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Why do we keep designing streets for speed?
- jwatte 9y agoBecause wasting time on transpiration also kills, small slices of lost life in parallel. Traffic had long hanging fruit for saving lives for sure -- mandatory daytime running lights come to mind as a zero cost improvement -- but the speed equation is not generally simple.
- lloeki 9y ago> small slices of lost life "A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death."
- reificator 9y agoI think they were talking about time, not risk.
- trothamel 9y agohttps://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt
- gowld 9y agoThat's funny because the Mac had a famously slow OS+chip combination for many years. Steve Jobs had an excuse for everything he wanted to do.
- kgwgk 9y agoNot really zero cost (probably cost-effective though). https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/fuel-economy/drl-gas-consumption1.htm https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/fuel-economy/...
- KozmoNau7 9y ago>Because wasting time on transpiration also kills, small slices of lost life in parallel. So you're willing to put other people at risk, for an immeasurable gain to yourself? Maybe you should take public transport more, where you can actually do something else while being transported?
- dang 9y ago> So you're Comments here need to follow the HN guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- KozmoNau7 9y agoBased on my experience with other people, both in and out of traffic, that is the most plausible interpretation.
- closeparen 9y agoYes. Air travel is quite safe, for example, but not danger-free. We as a society are willing to accept some death here and there so that the rest of us can go on interesting vacations.
- Doctor_Fegg 9y ago> mandatory daytime running lights come to mind as a zero cost improvement Jury's out on that one. If you're always looking for vehicles with lights on, you're less likely to notice pedestrians or cyclists in the road.
- boznz 9y agoQuite an interesting article. My beef is also with car manufacturers. I have a bog standard 2015 Mazda 3. The speedometer reads up to 260KMH, the national speed limit in the country is 100KMH, who the fuck are they designing these things for?
- tsomctl 9y agoThe national speed limit doesn't apply when on a race track.
- mc32 9y agoCan you imagine at the dealership: You step into a basic Toyota, you gauge the speedometer. It reads 0 on end, 160 on the other. Next you step into a basic Honda, you gauge the speedometer. It reads 0 on one end, 80 on the other. Which one will most people buy, all other things being equal? Now, if you want to have an absolute maximum speed, governments can insist on tamper-proof governors. Kinda like Singapore does for its cabs.
- UncleEntity 9y ago> ...who the fuck are they designing these things for? Obviously you since you own the thing. If people didn't buy the fast cars they wouldn't build the fast cars...how many Beetles were sold worldwide and those things could barely do 110kph with a good tailwind?
- hermannj314 9y agoAren't all of the gauges from speed, temperature, tach, fuel, etc. meant to show engineering ranges and not optimal ranges? If you designed a car that couldn't go faster than 100KMh, I assume driving it 100% of the time at 100kmh would be more detrimental to the car's longevity than operating a more capable car at a lower percentage of its capability. I realize I'm making some assumptions here, but maybe the maximum speed of a car is an design artifact of maximizing for multiple variables (longevity, fuel consumption, maintenance costs), not just speed. I'm not an engineer so I have no idea what I'm talking about.
- perl4ever 9y ago
- tallpapab 9y agoInteresting article. One can easily notice that most folks seem to treat the speed limit as a minimum speed rather than a maximum speed. It's not just designers designing for speed. They do so because of market demand. That demand is boosted by advertising - both overt and culturally pervasive imagery. Buckle up folks. Try not to speed. You're really not saving much, if any, time. Also minimize left turns and lane changes. When you do turn (or change lanes) always use your turn indicator. When cars are robots they can do these things. The worry it that freedom loving consumers will still choose thrills over safety and this may stunt the adoption of robocars.
- rootusrootus 9y agoCars are actually quite safe if you consider how much we use them. Your odds of dying in a car accident are quite low. Given that robocars have their own trade-offs, I don't think it's too surprising that some people will elect to continue to buy human-driven cars indefinitely if given the choice.
- kazagistar 9y agoMy odds of dying in a car are much higher then almost anything else in the short term. If there is anything to rationally optimize for, it is car safety.
- rootusrootus 9y agoI think maybe you are missing a whole bunch of other risks in your life that are more likely to take your life. How much do you worry about dying from a fall, or poison, or alcohol, or drugs? Or a firearm? All of those are either similar to or more likely than dying in a car accident. If you want to rationally optimize for something that will improve your survival odds, heart health is by a vast, vast margin a better place to spend your efforts. If you drive an average number of miles per year, you will probably be involved in some kind of accident once every decade. The odds you will die in that accident are pretty low, as it only happens about once every 100,000,000 miles driven.
- 9y ago
- closeparen 9y ago>However, a majority of the severe injury and fatal collisions are preventable, so they are not accidents 100% of transportation-related incidents are preventable, full stop. You can always stay home. Beyond that, it's a question of how we balance a number of factors such as risk and quality of life.
- frobozz 9y agoAlso, where does the author get the idea that preventable is an antonym of accidental? Just because someone failed to take certain steps to prevent an accident, it doesn't mean that they deliberately caused the accident.
- amputect 9y agoI've got a guess as to what the author is talking about, because gun owners have a similar thing. In the case of guns, it's "there's no such thing as an accidental discharge, only a negligent one". By this reading, the author is probably saying that unless your car malfunctions and prevents you from stopping or steering, or there is some equivalent fluke happening (a deer darts out in front of you and you physically can't stop in time), then "accidents" are caused by negligence (not checking lanes when changing, playing with the radio, not looking for pedestrians) or malfeasance (unsafe passing, driving at an unsafe speed for the conditions, drunk driving). I have mixed feelings about this, but I've been driving a while and I've seen a lot of truly stupid and/or mean spirited and/or reckless behavior that could quite predictably result in a collision, but it'd be a stretch to call the sad and obvious outcome an 'accident'.
- icebraining 9y agoThere's a movement to change the language used: https://www.crashnotaccident.com/ https://www.crashnotaccident.com/
- frobozz 9y agoIt then goes on to say > What is your state or city doing to address this safety issue and prevent severe injuries and fatalities? So the negligent party is implied not to be the individual driver who is not giving due care and attention, but the road designer or maintainer for not making the road safer. I agree that crashes often occur due to the direct negligence of a road user, but when it comes to the state, there are a lot of tradeoffs and calculations to make. They are not responsible for each individual accident, but for the overall outcome of road use in general. It's erroneous to say the state is negligent for (e.g) funding emergency services to improve outcomes after a range of incidents both on and off the road, vs. Road safety measures. If £X of extra ambulance and fire funding prevents Y road-related deaths and Z other deaths, whilst that same sum on road safety measures only prevents those Y road deaths, then cure may be better than prevention.
- Animats 9y agoJapan runs with somewhat lower speed limits. The article is heavy on Celebration, FL, which was built by Disney, but has fallen on hard times. It's deliberately retro idealized 1950s America, and entirely privatized. That's a very unusual community. The optimal speed for maximum traffic flow is around 35mph. Faster than that, and the cars space out further and throughput decreases. Slower than that, and not enough cars per second are passing. Metering signals are designed to throttle entry to the freeway to keep speed around 35mph.
- mikekchar 9y agoLiving in Japan, I'm not sure I would say that the slower speeds make things safer (can't say one way or another). However, it definitely changes the way you think about geography. I spent about 12 years of my adult life living in Ottawa Canada and about 8 years living in Japan (with the balance being in the UK). In Ottawa, I would not think twice about driving 20-30 km to hang out with my friend after work. When all is said and done, it's under an hour of driving for a round trip. But in Japan, 30 km away might as well be on the other side of the moon for me most days. From where I live, the nearest "big" city (of 700K people) is 25 km. To drive there would take over an hour each way. The bus fare is over $20 US, round trip (and takes 3 hours round trip). I stay in my town. I walk to the izakaya (neighbourhood pub). I walk to the super market. I walk to the hardware store. I walk everywhere -- anything I would want to go to is less than 2 km away. Not everybody lives the way I do, but enough people do that each town has it's own flavour. It has it's own special foods and shops. I can ride my bike 5 km to the next town over and it's different than the town I live in. I can go another 5 km and that town is also different. Compared to Canada, it's night an day. In Canada, it would take me 5 km just to get out of my housing subdivision. Walking to the grocery store is a crazy thought unless you just happened to live next to a grocery story. Don't get me wrong -- Ottawa is a great place, but you really need to live in the older areas to get much flavour. The rest is cookie cutter subdivisions, interspersed with malls. Having said that, I'm not sure if it's reasonable to expect to transplant a non-car culture into NA. The vast majority of my friends in Canada dream of owning a home with enough land that they never have to see their neighbours. They don't wan't a neighbourhood where they walk everywhere. They want a kind of island and they really don't mind driving from island to island. It's not for me, but I can definitely understand the appeal.
- kaplun 9y ago... because speed is... fun? :-)
- mlazos 9y agoThe one issue I have with the article is that the author doesn’t mention specifics about designing streets to lower the speed. Is the implied suggestion to make roads terribly curved so it’s really hard to drive fast? That seems to have it’s own drawbacks. I was surprised the author didn’t mention that many cities have intersections designed so that cars trying to turn right with a green light often intersect with a crosswalk that is also green for pedestrians. That seems more amiable to redesign rather than the grid road designs favored in most cities.
- stinos 9y agoAuthor works for a company doing such desig it seems, see link in vey first sentence [1]. For an example see the link in the last paragraph [2] where a couple of possible techniques are shown. [1] https://altaplanning.com/ https://altaplanning.com/ [2] https://blog.altaplanning.com/reducing-speeding-related-crashes-through-design-5d79e8c7af8e https://blog.altaplanning.com/reducing-speeding-related-cras...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sparrc 9y agoI believe the author is advocating for "traffic calming" measures, which are a fairly standardized set of measures that urban planners and developers use to slow down traffic on streets to make them safer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
- lsh123 9y agoSpeed limits in US highways had been introduced in 70s to save gas during the crisis. Let’s all agree it had nothing to do with safety. The claim that 30% of incidents are caused by speeding are also questionable. Few years back I was rear ended by someone talking on the phone. The officer wrote speeding as the cause of incident. When I asked about it, he replied that the safe speed in this case was zero. Just wander how many of these 30% are the same. P.S. I rarely actually go above the speed of the traffic flow. I think it is the safest to drive at the same speed as others even if it is above speed limit. On the other hand, drivers in the left lane going 60 mph when everyone else is doing 85 mph are the real danger on the road.
- llukas 9y agoYou forgot about pedestrians. Should we throw away research that says pedestrian death is more likely when speed is higher than 50kph?
- ronsor 9y agoThere are no pedestrians on highways.
- Piskvorrr 9y agoBabylonian alert: in some Englishes, "highway" is "road", whereas in others it means "high-speed motor vehicle road". Confusing, yes: given that the article talks about rural and city roads and the GP tries to refute it through freeway speed limits, apparently some of the confusion is present here as well.
- CamperBob2 9y agoIt's a shame that statistics don't back up this hoary old saying. Turns out that modeling drivers as if they were ideal gas particles doesn't give you the numbers you expect. Meanwhile, lack of respect for traffic laws due to inappropriately-low speed limits arguably does get people killed.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> Meanwhile, lack of respect for traffic laws due to inappropriately-low speed limits arguably does get people killed. This is one area where I believe we need to treat the "lack of respect" part, i.e. beat the people into submission. Because it's not reasonable to optimize speed limits for what a driver feels should be appropriate - a driver takes into account his own position and situation only, while optimizing traffic is a much larger-scale exercise. (Also, frankly, it's the speed that kills. If either the pedestrian or you were dumb enough to get into crash at 50km/h, you'd get into an even harder crash at 100km/h. I cringe when I hear drivers wanting to raise speed limits on the roads that have foot traffic crossing it, children playing on the sidewalks, etc.)
- mantas 9y agoGerman autobahn traffic would like a word with you. Drivers over there are pretty good to find out their reasonable speed. There's a ton of respect between drivers too. Probably the most respectful driving culture I drove at.
- konschubert 9y agoAside from the fact that the parent was talking about city streets, not freeways... I find Autobahn driving very stressful. Crossing the border into Switzerland, which has a general speed limit, traveling becomes much more enjoyable.
- mantas 9y agoI was talking about his general sentiment that people don’t consider others and have to be beaten into submission. Out of countries I drive at, Germany is least stressful. Especially because drivers seem to be very considerate of others. Including, if not more, on unlimited autobahn sections. Haven’t driven in Switzerland yet though.
- Mo3 9y agoInadequate drivers kill, not the speed.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoInadequate drivers go too fast for their own skills. Adequate drivers know that speed does kill, or at least makes accidents much worse. They are not overconfident fools. Good drivers know the rules of the road and follow them, they know when to bend them, and when not to bend them. Speeding isn't worth it, you gain a minute here or there, that's it.
- evincarofautumn 9y agoI suppose so, but increased speed increases the likelihood that “inadequate” driving causes an accident, and that that accident will be fatal. And IMO most humans are “inadequate” drivers, in terms of risk of death driving—something like 1 micromort per 250 miles, or 1 in 6000 chance per year for the average driver.
- konschubert 9y agoThat's like saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". Which is bullshit.
- kisstheblade 9y agoIs it just that americans can't drive? In my country road fatalities are 4/100000 people. This is a country with as many vehicles as persons (so a lot of driving). In the US the fatality rate is apparently 12/100000.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gowld 9y agoHow many miles do your countrymates drive, on average? Americans drive ~12000miles/year, per car. Also many americans drive very large cars that may be more dangerous to others.
- paulddraper 9y agoI think that's it: citizens of the United States are incapable of driving.
- mathgeek 9y ago> a majority of the severe injury and fatal collisions are preventable, so they are not accidents They are indeed accidents, using the definition which implies unexpectedness (rather than the definition which implies chance).
- icc97 9y agoIt's not just speed it's the distance that you keep. If everyone kept to the 3 seconds rule, which basically applies at any speed we'd all be safer. Further you simply increase that when there's ice and rain. France has broken white stripes along side their motorway with gaps every 4 seconds travelling at 80 mph. It's beautifully simple and saves on paint too.
- tehlike 9y agoOne of the most important rule we tend to forget. Distance and less variance in traffic speed.