9 ms·

I suspect that people of the future will look back and be amazed that for more than a century we've been legally allowing our slow-reacting bodies [1] to ride a

I suspect that people of the future will look back and be amazed that for more than a century we've been legally allowing our slow-reacting bodies [1] to ride around at 80mph in a 2-ton hideous mechanical equivalent of a horse, killing ourselves [2] and simultaneously destroying our cities [3]. I myself used to be a "petrolhead" my 20s and it's quite amazing to observe this awakening when looking in the mirror. I suspect it was caused by the revolution in electric/self-driving tech and traveling more and comparing car-centric US cities to other places. [1] 250ms delay at best, for young and healthy adults. [2] #1 cause, ahead of all guns, including suicides. [3] https://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/cars-kill-cities

chadgeidel 9y ago
I think this is often overlooked. Traction aids and computer control has filled in so much as horsepower and weight increases. It's absolutely mind-boggling that people drive around in giant SUVs with huge amounts of horsepower until you look at the suspension and brakes - which are bigger and more complex than performance cars of just a few years ago. * still a "petrohead" but I prefer light weight and low displacement (Lotus FTW!)
- dhf17 9y ago
  NA Miata owner here :) Wouldn't mind just a little more in the power department though.
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
Yes, and of course they will do from the comfort and safety of a confinement bubble such as seen in the Matrix... because absolute safety trumps all. I sure hope I don't live long enough to see a world full of people scared shitless at moving at 80 mph on a road designed for that; and I quite would like to live some time, too.
- derefr 9y ago
  I'm not scared of moving at 80 mph; I'm scared of what arbitrary human beings can do (by accident or on purpose) with their vehicle, in the opposite lane of non-divided highways, when we have 160 mph of relative velocity (i.e. ~100k newton-seconds of impulse on impact, assuming 2tn vehicles.)
valuearb 9y ago
In the US only about 1 out of every 70 deaths is from an auto accident. As a single cause of death, it's not even in the top 10. Less than 1 in 3 accidental deaths is auto accident related. More people commit suicide (42,000) than die in auto accidents (40,000). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php Deaths per mile driven have plummeted over time. From 24 per million miles in 1921, to 7 per hundred million miles in 1950, to 2.5 PHMM in the 1980s, 1.5 PHMM in early 2000s and now about 1.1 per hundred million miles. 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... They are set to plunge further as automated braking and collision avoidance become standard features over the next decade. Edits: Corrected to deaths per 100M miles, not deaths per 1M miles.
- fiblye 9y ago
  1 out of 70 is pretty damn huge. We have global campaigns about preventing cancers that are less dangerous than car accidents. There was panic over Ebola, which killed essentially nobody compared to car accidents. Yet the general response to 1/70 people deaths being because of cars is "meh, oh well."
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Ebola doesn't give you freedom to live where you want and work where you want. We live in a world where we can afford to travel what was once long distances to do so, all due to the automobile. We spend tons of time in our cars, and it's safe time because we have to drive 100 million miles before we can expect one death among us or our passengers.
  - 1_2__3 9y ago
    I think you might misunderstand the statistic. He's saying one out of every 70 deaths. If there were only 70 deaths a year, one would be from a car accident. Far more would be from suicide, cancer, and heart disease.
    - fiblye 9y ago
derefr 9y ago
> 2-ton hideous mechanical equivalent of a horse This phrasing makes me curious: how did "horse-related accidents" rank among the causes of death for people who rode horses everywhere? Or people who rode in horse-drawn carriages everywhere?
- theparanoid 9y ago
  Probably high. Those dealing with horses are kicked in the head not infrequently. Marie Curie's husband died after being run over by a carriage.
  - ljf 9y ago
    I'd be interested to see that. While yes people falling from a horse might be in trouble - generally horse will try to avoid danger themselves - and there would have been only so fast that you could ride a horse in a city, due to the roads available for this.
    - derefr 9y ago
      Generally, "cities" were much smaller (and fewer) then; not large enough to have much need to ride "through" one. Most horse-riding (though not carriaging) would involve using a horse to travel between the various towns in an area, via not-necessarily-well-kept roads. Some non-negligible percentage of horse-riding was also done by the nobility, where the horses were used either for hunting, or for military campaigning—both places where a horse "avoiding danger" can actually be fatal. Re: hunting, horses would often rear back from predatory-looking animals, dropping their riders and possibly dropping onto their riders, crushing and laming/killing them. "Hunting accident" was the old world's "boating accident." Re: military cavalry usage, horses could be spooked into stampeding—this was an incredibly large problem when in a closely-packed cavalry formation. Cavalry warfare was phased out upon the introduction of guns not because horses were more likely to die by a bullet than by an arrowhead; but rather because the sound of rifle or cannonfire was usually enough to spook horses un-used to the sound, turning many of the first rifle-era battles into instant routs.
komali2 9y ago
I don't think people should generally be driving day to day, but as a passionate driver and motorcyclist, it does make me sad to think that I won't be allowed to tear rubber up and down, say, Highway 1 sometime in the future. Tracks are great and all (and where the real speed belongs) but nothing beats bendies next to the ocean.
- rxhernandez 9y ago
  I truly hope they don't ban motorcycles. Motorcycles will be much more fun once we no longer have to risk getting killed by an irresponsible driver on a commute.
  - madengr 9y ago
    Though I often see idiots on motorcycles; exclusively on sport bikes. I just call them "organ donors", not that there'd be much left to scrape up.
civilian 9y ago
The obvious question, of course, is what you would've recommended for us to use between 1950 and 2000? Transportation and moving around fast is pretty dang valuable. It lets us do a lot of things, markets become larger, and the different number of highly specialized people I can interact with increases.
- maxsilver 9y ago
  That, and they drastically reduce housing costs, and increase incomes. Two of the biggest areas we're currently sliding backwards with in modern cities.
- glial 9y ago
  Higher population density in urban areas severely reduces the need for cars. It's possible to live in cities developed pre-car (London, Berlin, Boston, New York) without owning a car. Americans have put ourselves in a pickle by building sprawling suburbs, which then require cars to increase the "number of highly specialized people" they can interact with.
  - therealidiot 9y ago
    There are however many people who find high-density living to be unappealing
torrent-of-ions 9y ago
Road safety is much better in Europe than the US. The US seems to have a problem with driver education. I actually think the prevalence of automatics is part of the problem as they present themselves as a big toy and convenient luxury rather than as a powerful machine that comes with a lot of responsibility. I wondered if the design of the roads themselves plays a big part, but I no longer think it is very significant here. In South Africa the roads are basically built to British standards but they have even worse safety than the US. The big difference I noticed there is the extreme variety of vehicles on the road. You get modern, powerful cars just like in Europe, but also rattly old rust buckets that would have failed their MOT test in the UK years ago. This variety makes navigating the roads much more difficult.
- driverdan 9y ago
  Driver education in the US is a joke and everyone treats driving as a right, not a privilege. If we had far better education and mandatory retesting every 10 years accidents would drop significantly.

chadgeidel 9y ago

I think this is often overlooked. Traction aids and computer control has filled in so much as horsepower and weight increases. It's absolutely mind-boggling that people drive around in giant SUVs with huge amounts of horsepower until you look at the suspension and brakes - which are bigger and more complex than performance cars of just a few years ago. * still a "petrohead" but I prefer light weight and low displacement (Lotus FTW!)

dhf17 9y ago
NA Miata owner here :) Wouldn't mind just a little more in the power department though.

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago

Yes, and of course they will do from the comfort and safety of a confinement bubble such as seen in the Matrix... because absolute safety trumps all. I sure hope I don't live long enough to see a world full of people scared shitless at moving at 80 mph on a road designed for that; and I quite would like to live some time, too.

derefr 9y ago
I'm not scared of moving at 80 mph; I'm scared of what arbitrary human beings can do (by accident or on purpose) with their vehicle, in the opposite lane of non-divided highways, when we have 160 mph of relative velocity (i.e. ~100k newton-seconds of impulse on impact, assuming 2tn vehicles.)

valuearb 9y ago

In the US only about 1 out of every 70 deaths is from an auto accident. As a single cause of death, it's not even in the top 10. Less than 1 in 3 accidental deaths is auto accident related. More people commit suicide (42,000) than die in auto accidents (40,000). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php Deaths per mile driven have plummeted over time. From 24 per million miles in 1921, to 7 per hundred million miles in 1950, to 2.5 PHMM in the 1980s, 1.5 PHMM in early 2000s and now about 1.1 per hundred million miles. 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... They are set to plunge further as automated braking and collision avoidance become standard features over the next decade. Edits: Corrected to deaths per 100M miles, not deaths per 1M miles.

fiblye 9y ago
1 out of 70 is pretty damn huge. We have global campaigns about preventing cancers that are less dangerous than car accidents. There was panic over Ebola, which killed essentially nobody compared to car accidents. Yet the general response to 1/70 people deaths being because of cars is "meh, oh well."
- valuearb 9y ago
  Ebola doesn't give you freedom to live where you want and work where you want. We live in a world where we can afford to travel what was once long distances to do so, all due to the automobile. We spend tons of time in our cars, and it's safe time because we have to drive 100 million miles before we can expect one death among us or our passengers.
- 1_2__3 9y ago
  I think you might misunderstand the statistic. He's saying one out of every 70 deaths. If there were only 70 deaths a year, one would be from a car accident. Far more would be from suicide, cancer, and heart disease.
  - fiblye 9y ago

derefr 9y ago

> 2-ton hideous mechanical equivalent of a horse This phrasing makes me curious: how did "horse-related accidents" rank among the causes of death for people who rode horses everywhere? Or people who rode in horse-drawn carriages everywhere?

theparanoid 9y ago
Probably high. Those dealing with horses are kicked in the head not infrequently. Marie Curie's husband died after being run over by a carriage.
- ljf 9y ago
  I'd be interested to see that. While yes people falling from a horse might be in trouble - generally horse will try to avoid danger themselves - and there would have been only so fast that you could ride a horse in a city, due to the roads available for this.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Generally, "cities" were much smaller (and fewer) then; not large enough to have much need to ride "through" one. Most horse-riding (though not carriaging) would involve using a horse to travel between the various towns in an area, via not-necessarily-well-kept roads. Some non-negligible percentage of horse-riding was also done by the nobility, where the horses were used either for hunting, or for military campaigning—both places where a horse "avoiding danger" can actually be fatal. Re: hunting, horses would often rear back from predatory-looking animals, dropping their riders and possibly dropping onto their riders, crushing and laming/killing them. "Hunting accident" was the old world's "boating accident." Re: military cavalry usage, horses could be spooked into stampeding—this was an incredibly large problem when in a closely-packed cavalry formation. Cavalry warfare was phased out upon the introduction of guns not because horses were more likely to die by a bullet than by an arrowhead; but rather because the sound of rifle or cannonfire was usually enough to spook horses un-used to the sound, turning many of the first rifle-era battles into instant routs.

komali2 9y ago

I don't think people should generally be driving day to day, but as a passionate driver and motorcyclist, it does make me sad to think that I won't be allowed to tear rubber up and down, say, Highway 1 sometime in the future. Tracks are great and all (and where the real speed belongs) but nothing beats bendies next to the ocean.

rxhernandez 9y ago
I truly hope they don't ban motorcycles. Motorcycles will be much more fun once we no longer have to risk getting killed by an irresponsible driver on a commute.
- madengr 9y ago
  Though I often see idiots on motorcycles; exclusively on sport bikes. I just call them "organ donors", not that there'd be much left to scrape up.

civilian 9y ago

The obvious question, of course, is what you would've recommended for us to use between 1950 and 2000? Transportation and moving around fast is pretty dang valuable. It lets us do a lot of things, markets become larger, and the different number of highly specialized people I can interact with increases.

maxsilver 9y ago
That, and they drastically reduce housing costs, and increase incomes. Two of the biggest areas we're currently sliding backwards with in modern cities.
glial 9y ago
Higher population density in urban areas severely reduces the need for cars. It's possible to live in cities developed pre-car (London, Berlin, Boston, New York) without owning a car. Americans have put ourselves in a pickle by building sprawling suburbs, which then require cars to increase the "number of highly specialized people" they can interact with.
- therealidiot 9y ago
  There are however many people who find high-density living to be unappealing

torrent-of-ions 9y ago

Road safety is much better in Europe than the US. The US seems to have a problem with driver education. I actually think the prevalence of automatics is part of the problem as they present themselves as a big toy and convenient luxury rather than as a powerful machine that comes with a lot of responsibility. I wondered if the design of the roads themselves plays a big part, but I no longer think it is very significant here. In South Africa the roads are basically built to British standards but they have even worse safety than the US. The big difference I noticed there is the extreme variety of vehicles on the road. You get modern, powerful cars just like in Europe, but also rattly old rust buckets that would have failed their MOT test in the UK years ago. This variety makes navigating the roads much more difficult.

driverdan 9y ago
Driver education in the US is a joke and everyone treats driving as a right, not a privilege. If we had far better education and mandatory retesting every 10 years accidents would drop significantly.