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You have to feel terribly sad for everyone involved here. The only place the blame can rest is humanity's desire to mix very fast, solid vehicles with very slow

You have to feel terribly sad for everyone involved here. The only place the blame can rest is humanity's desire to mix very fast, solid vehicles with very slow, squishy pedestrians in the same spaces. We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it, but hopefully self-driving cars (and less polluting cars, too) will start to reverse the damage done by the automobile, in the not-too distant future.

deleted 9y ago
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bryanlarsen 9y ago
"We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/ http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Sweden may also have more stringent license requirements...
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    And? If they play an important role in the difference, we should adopt them.
- Pigo 9y ago
  You're talking about a country that is the size of a large state. I really wish there were state initiatives to work on infrastructure that makes sense for their territory and people.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    Once you adjust per capita (which I did when I said the rate of fatalities), most of the usual excuses fall away. Sweden has areas with similar population densities to NYC and to Alaska, a more diverse population than you'd expect, similar per capita income, etc.
    - Pigo 9y ago
      The US is 22 times the size of Sweden. And you're not going to convince me that it's any where near as diverse, even with the new immigrants. I'm agreeing with you that I would love such an initiative, just that it only makes sense to carry it out at the state level. But I will say it's pretty arrogant to claim it's our situation is criminal. http://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-states/sweden http://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/unite...
    - ashelmire 9y ago
      Sweden has about as many people as singular metro areas in the US (smaller than some). Talking about reducing road fatalities in Chicago would be a similar scale.
      - mcguire 9y ago
        About 15% of Swedes live in the Stockholm urban area, about the same proportion as Texas and Florida combined.
        ashelmire 9y ago
        Texas and Florida combined have 5 times the population of Sweden, twice the area, and far more roadways. Solutions are more complicated in the US due to size, population, and broad political, economic, and geographic complexity. Stop trying to equate this tiny nation with one of the most populated and largest.
        mcguire 9y ago
- bitexploder 9y ago
  This is just back of the envelope math here, but I think it will cost the US a significant amount more dollars per fatality reduction. We have a huge number more cars and a very different culture and driving mindset. One relative small country with a pretty singular culture and a much, much smaller amount of roads is just going to have an easier time addressing the issue. It is still worth pursuing, but the scale of it is tremendous. I am hoping technology can outpace the politics myself.
  - weavie 9y ago
    Could you expound on how the culture and mindset is different? I can imagine what it would be, but don't want to just jump to stereotypes..
    - DarronWyke 9y ago
      Not the OP, but my take on it would be that every State is different from each other, and even within the State there's differences. Take a look at where I live, Texas. Dallas will be different than Austin which will be different than Houston. Any metropolitan area, even within the same borders, will have different culture and mindset than another. Compare that to another State and the divide only widens. Most countries are fairly homogenous, which lends itself to a singular-ish mindset and culture. The US is not really one country, it's a melting pot (remember that word from social studies?) of many different cultures and ideas. That's one of the big reasons why we can't really be compared to any other country on many topics. Every locale is different, in many cases fundamentally, and that's part of the point of the Federal-State system we have.
      - bryanlarsen 9y ago
        Stockholm and Lapland have significantly different cultures, infrastructure requirements, populations et cetera. We can argue which has the bigger difference, but we should be able to agree that the differences are similar in kind.
        9y ago
- peatmoss 9y ago
  Reducing speed limits and designing roadways to discourage high speeds. But yeah, I like to measure annual traffic fatalities in 9/11s. Here in the US, we typically do >10 of them per year. We toppled the governments of two countries, created a whole new department of our federal government, and continue to advance prosthetics at a breakneck pace to fix the men and women we send to be disfigured overseas as a response to just one single 9/11. It’s a question of political will. We’ve become comfortable with the level of death, dismemberment, and disfigurement associated with transportation as we’ve built it in this country.
  - cobbzilla 9y ago
    Maybe if all the traffic fatalities occurred on the same day each year it would be a more apt comparison. I bet you'd see some political will power then.
    - peatmoss 9y ago
      Well, if we’re doing > 10 9/11s per year, and we’ve had 16 years of comparison since 9/11, my back-of-a-napkin reasoning suggests we’re almost half way to a year’s worth of 9/11s.
      - cobbzilla 9y ago
        Another reason the 9/11 comparison is not so great: from a mass-social-psychology POV it was (a) very easy to blame an out-group (terrorists), and (b) the singular nature of the event represented a tremendous opportunity for a huge power-grab by the government. With traffic fatalities (a) we largely have only ourselves to blame, and (b) there is no big power-grab to be found.
        jessaustin 9y ago
        Maybe it wasn't a "big" power-grab, but the lives of the rural poor have certainly been made worse by all of our egregious drunk driving laws, and the cops and courts dedicated to their zealous persecution.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  And way more intensive driver training, car inspections, etc.
- mattlondon 9y ago
  +1 This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do <something positive> in such a small place - the US is just too big for <something positive> to happen!" I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area. US road fatalities per 1m population in 2013: 104 (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...) EU road fatalities per 1m population in 2013: 51 (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Road_accident_fatalities_-_statistics_by_type_of_vehicle http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...)
  - adventured 9y ago
    The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU. As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year. In the EU it's half that. You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.
    - kmm 9y ago
      The relevant statistic is fatalities per billion vehicle-kilometers, which attempts to even out that discrepancy, and leads to the same conclusion. Using this metric, the US still has twice the fatality rate than the UK. > In the EU it's half that. I'd like to see a source on that. I think the average American drives about 30% more.
      - adventured 9y ago
        The link/pdf below says 13,000km per driver in the EU. Other sources indicate 11,000km or 12,000km. Any of those work reasonably for this comparison. https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_faltblatt_englisch_1115_238337.pdf https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_f... The US figure is around 22,000km per person for 2017. In Sweden for example it's closer to 12,000km per person. There's a dramatic gulf between the distance driven in the US and most everywhere else. The passenger vehicles per capita are also reasonably over twice that in the US as in the EU (driving is far more distributed and common per capita). Around 263m passenger vehicles in the US, and 250m in the EU, with the EU having ~743 million people. If you double or nearly double the distance driven per year, and significantly increase the share of the population that drives, it's not far off to expect a doubling of fatalities vs what you see in the whole of the EU. In fact, I might expect worse than that, as if you're pulling so many km driving, you're probably likely to be driving more often under increased stress and inclimate weather circumstances, driving at times when you perhaps should not be etc. (due to no alternatives). The risk of a bad driving outcome likely accelerates with such substantial increases in km per capita. If you take the US figure on up to 50,000km per capita, I would expect to see an even greater acceleration of fatalities per capita.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  Not essentially zero. Around 10 % of road fatalities in Sweden are pedestrians (somewhere around 30 per year) for a population of 10 million. Swedish: http://www.vibilagare.se/nyheter/260-doda-i-trafiken-2015 http://www.vibilagare.se/nyheter/260-doda-i-trafiken-2015
- kelchm 9y ago
  Except reducing speed limits really don't change the speed at which people drive. https://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/ https://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    Changing the number on a sign doesn't work, but enforcement, designing roads for appropriate speeds, and providing separated infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists does.
  - dumbneurologist 9y ago
    the other reply is correct, but i had a hard time understanding the point without a concrete example: making the roads narrower with visual cues regarding your speed causes people to slow down.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Sweden's traffic fatality rate (3.5 / 10^9 vehicle km; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...) is roughly comparable to that of Massachusetts (3.25 / 10^9 v. km; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#Fatality_rates_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...). (Sorry, I couldn't find pedestrian numbers.) On the other hand, the Czech Republic is worse than South Carolina.
  - bckygldstn 9y ago
    For context, Massachusetts has the lowest fatality rate of all US states.
    - smitherfield 9y ago
      Wow. As a Massachusetts driver, I would not have expected that. I've traveled pretty extensively within the US and Europe and I (and many, many others) consider Massachusetts, or at least the Boston metro area, to have the worst drivers. Three possible explanations for the low fatality rate: - Bars, nightclubs and stores that sell alcohol must close by 2 AM, plus our other state and local alcohol sales regulations (particularly on hard liquor) are among the most restrictive of any state. - The additional fatalities caused by the relatively high number of bad drivers are more than offset by forcing the silent majority of good drivers (and pedestrians) to maintain concentration and alertness. - Many elderly drivers move to warmer states, and the ones who stay tend to be in better health than the ones who leave. Edit: A fourth possible factor is that we're one of the most affluent states and cars succumb to corrosion faster than average due to the long, harsh winters (off the top of my head, I can't think of any state that's both more affluent and has longer winters), so cars are newer (therefore, safer) than average.
      - Pxtl 9y ago
        I'd assume it's just that Boston traffic is so slow that it's impossible to get up to speed enough to kill anybody - all the fast traffic is on expressways like the Mass Pike, which are far safer because of controlled access. Slow traffic just plain doesn't kill people. Sprawl and exurb farming country is where fatalities happen. That's where people are driving fast but without the protection that expressways provide. Massachusetts is one of the most urbanized states, and has less of that fatality-prone terrain.
- dm319 9y ago
  I agree with the sentiment that there is something you can do about it, but Sweden has a road fatality rate of 2.8/100'000/year. I live in the UK where we have a road fatality rate of 2.9/100'000/year. On average 1 child dies and ~60 are seriously injured every week. I don't know how much further this accident/death rate can be decreased - but I agree that we are down a rabbit hole - is it acceptable that this happens? Obviously not. But are the population going to agree to ban cars? No.
- astura 9y ago
  You have to take into consideration cultural and social factors too. In my experience people in the US drive very dangerously no matter the traffic laws. One of the craziest encounters in my life was driving on a windy rural road and getting stuck behind a tractor. The road was so windy there was no passing zones for miles. It was frustrating, yes, but part of driving on that kind of road. Eventually a driver came behind me. Without skipping a beat he or she passed both of us (illegal) in a no passing zones (also illegal) and ON A BLIND CORNER! Nobody was coming but that driver had zero way to tell that. My heart still jumps a little just thinking about it. Another issue happened in Brooklyn. I was driving on a narrow residential street with cars parked on both sides going a little over 20mph. I did not feel safe going any faster as a kid could jump out between the parked cars at any time. Guy comes up behind me and just lays on the horn for a good couple blocks (it's NYC after all). Then the car passes me illegally and took off going at least 40 mph.
  - ptaipale 9y ago
    I have to disagree here. Americans drive pretty nice and relaxed. Not much different from e.g. Sweden or Germany. But much more relaxed than in Greece, Italy, China, or Thailand, or even Russia.
    - astura 9y ago
      We must not be driving on the same roads. I've only been to a single town in the US that the majority of drivers are polite and seemingly safe.
JeanMarcS 9y ago
That’s my hope. Yesterday a 12 year old kid on a bike was hit by a car where I live. It was dark, and I don’t have the exact details. The kid was coming from behind a parked car, it was 7pm so night, so I guess it’s the same kind of story that happened (beside the fact that a lot of people here are really bad drivers). I’m so looking forward the time when human will stop driving by themselves. Of course there will be trade offs, most surely on the tracking side, but I’m deeply confident that accident rates will fall drastically. No one should have to live with the feelings of having killed anyone, especially if not responsible. Let’s hope technology will finally prevent that.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  > Let’s hope technology will finally prevent that. Funny, because it's technology that caused the death in the first place. Maybe consider how to get rid of the car?
  - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
    How many deaths would getting rid of modern transportation cause? You can't just measure something by the negatives.
  - gcheong 9y ago
    Lots of everyday technology has the potential to cause death. People sometimes get hit by trains and those run on tracks. Whether the advantage of using the technology outweigh the downsides is always the tradeoff we need to decide on with an eye on trying to eliminate the downsides as much as possible while retaining the benefits.
    - JKCalhoun 9y ago
      True, just pointing out the irony of waiting for technology to fix technology.
      - gcheong 9y ago
francisofascii 9y ago
Right. It is interesting to read the early history of the automobile in the U.S. Many of the pedestrian deaths in the early days were children. Speed governor laws were proposed but ultimately rejected. Motordom won the day. Now it is built into our society that people have to be super vigilant whenever we walk outside. Kids have to always be careful and limited to where they can play. It is sad how much of our freedom to roam has been lost in the U.S.
- tedchs 9y ago
  Well, people had to be careful before the automobile too, you know. People could by killed by horses or wagons. The introduction of the automobile didn't make it suddenly unsafe to be in the street.
  - francisofascii 9y ago
    The key difference is speed. One of the earliest speeding laws considered was the automobile cannot go faster than a horse and wagon which is about 10-15 mph. It is much easier to stop in time, or get out of the way, when at 15 mph rather than 30 mph.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Horses had a habit of not trampling people if they could avoid it, regardless of the driver’s own intent. They were in many ways like self driving cars. These things (safety) aren’t binary. Just because it wasn’t absolutely false before doesn’t mean it was much more true after.
    - pixl97 9y ago
      Horses are evil creatures that will stop your head in. The difference between now and then is we dont have an agency that keeps track of horse related deaths then.
      - dreamcompiler 9y ago
gambiting 9y ago
I'm hoping that pedestrian collisions will be reduced to nearly zero thanks to the rise of autonomous braking(don't they have to be installed in every new car by 2020?), long before anything reassembling self-driving cars is available. My own car has already given me a solid scare when a toy ball rolled onto the road from in between the parked cars and my car has stopped before I could even react - surely enough, there were kids playing behind the cars and they went out to get their toy.
- nxc18 9y ago
  What kind of car do you have? I got a new Toyota Corolla (lease, fortunately) with autonomous braking, but it seems to be a “slow down by 5mph pre-collision” sort of system rather than an “avoid the collision” sort of system. Seeing the Subaru system in action gives me faith, but you pay the premium.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Mercedes-Benz GLA - it does stop down to zero, at least at lower speeds. This video shows how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hndlXz844No https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hndlXz844No
JKCalhoun 9y ago
> but hopefully self-driving cars Think more boldly: public transportation.
- peatmoss 9y ago
  The OG self-driving tech. Side benefit, you get more than small marginal, theoretical gains in terms of the numbers of people who can be transported, especially at peak demand times!
- gcheong 9y ago
  Self-driving cars can be the last mile solution to public transportation that is limited by the efficiency of transporting larger numbers of people to a limited set of destinations.
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    True. Walking is another last mile solution for all but the handicapped and elderly.
- adventured 9y ago
  There's no reason self driving cars/vehicles can't be public transportation. Most likely there will be a segment just like that. A slightly larger, electric, van type vehicle, that holds ten people, for public group commuting. It would be a solid improvement over present circumstances and would probably work quite well, and cost effectively, for poorer working class people.
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    I like that idea. The sentiment I've seen more commonly expressed is — I still want a car for each adult in my household so we can each go where we want, when we want. I'm spoiled and prefer that as well but I know in my heart it is selfish and not sustainable.
- alien_at_work 9y ago
  That's not bold, that's meek. Self driving cars are the bold. Public transport means travelling to somewhere I don't want to go, so I can be taken somewhere else I don't want to go but is closer to where I do want to go. I want to walk out my front door, get into an "auto Uber" or whatever, and be let out at the front door of my work.
ballenf 9y ago
No innovation can survive one-sided scrutiny of this type: you should at least factor in the number of children saved because of the availability of fast-moving vehicles to get them timely help. Given the steady rise of childhood life expectancies during our fall down this "rabbit hole", your logic breaks down pretty catastrophically. At least without more support than comparing the relative squishiness of these two objects.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  That's a surprisingly good point, and it's the first time I've seen it brought up in discussions about car accidents here. I wonder if there are statistics out there estimating the amount of lives saved thanks to quick response enabled by cars (e.g. ambulances). OTOH, this can get quickly confounded with the second-order impact of cars - e.g. that medical facilities would be closer to people were it not for the possibility to deliver them there by car.
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    > OTOH, this can get quickly confounded with the second-order impact of cars - e.g. that medical facilities would be closer to people were it not for the possibility to deliver them there by car. we've already got to use helicopters to flight-for-life folks from one hospital to another because it is impractical to build & staff enough of the specialized emergency medical care you might happen to need when something terrible happens. (not to mention all the certificate-of-need crap that keeps hospital availability artificially limited.)
gkya 9y ago
While I upvoted you for the initial part of your comment, I do not support the autonomous car argument, as I can't see how an autonomous car can avoid an accident of the sort cited in the article, namely an object or a person darting in front of a vehicle moving with enough velocity to be unable to come to a stop immediately.
- joosters 9y ago
  On a very cynical level, autonomous cars will still help. If the person in the article had been a passenger in the car when they hit the child, they would undoubtedly feel far less guilt about the incident, and their life would have been far less affected as a result.
  - gkya 9y ago
    Is this a question that has a legal answer, at least in the US where autonomous vehicles seem to be most in vogue, that what party is guilty in an autonomous vehicle accident? Because in an autonomous vehicle every person is a passenger. The only person that can be blamed at all is the pedestrian victim of the accident, no? Also, in an accident which involves two vehicles, on whom will the damages be? Certainly none of the persons in the cars, no?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- tlb 9y ago
  Human reaction time to unexpected events is at least 400 mS. Autonomous car reaction time can be as low as 40 mS. You can slow down a lot in those 360 mS (about 6 mph) which can turn a fatal accident into a moderate one. The vast majority of accidents are due to sloppy, aggressive, or distracted driving, which autonomous vehicles will completely eliminate.
  - gkya 9y ago
    I kind of doubt it in this case. If a person darted on to the road from behind an object that obstructs the sensors of an autonomous vehicle, in a distance of about a couple meters, slowing down quickly enough is probably not possible (though IDK much about cars, really). But such a vehicle would be able to steer away in some cases, but then it puts itself and the passengers in danger (i.e. hitting another moving vehicle or a stationary object nearby). I believe autonomous vehicles are a huge overkill for what can easily be solved via decent public transportation. Public transportation via autonomous / centrally controlled vehicles would be way easier if the amount of private cars on the roads were reduced. And I'd guesstimate that a great majority of people using cars could easily switch to electric bicycles or mopeds. And that's a huge step forwards, as these vehicles are less likely to kill you if they hit you, and can steer away more easily. Add to that them being way more clean and fuel- and space-efficient in comparison to cars, leading to much more efficient use of both road- and parking-space, and of raw fuel. Also, this may be a local phæenomenon, but lots of large chain-stores offer delivery services, along with many small shops. In my quartier in the Northern European parts Istanbul, I can order from a bunch of chain stores, lots of restaurants (using yemeksepeti.com) and many tobacco shops.
joosters 9y ago
Autonomous cars could actually lead to increases in road deaths (or at least, less pressure to improve road safety, and hence less potential reduction in deaths), because people would be far less invested in the accident. There would always be someone else to potentially blame: the manufacturer of the vehicle, the programmer of the software, the creators of the sensors, or even the owner of the vehicle not cleaning the sensors enough. Every party could make a compelling case for why someone else was the cause of the death. There would be more people with blood on their hands, but those people would feel less responsible and be even further removed from the actual incident.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Has that ever happened before in the American or other western legal system? It seems highly unlikely that no one would be assigned blame. Heck, we already have cars driven for us (taxis) and the blame for an accident is attributed to the driver, that wouldn’t change if the driver was a computer, the legal syste, wouldn’t simply shutdown.
  - joosters 9y ago
    Well, it happened in the original article. The driver was not charged with killing someone. Even if blame is cast, in the autonomous future that blame would be upon a company, or multiple companies, whose legal departments will spend great effort diverting the blame onto other people or other companies. No one individual will be charged with killing someone, and no one person will have a death on their conscience.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      You are conveniently leaving out civil liability. Yes, the self driving car won’t be put in jail because it didn’t have a murderous intent or wasn’t criminally negligent (e.g. drunk). But damn, if it kills someone, at least the insurance company will have to pay up (as it most definitely did in this case); kill more than a few people with your self driving car and you can bet there will be a recall, well, lawsuits, massive hits to financial performance, and so on. Death has consequences. It really is the same with doctor malpractice, the doctor doesn’t go to jail because their patient died because they made a mistake. Transforming civil negligence into criminal negligence as you seem to be hinting at would be a horrible system.
jessaustin 9y ago
Blame is most naturally attributed to the party that brings the 2-ton death machine to the incident. It was like that in USA, when automobiles were first introduced. The laws only changed as a result of decades of dishonest public relations and bribery on the part of the automobile industry.

deleted 9y ago

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bryanlarsen 9y ago

"We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/ http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/

digi_owl 9y ago
Sweden may also have more stringent license requirements...
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  And? If they play an important role in the difference, we should adopt them.
Pigo 9y ago
You're talking about a country that is the size of a large state. I really wish there were state initiatives to work on infrastructure that makes sense for their territory and people.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Once you adjust per capita (which I did when I said the rate of fatalities), most of the usual excuses fall away. Sweden has areas with similar population densities to NYC and to Alaska, a more diverse population than you'd expect, similar per capita income, etc.
  - Pigo 9y ago
    The US is 22 times the size of Sweden. And you're not going to convince me that it's any where near as diverse, even with the new immigrants. I'm agreeing with you that I would love such an initiative, just that it only makes sense to carry it out at the state level. But I will say it's pretty arrogant to claim it's our situation is criminal. http://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-states/sweden http://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/unite...
  - ashelmire 9y ago
    Sweden has about as many people as singular metro areas in the US (smaller than some). Talking about reducing road fatalities in Chicago would be a similar scale.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      About 15% of Swedes live in the Stockholm urban area, about the same proportion as Texas and Florida combined.
      - ashelmire 9y ago
        Texas and Florida combined have 5 times the population of Sweden, twice the area, and far more roadways. Solutions are more complicated in the US due to size, population, and broad political, economic, and geographic complexity. Stop trying to equate this tiny nation with one of the most populated and largest.
        mcguire 9y ago
bitexploder 9y ago
This is just back of the envelope math here, but I think it will cost the US a significant amount more dollars per fatality reduction. We have a huge number more cars and a very different culture and driving mindset. One relative small country with a pretty singular culture and a much, much smaller amount of roads is just going to have an easier time addressing the issue. It is still worth pursuing, but the scale of it is tremendous. I am hoping technology can outpace the politics myself.
- weavie 9y ago
  Could you expound on how the culture and mindset is different? I can imagine what it would be, but don't want to just jump to stereotypes..
  - DarronWyke 9y ago
    Not the OP, but my take on it would be that every State is different from each other, and even within the State there's differences. Take a look at where I live, Texas. Dallas will be different than Austin which will be different than Houston. Any metropolitan area, even within the same borders, will have different culture and mindset than another. Compare that to another State and the divide only widens. Most countries are fairly homogenous, which lends itself to a singular-ish mindset and culture. The US is not really one country, it's a melting pot (remember that word from social studies?) of many different cultures and ideas. That's one of the big reasons why we can't really be compared to any other country on many topics. Every locale is different, in many cases fundamentally, and that's part of the point of the Federal-State system we have.
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
      Stockholm and Lapland have significantly different cultures, infrastructure requirements, populations et cetera. We can argue which has the bigger difference, but we should be able to agree that the differences are similar in kind.
      - 9y ago
peatmoss 9y ago
Reducing speed limits and designing roadways to discourage high speeds. But yeah, I like to measure annual traffic fatalities in 9/11s. Here in the US, we typically do >10 of them per year. We toppled the governments of two countries, created a whole new department of our federal government, and continue to advance prosthetics at a breakneck pace to fix the men and women we send to be disfigured overseas as a response to just one single 9/11. It’s a question of political will. We’ve become comfortable with the level of death, dismemberment, and disfigurement associated with transportation as we’ve built it in this country.
- cobbzilla 9y ago
  Maybe if all the traffic fatalities occurred on the same day each year it would be a more apt comparison. I bet you'd see some political will power then.
  - peatmoss 9y ago
    Well, if we’re doing > 10 9/11s per year, and we’ve had 16 years of comparison since 9/11, my back-of-a-napkin reasoning suggests we’re almost half way to a year’s worth of 9/11s.
    - cobbzilla 9y ago
      Another reason the 9/11 comparison is not so great: from a mass-social-psychology POV it was (a) very easy to blame an out-group (terrorists), and (b) the singular nature of the event represented a tremendous opportunity for a huge power-grab by the government. With traffic fatalities (a) we largely have only ourselves to blame, and (b) there is no big power-grab to be found.
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        Maybe it wasn't a "big" power-grab, but the lives of the rural poor have certainly been made worse by all of our egregious drunk driving laws, and the cops and courts dedicated to their zealous persecution.
0xfeba 9y ago
And way more intensive driver training, car inspections, etc.
mattlondon 9y ago
+1 This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do <something positive> in such a small place - the US is just too big for <something positive> to happen!" I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area. US road fatalities per 1m population in 2013: 104 (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...) EU road fatalities per 1m population in 2013: 51 (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Road_accident_fatalities_-_statistics_by_type_of_vehicle http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...)
- adventured 9y ago
  The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU. As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year. In the EU it's half that. You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.
  - kmm 9y ago
    The relevant statistic is fatalities per billion vehicle-kilometers, which attempts to even out that discrepancy, and leads to the same conclusion. Using this metric, the US still has twice the fatality rate than the UK. > In the EU it's half that. I'd like to see a source on that. I think the average American drives about 30% more.
    - adventured 9y ago
      The link/pdf below says 13,000km per driver in the EU. Other sources indicate 11,000km or 12,000km. Any of those work reasonably for this comparison. https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_faltblatt_englisch_1115_238337.pdf https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_f... The US figure is around 22,000km per person for 2017. In Sweden for example it's closer to 12,000km per person. There's a dramatic gulf between the distance driven in the US and most everywhere else. The passenger vehicles per capita are also reasonably over twice that in the US as in the EU (driving is far more distributed and common per capita). Around 263m passenger vehicles in the US, and 250m in the EU, with the EU having ~743 million people. If you double or nearly double the distance driven per year, and significantly increase the share of the population that drives, it's not far off to expect a doubling of fatalities vs what you see in the whole of the EU. In fact, I might expect worse than that, as if you're pulling so many km driving, you're probably likely to be driving more often under increased stress and inclimate weather circumstances, driving at times when you perhaps should not be etc. (due to no alternatives). The risk of a bad driving outcome likely accelerates with such substantial increases in km per capita. If you take the US figure on up to 50,000km per capita, I would expect to see an even greater acceleration of fatalities per capita.
ptaipale 9y ago
Not essentially zero. Around 10 % of road fatalities in Sweden are pedestrians (somewhere around 30 per year) for a population of 10 million. Swedish: http://www.vibilagare.se/nyheter/260-doda-i-trafiken-2015 http://www.vibilagare.se/nyheter/260-doda-i-trafiken-2015
kelchm 9y ago
Except reducing speed limits really don't change the speed at which people drive. https://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/ https://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Changing the number on a sign doesn't work, but enforcement, designing roads for appropriate speeds, and providing separated infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists does.
- dumbneurologist 9y ago
  the other reply is correct, but i had a hard time understanding the point without a concrete example: making the roads narrower with visual cues regarding your speed causes people to slow down.
mcguire 9y ago
Sweden's traffic fatality rate (3.5 / 10^9 vehicle km; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...) is roughly comparable to that of Massachusetts (3.25 / 10^9 v. km; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#Fatality_rates_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...). (Sorry, I couldn't find pedestrian numbers.) On the other hand, the Czech Republic is worse than South Carolina.
- bckygldstn 9y ago
  For context, Massachusetts has the lowest fatality rate of all US states.
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    Wow. As a Massachusetts driver, I would not have expected that. I've traveled pretty extensively within the US and Europe and I (and many, many others) consider Massachusetts, or at least the Boston metro area, to have the worst drivers. Three possible explanations for the low fatality rate: - Bars, nightclubs and stores that sell alcohol must close by 2 AM, plus our other state and local alcohol sales regulations (particularly on hard liquor) are among the most restrictive of any state. - The additional fatalities caused by the relatively high number of bad drivers are more than offset by forcing the silent majority of good drivers (and pedestrians) to maintain concentration and alertness. - Many elderly drivers move to warmer states, and the ones who stay tend to be in better health than the ones who leave. Edit: A fourth possible factor is that we're one of the most affluent states and cars succumb to corrosion faster than average due to the long, harsh winters (off the top of my head, I can't think of any state that's both more affluent and has longer winters), so cars are newer (therefore, safer) than average.
    - Pxtl 9y ago
      I'd assume it's just that Boston traffic is so slow that it's impossible to get up to speed enough to kill anybody - all the fast traffic is on expressways like the Mass Pike, which are far safer because of controlled access. Slow traffic just plain doesn't kill people. Sprawl and exurb farming country is where fatalities happen. That's where people are driving fast but without the protection that expressways provide. Massachusetts is one of the most urbanized states, and has less of that fatality-prone terrain.
dm319 9y ago
I agree with the sentiment that there is something you can do about it, but Sweden has a road fatality rate of 2.8/100'000/year. I live in the UK where we have a road fatality rate of 2.9/100'000/year. On average 1 child dies and ~60 are seriously injured every week. I don't know how much further this accident/death rate can be decreased - but I agree that we are down a rabbit hole - is it acceptable that this happens? Obviously not. But are the population going to agree to ban cars? No.
astura 9y ago
You have to take into consideration cultural and social factors too. In my experience people in the US drive very dangerously no matter the traffic laws. One of the craziest encounters in my life was driving on a windy rural road and getting stuck behind a tractor. The road was so windy there was no passing zones for miles. It was frustrating, yes, but part of driving on that kind of road. Eventually a driver came behind me. Without skipping a beat he or she passed both of us (illegal) in a no passing zones (also illegal) and ON A BLIND CORNER! Nobody was coming but that driver had zero way to tell that. My heart still jumps a little just thinking about it. Another issue happened in Brooklyn. I was driving on a narrow residential street with cars parked on both sides going a little over 20mph. I did not feel safe going any faster as a kid could jump out between the parked cars at any time. Guy comes up behind me and just lays on the horn for a good couple blocks (it's NYC after all). Then the car passes me illegally and took off going at least 40 mph.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  I have to disagree here. Americans drive pretty nice and relaxed. Not much different from e.g. Sweden or Germany. But much more relaxed than in Greece, Italy, China, or Thailand, or even Russia.
  - astura 9y ago
    We must not be driving on the same roads. I've only been to a single town in the US that the majority of drivers are polite and seemingly safe.

JeanMarcS 9y ago

That’s my hope. Yesterday a 12 year old kid on a bike was hit by a car where I live. It was dark, and I don’t have the exact details. The kid was coming from behind a parked car, it was 7pm so night, so I guess it’s the same kind of story that happened (beside the fact that a lot of people here are really bad drivers). I’m so looking forward the time when human will stop driving by themselves. Of course there will be trade offs, most surely on the tracking side, but I’m deeply confident that accident rates will fall drastically. No one should have to live with the feelings of having killed anyone, especially if not responsible. Let’s hope technology will finally prevent that.

JKCalhoun 9y ago
> Let’s hope technology will finally prevent that. Funny, because it's technology that caused the death in the first place. Maybe consider how to get rid of the car?
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  How many deaths would getting rid of modern transportation cause? You can't just measure something by the negatives.
- gcheong 9y ago
  Lots of everyday technology has the potential to cause death. People sometimes get hit by trains and those run on tracks. Whether the advantage of using the technology outweigh the downsides is always the tradeoff we need to decide on with an eye on trying to eliminate the downsides as much as possible while retaining the benefits.
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    True, just pointing out the irony of waiting for technology to fix technology.
    - gcheong 9y ago

francisofascii 9y ago

Right. It is interesting to read the early history of the automobile in the U.S. Many of the pedestrian deaths in the early days were children. Speed governor laws were proposed but ultimately rejected. Motordom won the day. Now it is built into our society that people have to be super vigilant whenever we walk outside. Kids have to always be careful and limited to where they can play. It is sad how much of our freedom to roam has been lost in the U.S.

tedchs 9y ago
Well, people had to be careful before the automobile too, you know. People could by killed by horses or wagons. The introduction of the automobile didn't make it suddenly unsafe to be in the street.
- francisofascii 9y ago
  The key difference is speed. One of the earliest speeding laws considered was the automobile cannot go faster than a horse and wagon which is about 10-15 mph. It is much easier to stop in time, or get out of the way, when at 15 mph rather than 30 mph.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Horses had a habit of not trampling people if they could avoid it, regardless of the driver’s own intent. They were in many ways like self driving cars. These things (safety) aren’t binary. Just because it wasn’t absolutely false before doesn’t mean it was much more true after.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    Horses are evil creatures that will stop your head in. The difference between now and then is we dont have an agency that keeps track of horse related deaths then.
    - dreamcompiler 9y ago

gambiting 9y ago

I'm hoping that pedestrian collisions will be reduced to nearly zero thanks to the rise of autonomous braking(don't they have to be installed in every new car by 2020?), long before anything reassembling self-driving cars is available. My own car has already given me a solid scare when a toy ball rolled onto the road from in between the parked cars and my car has stopped before I could even react - surely enough, there were kids playing behind the cars and they went out to get their toy.

nxc18 9y ago
What kind of car do you have? I got a new Toyota Corolla (lease, fortunately) with autonomous braking, but it seems to be a “slow down by 5mph pre-collision” sort of system rather than an “avoid the collision” sort of system. Seeing the Subaru system in action gives me faith, but you pay the premium.
- gambiting 9y ago
  Mercedes-Benz GLA - it does stop down to zero, at least at lower speeds. This video shows how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hndlXz844No https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hndlXz844No

JKCalhoun 9y ago

> but hopefully self-driving cars Think more boldly: public transportation.

peatmoss 9y ago
The OG self-driving tech. Side benefit, you get more than small marginal, theoretical gains in terms of the numbers of people who can be transported, especially at peak demand times!
gcheong 9y ago
Self-driving cars can be the last mile solution to public transportation that is limited by the efficiency of transporting larger numbers of people to a limited set of destinations.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  True. Walking is another last mile solution for all but the handicapped and elderly.
adventured 9y ago
There's no reason self driving cars/vehicles can't be public transportation. Most likely there will be a segment just like that. A slightly larger, electric, van type vehicle, that holds ten people, for public group commuting. It would be a solid improvement over present circumstances and would probably work quite well, and cost effectively, for poorer working class people.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  I like that idea. The sentiment I've seen more commonly expressed is — I still want a car for each adult in my household so we can each go where we want, when we want. I'm spoiled and prefer that as well but I know in my heart it is selfish and not sustainable.
alien_at_work 9y ago
That's not bold, that's meek. Self driving cars are the bold. Public transport means travelling to somewhere I don't want to go, so I can be taken somewhere else I don't want to go but is closer to where I do want to go. I want to walk out my front door, get into an "auto Uber" or whatever, and be let out at the front door of my work.

ballenf 9y ago

No innovation can survive one-sided scrutiny of this type: you should at least factor in the number of children saved because of the availability of fast-moving vehicles to get them timely help. Given the steady rise of childhood life expectancies during our fall down this "rabbit hole", your logic breaks down pretty catastrophically. At least without more support than comparing the relative squishiness of these two objects.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
That's a surprisingly good point, and it's the first time I've seen it brought up in discussions about car accidents here. I wonder if there are statistics out there estimating the amount of lives saved thanks to quick response enabled by cars (e.g. ambulances). OTOH, this can get quickly confounded with the second-order impact of cars - e.g. that medical facilities would be closer to people were it not for the possibility to deliver them there by car.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > OTOH, this can get quickly confounded with the second-order impact of cars - e.g. that medical facilities would be closer to people were it not for the possibility to deliver them there by car. we've already got to use helicopters to flight-for-life folks from one hospital to another because it is impractical to build & staff enough of the specialized emergency medical care you might happen to need when something terrible happens. (not to mention all the certificate-of-need crap that keeps hospital availability artificially limited.)

gkya 9y ago

While I upvoted you for the initial part of your comment, I do not support the autonomous car argument, as I can't see how an autonomous car can avoid an accident of the sort cited in the article, namely an object or a person darting in front of a vehicle moving with enough velocity to be unable to come to a stop immediately.

joosters 9y ago
On a very cynical level, autonomous cars will still help. If the person in the article had been a passenger in the car when they hit the child, they would undoubtedly feel far less guilt about the incident, and their life would have been far less affected as a result.
- gkya 9y ago
  Is this a question that has a legal answer, at least in the US where autonomous vehicles seem to be most in vogue, that what party is guilty in an autonomous vehicle accident? Because in an autonomous vehicle every person is a passenger. The only person that can be blamed at all is the pedestrian victim of the accident, no? Also, in an accident which involves two vehicles, on whom will the damages be? Certainly none of the persons in the cars, no?
  - deleted 9y ago
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tlb 9y ago
Human reaction time to unexpected events is at least 400 mS. Autonomous car reaction time can be as low as 40 mS. You can slow down a lot in those 360 mS (about 6 mph) which can turn a fatal accident into a moderate one. The vast majority of accidents are due to sloppy, aggressive, or distracted driving, which autonomous vehicles will completely eliminate.
- gkya 9y ago
  I kind of doubt it in this case. If a person darted on to the road from behind an object that obstructs the sensors of an autonomous vehicle, in a distance of about a couple meters, slowing down quickly enough is probably not possible (though IDK much about cars, really). But such a vehicle would be able to steer away in some cases, but then it puts itself and the passengers in danger (i.e. hitting another moving vehicle or a stationary object nearby). I believe autonomous vehicles are a huge overkill for what can easily be solved via decent public transportation. Public transportation via autonomous / centrally controlled vehicles would be way easier if the amount of private cars on the roads were reduced. And I'd guesstimate that a great majority of people using cars could easily switch to electric bicycles or mopeds. And that's a huge step forwards, as these vehicles are less likely to kill you if they hit you, and can steer away more easily. Add to that them being way more clean and fuel- and space-efficient in comparison to cars, leading to much more efficient use of both road- and parking-space, and of raw fuel. Also, this may be a local phæenomenon, but lots of large chain-stores offer delivery services, along with many small shops. In my quartier in the Northern European parts Istanbul, I can order from a bunch of chain stores, lots of restaurants (using yemeksepeti.com) and many tobacco shops.

joosters 9y ago

Autonomous cars could actually lead to increases in road deaths (or at least, less pressure to improve road safety, and hence less potential reduction in deaths), because people would be far less invested in the accident. There would always be someone else to potentially blame: the manufacturer of the vehicle, the programmer of the software, the creators of the sensors, or even the owner of the vehicle not cleaning the sensors enough. Every party could make a compelling case for why someone else was the cause of the death. There would be more people with blood on their hands, but those people would feel less responsible and be even further removed from the actual incident.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Has that ever happened before in the American or other western legal system? It seems highly unlikely that no one would be assigned blame. Heck, we already have cars driven for us (taxis) and the blame for an accident is attributed to the driver, that wouldn’t change if the driver was a computer, the legal syste, wouldn’t simply shutdown.
- joosters 9y ago
  Well, it happened in the original article. The driver was not charged with killing someone. Even if blame is cast, in the autonomous future that blame would be upon a company, or multiple companies, whose legal departments will spend great effort diverting the blame onto other people or other companies. No one individual will be charged with killing someone, and no one person will have a death on their conscience.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    You are conveniently leaving out civil liability. Yes, the self driving car won’t be put in jail because it didn’t have a murderous intent or wasn’t criminally negligent (e.g. drunk). But damn, if it kills someone, at least the insurance company will have to pay up (as it most definitely did in this case); kill more than a few people with your self driving car and you can bet there will be a recall, well, lawsuits, massive hits to financial performance, and so on. Death has consequences. It really is the same with doctor malpractice, the doctor doesn’t go to jail because their patient died because they made a mistake. Transforming civil negligence into criminal negligence as you seem to be hinting at would be a horrible system.

jessaustin 9y ago

Blame is most naturally attributed to the party that brings the 2-ton death machine to the incident. It was like that in USA, when automobiles were first introduced. The laws only changed as a result of decades of dishonest public relations and bribery on the part of the automobile industry.