion to be drawn until you consider the miles-walked number too.
Poke around at what American auto manufacturers are selling these days, it's almost entirely high-grill trucks and SUVs, we don't sell much in the way of cars (and even then, they're mostly of the bigger/sportier variety).
When you get hit by something with a high grill you're more likely to go under the vehicle than over the hood (compared to a car).
This is allowed because when we evaluate cars for safety, we exclusively look at safety of the driver/passengers, not someone getting hit. This is a great place to start when looking for solutions to this problem.
Of course lack of safe infrastructure and a legal system that frequently dismisses 'accidents' also play a role.
EDIT:
I'm talking about the American market and the way the NHTSA evaluates auto safety.
The second problem is it becomes an arms race. If I’m in a normal height car and get hit by the monster trucks out there today, I am more exposed. So I buy a big monster truck, to be safe.
I currently drive a car that is a little over four feet tall. I regularly pull up to intersections and try to turn corners where my roofline is below the bottom of the windows of the megatrucks next to me. So yes, the arms race is real, and my next car will be taller and bigger.
Not at all.
The eu has pedestrian safety standards that must be met as well as passenger safety.
In those countries Tesla and Mercedes, to name a few, have active pedestrian safety devices in the hood that change the angle of the hood just before a pedestrian strike to minimize injury.
They remove those safety devices in North American markets where there isn’t testing.
Do you really need a peer reviewed study to tell you that getting hit by a truck in the chest/head is going to be more dangerous than getting struck by a small sedan in the legs?
Looks like these are talking about hood standards on three-box vehicles/sedans, which don't apply to trucks or SUVs[0] (most of the American market, these days).
It is your position that Pedestrian Safety Requirements have caused an unprecedented rise in both the weight (with the obvious increase in kinetic energy) and size, particularly height of new cars?
My position is stated in the first two lines of my comment. Automobiles definitely do have to meet increasingly more stringent regulations for pedestrian safety. I work with several people who have industry experience.
Not only are pedestrians more distracted (wearing headphones/earbuds/etc) but DRIVERS are more distracted as well. If it was only one and not the other it wouldn't be as big of a problem but I suspect distracted drivers are more the problem than any cluelessness on the part of pedestrians.
Stand by any intersection (in Chicago at least) and you will see very close to 100% of drivers primarily looking at their phones. Technology truly is the cause of (distraction from smartphones) and solution to (autonomous software drivers) all our problems.
It seems publishers have figured out that injecting identity/race into every single topic gets views these days. What is the benefit of analyzing increasing pedestrian deaths by race here?
"There are no facts, only interpretations". It could just as easily be the case that people with black hair are more affected than people with white hair, if that was the taxonomy we applied to the dataset.
> If there is a demographic discrepancy, it is worth asking why.
The answer is minorities are notorious bad drivers. The Indians across the street from me do not know they can turn the wheel while in reverse. Every day, for the past year, I see them making 3-4 point turns to get in and out of the drive way.
> It raises questions of systemic injustice.
Of course it does. Ignore the true cause, and find someone in the "system" to blame. As long as they're white enough.
Due to a pretty dark and nasty history of race-based subjugation; race and inequality were tightly intertwined in this country and we're still untangling it to this day.
So... since finance is an integral component of pretty much every social interaction, economic inequality rears it's head everywhere. Correlation seems like causation and all that, which means that if every single issue is looked at through the lens of "is this racist?" the result is always "uh oh, maybe it is."
I dunno. Seems to me that constantly re-casting economic inequality issues as racial inequality issues is going go to make race relations worse rather than better...
Because socioeconomic status is correlated to race due to a long history of racism. That socioeconomic status impacts where people live, street designs in those areas, parking availability, whether people drive, walk, or take public transport, etc. All of these impact how often somebody is on the squishy human side of a human vs car collision.
You can't improve a problem without first measuring its impact.
Possibly, though that could miss other correlations that occur with race. I would want a study that also includes location, year of most recent road renovation, local visibility at time of fatality, distance traveled per day by car/bike/foot, and visibility of clothing, just to name a few. That said, putting together a more in-depth dataset may be impossible given the level of information collected. Looking for correlations with race, which is typically recorded in police reports following collisions, is a reasonable first step that can be used to motivate and drive further research.
This is what I always wonder as well. It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.
It also just feels like pandering. Now that the problem is framed as racism, politicians can just paint a mural or something and continue to not actually fix anything.
> It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.
That's why some on the left believe that the elites (of both the NYT and Fox news persuasion) welcome and encourage identity politics. Marxists would say class is the important divisor and the rest is a distraction.
The problem is obviously poverty and not race so it’s pointless to put it in the article except for clickbait. If black people who can afford to live in nice neighborhoods and own vehicles are still hit more often then it might actually matter.
But is killing people of any particular race somehow more or less of an issue relative to killing people of another race? That would be a pretty provocative position. One might even say racist.
Wow, I wasn't expecting to run into the "All Lives Matter" rhetoric here, but I suppose I'll take the bait. Imagine you have two shifts of workers, making the same product. One shift consistently produces more output than the other. That on its own is an observation that needs more investigation in order to figure out why. Perhaps the faster shift came up with a better method, and that method should be taught to everybody. Perhaps the faster shift is skipping a step, and needs to be retrained. The first step is figuring out why there is a difference.
In the case of pedestrian fatalities, there is clearly a difference by race. The next questions are why that difference exists, what can be learned from it, and what needs to be changed. Perhaps it is a difference by location, and sidewalks need to be set back further from the road. Perhaps it is increased miles by walking, and the solution is to have wider public transportation that doesn't need as much walking at the endpoints. No matter what the fundamental cause is, the existence of a measurable difference in fatality rates means that we can look for deeper causes to see why those differences exist, and what can be improved.
There's no racism in identifying a difference in death rates. There would absolutely be racism to ignore and allow such a difference to continue.
Sorry, but I don't understand how any of the factors you identify have any association with race. People living in those conditions may be more or less vulnerable, no matter their race. As between equivalent fatality rates, prioritizing a particular race is, of course, definitionally racist. I agree with the parent comment that focusing on race here serves no purpose other than to make a relative statement about the prioritization of races.
There’s a particular political subculture dominant at most media outlets, where “by the way this is about race” is just something you’re expected to say from time to time. It’s seen as disrespectful to analyze an issue without thinking about race. Largely I think you can just read past it; you’ll note that most commenters outside this thread aren’t really mentioning race, despite how you or I would react if we encountered a racist policy.
It could be that places where minorities live have less sidewalks, less street lighting, faster posted speed limits, less traffic enforcement, and their economic status require them to walk more.
This article only touches on what exactly makes roads deadlier, but it's an interesting topic. For example, increasing the curb radius at an intersection is generally seen as good for drivers, because it allows the driver to take the turn at faster speeds. However, this increased speed increases both the curb to curb distance for pedestrians and the speed of collisions.
The article touches on SUVs being more common and deadlier, but doesn't go into why that is. For a typical sedan, a pedestrian is struck at the legs, then rolls over the car. By contrast, an SUV strikes a pedestrian in the chest, and is pushes the pedestrian forward because it is too high to roll over. This means that the pedestrian both has a higher delta v (direct impact vs glancing blow), a shorter collision duration (single impact vs roll), and a more fragile region (the torso has important organs that the legs so not). All of these combine to increase the fatality rate when hitting pedestrians, turning a broken leg into a death.
I know that sometimes SUVs or trucks are needed, such as for electrical workers who need to get to a repair site during/after a snowstorm. In most cases, though, there is a social responsibility not to buy SUVs, due to the danger they pose to society in general.
Ugh. I already know what the comments are going to look like from reading the headlines.
Perspective 1: Cars are, by default, supreme on the road. The use of personal motor vehicles on public roads should be an assumed right, a first principle of modern life. Non motorized transport should be assumed to be lesser in all cases. Complaints about ‘distracted pedestrians’, and people ‘misusing’ a bicycle on public roads.
Perspective 2: The enlightened one whose eyes have been opened. Personal cars are the absolute devil. Unredeemable assholes drive pickup trucks with hoods as high as my forehead. Etc, etc.
How did we get to a place where this is so contentious? Why is everything politicized to extremes.
Everything is political, "politics" is just shorthand for "this is how I think people should be treated". Politics is about how we structure and interact with society, so of course it permeates everything.
This is a left-wing narrative. When you want to change the entire system from the ground up you want everyone to be involved in politics and campaign for your cause. Those who prefer to be left out of it become your enemies. This is the same narrative that was used in USSR and everyone knows how it played out for them.
I wish I was wrong.
Ctrl f your way through the comments.
There is a comment on hood heights.
There is a comment about cyclists using streets even though there are recreational paths.
There are several comments about distracted walking.
I use the term political as derogatory in a contentious discussion because 1) people come into them unwilling to change their mind 2) their beliefs are largely inherited and they will not acknowledge or state the assumptions and underlying opinions that underly their positions
My opinion is that we lack a culture of automotive excellence, and driving as a real “skill” is long gone. People operate vehicles with the bare minimum of requirements on roads almost devoid of any practical safety policing; speeding tickets and DUIs aside, I rarely see an officer doing much more to encourage good driving habits, and on some level I get it. Traffic stops are deadly and police would like to avoid them....but how else do you police traffic? Letters in the mail perhaps?
Driving is a skill, and if it’s not taken seriously or encouraged then it atrophies like any other skill. One of the best refreshers I’ve ever had was my motorcycle safety course; while I hated it because it was mandatory, it did teach real skills to help keep you alive on the road, and even if I found it boring, most of the people in my class were in dire need of that refresher.
Thats because in most places in the US driving is a necessity in order to function in society. So we need to make it stupid simple for people to maintain a drivers license, less we want them to end up homeless.
IMHO the only way for such a culture to emerge is if driving is not something that is required by a mass amount of people.
This is a symptom of low wages and subsidized roads. People can't afford to live near where they work, so they commute. People that commute speed because they're short on time.
We're all still trying to live by the punch clock like it's 1950 and everyone needs to be at their factory station at a certain time, all together at once. It's collective insanity.
If you like the article, read the report. Especially the section, "How Can We Reduce Pedestrian Fatalities and Injuries?" There are many things we can and are doing to make streets safer for pedestrians, so it's alarming to me that fatalities have been increasing for over a decade.
In the linked study, 75% of the fatalities happen at night. 32% of pedestrians struck are drunk, and 13% of striking drivers are drunk. There is mention of drug treatment as a prevention method, but no specific statistics for non-alcohol intoxication.
It's also notable that fatality rates are only worse for some minorities-- those typically in the lower socioeconomic brackets. And the difference isn't nearly as dramatic as the difference in homicide victims in general.
Yes, we need smaller cars, but it's worth noting that the common case isn't someone being run down walking to the train on their morning commute, as the Doerner quote might insinuate without further research.
FTA: “In 2019, 6,301 pedestrians were killed by vehicles on American streets — up 46% from 2010. Over the same timespan, the total for all traffic deaths rose by 5%.”
There, pedestrian deaths about decreased by a third over about the same period, and stayed at about the same percentage of all traffic deaths (figure 2, page 4), so non-pedestrian traffic deaths also must have decreased significantly.
(And no, it isn’t because US traffic deaths already are very low. They’re high, compared to the EU)
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadAlso, do cyclists register their bikes within the states that they ride them? Do they pay taxes on tires, fuel, etc.? Maybe cyclists should consider that roads were designed and intended for automobiles...
Should pedestrians also have to do this? Also it really doesn't make much sense since drivers are typing charged by weight, because that's what matters when it comes to wear and tear on the roads. Bicycles weight nothing compared to cars. Having such a system and charging bicyclist by weight would be orders of magnitude more expensive then the money it brings in.
Yes, yes, and in many places they also have to register them and pay taxes at that point as well.
I pay taxes on my tires. I pay tax on the food I eat. I pay tax on the gasoline I buy too. I also volunteer to help build new trails for bikes.
I wasn’t aware that roads were ‘designed and intended for automobiles’ given that so many of them existed long before the automobile, and so many of them also include provisions for cyclists, pedestrians, buses, trucks, trams, motorcycles etc.
So to clarify for anyone thinking "that's not the car's fault, they would've been watching for pedestrians on the sidewalk," there were no sidewalks. Only road.
Not uncommon for suburbs in the US, because why would anyone want to walk when you could drive a 4000 lb SUV everywhere?
Regarding your actual point, obviously the roads meant for automobiles and similar are the only way to get from A to B for almost all A and B, leaving many cyclists no other choice than to ride among automobiles.
Sorry, but no they wouldn't. They might make YOU feel better, but it would do VERY little to solve the problem. In fact, I'd bet a fair amount of money that you'd end up with deadlier vehicle vs pedestrian accidents because you'd dramatically increase the number of hit-and-runs, reducing the number of pedestrians that receive prompt care.
The consequences are already quite severe, though subject to some uncertainty and heavily based on the circumstances of the accident which... is probably pretty appropriate. In basically every other context in criminal policy, increasing penalties beyond a certain point really doesn't affect the underlying rate of the target crime by very much, and can actually be harmful. Three strikes laws are a good example where a run-of-the-mill crime gets turned into a situation where you might as well go for broke and murder every policeman you see because you're going to prison for life anyway so criminals are incentivized to do whatever they can do to escape.
"While 25 percent of pedestrian deaths are attributed to the driver’s failure to yield, pedestrian behavior looks pretty bad too — they lie down in the street, dart into the road, cross improperly, and so on"
So it would make sense, at least ostensibly, that the majority of drivers receive little punishment. Now, in a place like New York, I have a hard time believing that in the majority of instances drivers are the only witnesses.
The point was that killing someone with a car is a crime that is almost never prosecuted, not that the penalties are too low.
Unless it's malicious road rage with video evidence of the incident and intent, it's probably not going to be the penalty they deserve.
I get it, everyone makes mistakes. But when your mistake costs someone else their life, you deserve to have the book thrown at you.
I'm hopeful the increasing amount of cameras in cars will allow for more strict prosecution, as they establish a clearer record of fault (e.g. did biker zoom out of nowhere across a red, or did driver miss obvious biker).
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
The net effect of a moderation policy like yours is further entrenching of the status quo, since that's always the most "polite" opinion. Any challenge to power structures or other entrenched ideas is always read as "impolite", because that's how power reacts to a challenge.
If you go by how badly other commenters behave, how vitriolic various replies are or you feel they are, and so on, that's a recipe for a downward spiral, because literally everybody feels that way. I'm not saying everybody behaves equally badly (that's not so), or that everybody is equally right on the issues (also not so). I'm saying that everybody is subject to the same cognitive biases, which have hugely distorting effects on perceptions and therefore on behavior.
One of these biases is that we evaluate our own behavior in one way and other people's in a completely different way. I've been describing it this way lately: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Another bias is that our image of the group is determined by the datapoints that we notice and place the greatest weight on, and those unfortunately tend to be the ones we dislike or find painful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That means that people have a distorted tendency to see the group as worse and more hostile to themselves than it really is, which leads to a "why bother" and eventually a "fuck it" sentiment which you seem to be feeling when you say things like "I've long since noticed that being polite doesn't matter here". The problem with these perceptions is that they end up creating the very situation they feel they're reacting to.
The solution is to prioritize taking care of the commons, no matter how badly others are behaving or one feels they are.
Drivers are also to blame because they're doing the same dang thing!
> The group reported about a third of pedestrians were intoxicated when they were struck
Cyclists are also completely unaware, it's almost depressing to stop at a red light and just watch swaths of riders zoom past into incoming traffic.
One thing i'd like is diagonal crossings that would force you to look in the traffic direction. But then, most people don't bother to walk 10 meters to use the crossing anyways.
Earbuds or headphones while walking near a motor vehicle road with anything shy of a barrier-separated sidewalk should be illegal.
Not listening to music or a podcast seems a reasonable sacrifice to make, in exchange for being within a few feet of multi-ton vehicles at 30+ mph relative velocity.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/01/27/jaywalking-while-blac...
There is a large difference between people ought not do <> and cops ought to be given the privilege of harassing and imprisoning people who do <>.
It's perfectly possible to wear headphones and use your eyeballs to ensure the path ahead is clear in fact your ears aren't all that useful. I can SEE an oncoming car as much as a mile away if I am hearing a car about to crease me its already too late.
There are infrastructure issues too, but vehicle size alone is sufficient to explain most of the increase.
Given vehicle size trends, holding all else equal, this is exactly the outcome you would expect.
I don't hold all else equal, because nothing is equal. I contend that pedestrians are more distracted than ever, as are drivers.
The control for the 'bigger cars more death' would be evaluating the death rate of smaller cars.
The headline doesn't say 'accidents' are getting deadlier, it's saying 'roads' are getting deadlier.
> I don't hold all else equal, because nothing is equal.
Well yes, obviously. My point is that the observed outcome is in line with the expected outcome based on the increase in car sizes. But still it's a bit more complicated.
note the following:
> In 2019, 6,301 pedestrians were killed by vehicles on American streets — up 46% from 2010. Over the same timespan, the total for all traffic deaths rose by 5%.
This implies that distracted driving could be partially responsible, but something else is probably going on with pedestrians.
and:
> And in the first half of 2020, while driving was down because of the pandemic, the pedestrian death rate — the number of people struck and killed compared with the number of miles driven — soared by 20%, putting 2020 on track for the largest one-year increase in the death rate ever.
The article goes on to posit the popular theory that increased vehicle speed is the key factor in the last year. In fact a lot of the advocacy around the issue is focused on traffic calming in urban centers which has been shown repeatedly to lower the number of pedestrian deaths.
My neighbor's Smart Car and Cooper Mini beg to differ. Also, the proliferation of electric cars requires shedding weight in order to get more mileage. Sure, we still have lots of massive SUVs on the road but I would dispute the notion that vehicles overall are getting heavier on average.
> Larger vehicles, such as the popular SUVs and trucks that dominate new car sales, are more dangerous for pedestrians than sedans
Most new car sales are now SUVs and trucks. The share of SUVs and trucks sold is up over the period considered in the article, your neighbor notwithstanding.
https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...
Also, VW Golf/Rabbits. Civics. Accords. They're all huge. And they've all got a lot less glass than they use to have. (High beltline, small windows)
Not that long ago you could get a car that was ~2000 lbs. A big car was 2 tons.
I haven't checked the sales numbers, but I see far fewer Smart Cars today compared to even 5 years ago. Also the latest Mini Coopers are massive. Much larger than most normal cars.
Found a study from 2005 - https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/4/232
Light truck (pickups, suvs, vans) accounted for ~30% higher relative risk vs cars.
Surprisingly (to me) motorcycle/pedestrian accidents are three times as likely to result in a fatality.
Personally I think it's mostly related to distracted driving/walking but vehicle type almost certainly plays some role.
The point of discussion is "what level of responsibility if any do pedestrians bear in these accidents". Your point tries to make a false moral-equivalency with rape and makes the claim "0 responsibility". I argue there is nuance and just like rape, its possible to make it more / less probable with reasonable measures, but beyond that point, it is wrong to blame the victim.
So if you disagree, then address the point: should we consider the effect that pedestrians looking at phones, J-walking or ignoring signals, and listening to music has on safety or _only_ a single factor (drivers)? If you want to actually save lives then I'd argue for examining all reasons pedestrians are being hit by cars (and not resort to moral reasons to avoid even asking the question).
Who's "the victim" here that should not be blamed?
Or, negligence from the driver, as the OP mentioned.
Or, both.
This comparison does not seem tenable.
- There are a LOT of cyclists that don't bother respecting traffic laws (e.g. blow past red lights without even stopping, not respecting right of way, etc.). It's to the point that when I stop at a stop sign and let the other person go because they have the right of way, they are actually surprised I do it. I have noticed similar things with pedestrians as well (e.g. walk where there isn't a cross walk, jump out when there isn't a walk).
- There are a staggering amount of motorists that are on their phones texting/checking facrbook/I don't know what they are doing. I really wish this would have a much harsher penealty and it was enforced much more.
> "Slower speed limits and street redesigns such as wider sidewalks, narrow roads and rumble strips are among the group's priorities." A lot of motorists DO NOT care about the speed limit. 25 mph in a neighboorhgood with kids? yeah it's still amazingly common to be cycling at 25 mph on a road to be pasted by a car going 40-50 mph.
I say those things to say I think there are bad actors on both sides, and to be honest, I don't know much of a solution.
You get people doing 40-50 in a 25 when the road is as wide and straight as a 40-50 mph but the speed limit has been reduced because there are homes with kids nearby.
Make the road narrow, add curves to it, and suddenly people will do lower speeds naturally because they don't feel like they have as much of a buffer.
Same reason you're more likely to find someone speeding on a highway than down a narrow side street
I am not sure how that would be possible where I live. This would involve destroying a bunch of residential homes to add curves (the neighborhood I am in goes back at least to the 1930s, as thats when the house I am in was originally built).
The statistic only says that cars are more likely to hit pedestrians, not that being a pedestrian is itself more dangerous. If people were walking 2x as much in 2020 then this 20% increase would actually mean pedestrians were relatively safer. There's no conclusion to be drawn until you consider the miles-walked number too.
When you get hit by something with a high grill you're more likely to go under the vehicle than over the hood (compared to a car).
This is allowed because when we evaluate cars for safety, we exclusively look at safety of the driver/passengers, not someone getting hit. This is a great place to start when looking for solutions to this problem.
Of course lack of safe infrastructure and a legal system that frequently dismisses 'accidents' also play a role.
EDIT: I'm talking about the American market and the way the NHTSA evaluates auto safety.
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/nhtsa-too-slow-in...
https://www.codot.gov/safety/traffic-safety-pulse/2019/march...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/28/vehicle-safety-standa...
The insurance companies should have this data and I would be interesting to FOIA it if it’s not public
It would be useful if you explained how or why there's a problem with OP's post.
If you do, Euro NCAP has them.
At least in Europe, pedestrian safety is part of the assessment:
https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-expla...
This is not true at all. Pedestrian Safety Requirements are why most modern cars tend to look the same from the front these days:
https://www.hotcars.com/why-pedestrian-safety-ruining-car-de...
https://www.treehugger.com/why-all-modern-cars-look-alike-48...
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15118822/taking-the-h...
[0] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-419.pdf https://one.nhtsa.gov/cars/problems/studies/bumper/index.htm...
The answer is minorities are notorious bad drivers. The Indians across the street from me do not know they can turn the wheel while in reverse. Every day, for the past year, I see them making 3-4 point turns to get in and out of the drive way.
> It raises questions of systemic injustice.
Of course it does. Ignore the true cause, and find someone in the "system" to blame. As long as they're white enough.
Due to a pretty dark and nasty history of race-based subjugation; race and inequality were tightly intertwined in this country and we're still untangling it to this day.
So... since finance is an integral component of pretty much every social interaction, economic inequality rears it's head everywhere. Correlation seems like causation and all that, which means that if every single issue is looked at through the lens of "is this racist?" the result is always "uh oh, maybe it is."
I dunno. Seems to me that constantly re-casting economic inequality issues as racial inequality issues is going go to make race relations worse rather than better...
You can't improve a problem without first measuring its impact.
It also just feels like pandering. Now that the problem is framed as racism, politicians can just paint a mural or something and continue to not actually fix anything.
That's why some on the left believe that the elites (of both the NYT and Fox news persuasion) welcome and encourage identity politics. Marxists would say class is the important divisor and the rest is a distraction.
In the case of pedestrian fatalities, there is clearly a difference by race. The next questions are why that difference exists, what can be learned from it, and what needs to be changed. Perhaps it is a difference by location, and sidewalks need to be set back further from the road. Perhaps it is increased miles by walking, and the solution is to have wider public transportation that doesn't need as much walking at the endpoints. No matter what the fundamental cause is, the existence of a measurable difference in fatality rates means that we can look for deeper causes to see why those differences exist, and what can be improved.
There's no racism in identifying a difference in death rates. There would absolutely be racism to ignore and allow such a difference to continue.
The article touches on SUVs being more common and deadlier, but doesn't go into why that is. For a typical sedan, a pedestrian is struck at the legs, then rolls over the car. By contrast, an SUV strikes a pedestrian in the chest, and is pushes the pedestrian forward because it is too high to roll over. This means that the pedestrian both has a higher delta v (direct impact vs glancing blow), a shorter collision duration (single impact vs roll), and a more fragile region (the torso has important organs that the legs so not). All of these combine to increase the fatality rate when hitting pedestrians, turning a broken leg into a death.
I know that sometimes SUVs or trucks are needed, such as for electrical workers who need to get to a repair site during/after a snowstorm. In most cases, though, there is a social responsibility not to buy SUVs, due to the danger they pose to society in general.
Perspective 1: Cars are, by default, supreme on the road. The use of personal motor vehicles on public roads should be an assumed right, a first principle of modern life. Non motorized transport should be assumed to be lesser in all cases. Complaints about ‘distracted pedestrians’, and people ‘misusing’ a bicycle on public roads.
Perspective 2: The enlightened one whose eyes have been opened. Personal cars are the absolute devil. Unredeemable assholes drive pickup trucks with hoods as high as my forehead. Etc, etc.
How did we get to a place where this is so contentious? Why is everything politicized to extremes.
Everything is political, "politics" is just shorthand for "this is how I think people should be treated". Politics is about how we structure and interact with society, so of course it permeates everything.
This is a left-wing narrative. When you want to change the entire system from the ground up you want everyone to be involved in politics and campaign for your cause. Those who prefer to be left out of it become your enemies. This is the same narrative that was used in USSR and everyone knows how it played out for them.
These are problems people care about. No one is actually stating the exaggerated positions you’ve characterized.
There is a comment on hood heights.
There is a comment about cyclists using streets even though there are recreational paths.
There are several comments about distracted walking.
I use the term political as derogatory in a contentious discussion because 1) people come into them unwilling to change their mind 2) their beliefs are largely inherited and they will not acknowledge or state the assumptions and underlying opinions that underly their positions
Driving is a skill, and if it’s not taken seriously or encouraged then it atrophies like any other skill. One of the best refreshers I’ve ever had was my motorcycle safety course; while I hated it because it was mandatory, it did teach real skills to help keep you alive on the road, and even if I found it boring, most of the people in my class were in dire need of that refresher.
IMHO the only way for such a culture to emerge is if driving is not something that is required by a mass amount of people.
We're all still trying to live by the punch clock like it's 1950 and everyone needs to be at their factory station at a certain time, all together at once. It's collective insanity.
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Ped%20Spotl...
https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
It's also notable that fatality rates are only worse for some minorities-- those typically in the lower socioeconomic brackets. And the difference isn't nearly as dramatic as the difference in homicide victims in general.
Yes, we need smaller cars, but it's worth noting that the common case isn't someone being run down walking to the train on their morning commute, as the Doerner quote might insinuate without further research.
As always with traffic death data, it is eye-opening to compare with the EU (https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/...).
There, pedestrian deaths about decreased by a third over about the same period, and stayed at about the same percentage of all traffic deaths (figure 2, page 4), so non-pedestrian traffic deaths also must have decreased significantly.
(And no, it isn’t because US traffic deaths already are very low. They’re high, compared to the EU)
Also, Not Just Bikes on YouTube https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes