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Perhaps we accept car crashes as a generalized, unspecific life hazard because our lives require us to drive constantly? It's simply too mentally burdensome to
by icambron 10y ago
Perhaps we accept car crashes as a generalized, unspecific life hazard because our lives require us to drive constantly? It's simply too mentally burdensome to do something all of the time and also frame it as a life-threatening activity. I don't know the research on this kind of carefulness fatigue, but I strongly suspect that the more people do something dangerous, the more they consider the associated hazards to be outside their control.
So what I'm wondering is whether this kind of blame allocation really helps anyone. It's not that dissimilar to the conversation that crops here every once in a while about who should take personal responsibility when a critical security flaw is found in some widely used piece of software. We don't typically say "whelp, that's dangerous, you'd better focus really hard all of the time!" because we know that doesn't really work. Instead we say "how can we add tooling and processes to make these inevitable mistakes less likely?" Or even better, "how can we avoid doing these mistake-prone things altogether?"
Obviously, we do that with cars too, but we could do a whole lot more things that strike me, off-the-cuff, as much more likely to have an impact on reducing accidents (that's the point, right? We're not just trying shift the blame back to the drivers for some abstract sense of justice, are we?). For example:
1. More walkable
2. Add public transportation
3. Reduce speed limits
4. Autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles
5. Congestion taxes
I'm sure the impact of these different things on traffic fatalities have been studied and I'd be curious of the results. But I'd have to be convinced that "no, no, we just need people to think of their driving as their responsibility" is top-priority option.
- ryandrake 10y agoHow much effort/investment has gone into trying to prevent car crashes vs. how much effort has gone into trying to cushion and protect victims of crashes, isolating them from the dangerous activity they are undertaking? Seat belts, crumple zones, air bags. It's as if the auto industry has all thrown up their hands and accepted that car crashes can't possibly be avoided and instead focused effort on bubble wrapping and padding everything. If anything, what they're doing is making drivers LESS cautious and less aware that they're driving a 2000 pound killing machine down the road. Automatic transmission, power steering, drive-by-wire, comfy seats, sound deadening everywhere, vibration deadening everything, bluetooth, DVD LCD, climate control, cruise control, you name it. Abstraction on top of abstraction, distraction on top of distraction, to the point where you as a driver are so far removed from the act of driving that you become complacent. Driving a modern car is like sitting in your living room, and that's NOT a good thing. The safest I've ever behaved as a driver was behind the wheel of a 1980's manual-everything, metal dashboard deathmobile sports car. When you pulled out on the road in that thing, and it started shaking at speed, it was in-your-face obvious that you were taking your life into your own hands, and I guarantee my behavior changed due to it. We could use a little more of that these days and a little less air conditioning.
- icambron 10y agoI think there's pretty good evidence those safety features have helped a lot! People were almost twice as likely to die in a car accident in the 1980s than today [1]. I'm not an auto crash expert -- and I admit that safer roads and better traffic enforcement could be a portion of this -- but I'm pretty sure the lion's share of those gains are simply more crash-tolerant cars. > and I guarantee my behavior changed due to it But did your behavior change enough to make up for how much more dangerous it was? Would the median driver's in the same situation? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
- ssalazar 10y agoIm hoping this attitude becomes more common. I live in LA, and in my daily commute I encounter the aftermath of a collision on a weekly basis. How much of this could be prevented if more people could walk or take public transport to their job, to the store, to the bar. Unfortunately culture, (IMO) the auto + oil industry, and the lasting nature of auto infrastructure all push this outcome farther from reach. The proliferation of autonomous vehicles will be an incredible development, but in some ways is a technological bandaid over the underlying social/cultural/political problem.
- lmm 10y agoI agree that we should be looking to prevent traffic collisions, not just shift the blame. But I can see a shift in terminology helping with that. If we talk about an "accident" that carries a sense of it being unpreventable. Whet we talk about a "crash" it's more natural to start asking what caused it and what we can do to stop it happening again.