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Seeing red: Why cars are killing more people
- notus 7y agoThe site loads but the article content does not
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- klyrs 7y agoEdit, was a link to different content with the same title
- autoexec 7y ago> Pedestrians continue to die in disturbing numbers. Things like speed bumps, red light cameras, and more signage are virtually useless. Haven't red light cameras been linked to increases in accidents? I'm pretty sure I've read it was in part due to decreasing the length of yellow lights to try to increase revenue.
- notus 7y agoYeah most cities are removing red light cameras, it's been universally accepted as a failed experiment. I think distracted driving is the problem IMO. I cannot go anywhere without seeing people driving while looking at their phones and cops right next to them not doing anything about it.
- zzleeper 7y agoSame here. People messing with their phones are the new drunk drivers. Texting, messing with stuff on Waze/Maps, changing songs on spotify, etc...
- autoexec 7y agoI heard that in IL police are riding around in semi trucks so they can peer down into tall SUVs and catch drivers playing with their phones. Not at all a perfect solution, but it's a start.
- smileysteve 7y agoBut why! It's so easy to find a distracted driver driving recklessly these days. Whether it's failure to maintain a lane, maintain a speed, or failure to signal you don't need a semi truck to enforce it.
- autoexec 7y agoI think the idea is that they want to catch people specifically for cell phone use. I get the feeling they've got some harsh penalties for holding a phone at all while driving. They can pull 1000 people over for various offenses like drifting out of their lanes or failure to signal but that isn't going to put fear into people like it would if all of those 1000 people were busted for driving while holding a cell phone. People tend to overestimate their ability to drive well while playing with their phones and if you're caught but the officer doesn't see it in your hands it only takes a second to drop it into the seat next to you.
- smileysteve 7y agoI disagree (though my state seems to not). What better way to put the fear of enforcement into people than to say - and have on dash cam, this is a reckless driver that is drifting and making poorer decisions than a drunk driver. And to be able to receive this ticket readily, with no ability to hide a cell phone or claim to be in a navigation app. And it applies to other major causes of distracted driving accidents: drinking, distracting passengers to the driver, eating, and whatever else. In the time before dash cams, there was the option that this would be a subjective offense, an officer's word against the perpetrator, and so many of these are "secondary" offenses (a warning and reason to pull over for something else). But now that every officer has a dash cam, they can be objectively evidenced.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eli 7y agoI don't think that's true. The data are more complicated: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/ https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
- megaremote 7y ago> Yeah most cities are removing red light cameras, it's been universally accepted as a failed experiment. This is bullshit. People just don't like them. People don't like having to stop at yellow lights, including the people setting the laws.
- wl 7y agoMost tickets are for rolling right on red.
- jakeogh 7y agoThey went down in flames here in Tucson. https://tucson.com/news/local/no-more-tickets-from-tucson-s-red-light-cameras-radar/article_c4b350cf-2e9a-59ef-b644-ce83fca30896.html https://tucson.com/news/local/no-more-tickets-from-tucson-s-...
- eli 7y agoI believe the best practice is actually to lengthen the yellow light time when adding a red light camera. Presumably shortening the yellow light time is dangerous whether there's a camera or not.
- megaremote 7y ago> Haven't red light cameras been linked to increases in accidents? An increase in minor accidents, and decrease in major accidents involving death, which is exactly what you want.
- techslave 7y agowell, you don’t actually want the increase in minor accidents.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoSo install roundabouts instead. No need for red light cameras or traffic lights, and you reduce the most serious perpendicular and head on crashes to nothing.
- rootusrootus 7y agoI'd be interested in seeing data on this claim. The only people causing fender benders by panic stopping at every yellow light are the same people already paying attention to traffic signals to begin with. Major accidents are caused by people who blow the light entirely (e.g. drunk), not the folks who run a "pink" light.
- rootusrootus 7y agoYep, exactly. My city went the other way -- instead of red light cameras, we increased the time on the yellow light a little bit, and introduced a small delay between when one signal turns red and the next signal turns green. So we got less accidents, and less crazy panic stops on yellow lights. Win, win.
- WWLink 7y agoThere were a few intersections in a city I used to live in, where they set up redlight cameras and quickly figured out why people were running the lights. When they changed the order that the lights changed, suddenly nobody ran red lights anymore. I can't remember the exact reason anymore, but it was pretty interesting. Once they fixed the issue, they deactivated the cameras lol.
- btrettel 7y agoQuotes from the linked article: > The city responded to what is truly a life and death crisis by erecting small yellow signs which read: Seniors Safety Zone: Drive Slowly. One more piece of city signage for drivers to ignore as they race to the next red light. Cyclist here. There are a few crossing I go through every day where drivers need to yield to cyclists. I started keeping statistics on how often drivers yield to cyclists at these locations, and it's only about 62% of the time (N = 58). This is despite the TWO signs at each crossing saying for drivers to yield. I've talked to a few drivers at the next stop light and many of them see me but choose to plow through the crossing anyway because they are unaware of the law and the signs. I think these signs exist as a CYA measure for the city. The city will then blame the driver if something bad happens. I regard signs saying to yield to cyclists or "share the road" or whatnot as evidence that a particular location is dangerous to cyclists because they city wouldn't spend the money on the sign if they didn't have to. Since the signs don't work, they mainly serve to mark dangerous locations. > Drivers of high-end cars are the worst: BMWs, Audis and at the top of the list, Porsche drivers. Yep, as a cyclist I've noticed that luxury car drivers are particularly bad on average. Pick-up truck drivers seem to have a worse reputation among cyclists but I'd say they aren't worse drivers specifically than luxury car drivers on average. Though trucks are larger so they perhaps should get more attention.
- really3452 7y agoI gave a Prius a love tap today while riding my bike. They pulled right into the bicycle crossing without looking and then continued to only look the other way for an opening in traffic to pull out. So I stopped, got off my bike, tapped on their door a couple times to make sure they knew they were blocking the bike lane, and then went around. Pretty much any time I can tap on a vehicle that is pulled into the bike lane or cross walk I do just to let them know that they are driving poorly. Not anything that will leave a mark, just enough to get their attention. I usually end up doing this two to four times a week. Most of the time it seems to me that the offending drivers are in pretty poor physical shape. So I've just kind of chalked their driving behavior to be due to their lack of experience using the bike trails and sidewalks.
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- reificator 7y agoThis page does not contain an article for me. Simply a header, an ad, and some blocked content. I am not blocking scripts, and there are no errors in the console. The only network requests that are failing are analytics requests that are being blocked. The HTML source does not appear to contain an article that has failed to load. None of the requests appear to be for article content, just a lot of libraries, stylesheets, and images. Interesting snippets I found while reading the source: <!-- real people should not fill this in and expect good things - do not remove this or risk form bot signups--> I'm guessing they have a fake form honeypot to prevent bots from spamming their real signup form? /* <![CDATA[ */ var newsletter = {"messages":{"email_error":"Email address is not correct","name_error":"Name is required","surname_error":"Last name is required","privacy_error":"You must accept the privacy policy"},"profile_max":"20"}; /* ]]> */ I can tell from this snippet I really don't want to see their build pipeline if they have to escape such a simple statement such that it won't break XML or JS.
- autoexec 7y agoIf we can't read the article we can at least judge their code, like the 18 lines of JavaScript and CSS to display an emoji, or the fact that the entire text of the article is missing.
- benologist 7y agoStuff like /* <![CDATA[ */ was common some years ago because of JS and XHTML parsers colliding - https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/164569/put-cdata-it-is-a-good-practice-or-not-necessarily-magento-1-9 https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/164569/put-cdata...
- reificator 7y agoYou know what, my bad. I don't think I ever tried to use inline JS in that era. Thanks for that tidbit of info. I was picturing some horrific build script with the canonical JS stored in XML.
- autoexec 7y agothe source gives a description: "We're killing more people because more people are ignoring traffic signals We've charted the ominous increase in road deaths in the past several years, and now there's a new bit o... and links to this picture of a red light. http://cityobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/red_light-1024x768.jpg http://cityobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/red_li... That's all the content I can get out of their source code.
- kiliantics 7y agoBut instead of opening the discourse on how to solve the car epidemic, mainstream news prefers to focus on other road problems, like how "deadly" cyclists are: https://nypost.com/2019/08/31/nyc-bicyclists-are-killing-pedestrians-and-the-city-wont-stop-it/ https://nypost.com/2019/08/31/nyc-bicyclists-are-killing-ped...
- bt848 7y agoAlso “distracted walking “
- baroffoos 7y agoThe accepted punishment for stepping outside without being on full alert survival mode is instant death.
- CompanionCuuube 7y agoThe family members of those dead cyclists are crisis actors or something, right? There's no cycling problem.
- romaaeterna 7y agoThe article: http://cityobservatory.org/2019/09/ http://cityobservatory.org/2019/09/ Text: We’re killing more people because more people are ignoring traffic signals We’ve charted the ominous increase in road deaths in the past several years, and now there’s a new bit of evidence of just how bad the problem has become. In 2017, according to an American Automobile Association analysis of NHTSA data reported by the Los Angeles Times, we hit a new high for the number of people killed by cars running red lights. > In 2017, the latest figures available, 939 people were killed by vehicles blowing through red lights, according to a AAA study of government crash data. . . . AAA isn’t sure why the numbers are on the rise or why they have increased at a far higher rate than overall U.S. roadway deaths. Since 2012 the number of highway fatalities rose 10%, far short of the 28% increase in red-light running deaths. There are likely many causes for the increase in fatalities. Some of it sure has to do with the increase in driving, prompted by cheaper fuel. Red-light running is also likely another indication of the growing problem of distracted driving. Drivers who are texting or distracted by in-cabin technology are more likely to miss a red light. It also has to be mentioned that our efforts to use “smart” technology to improve compliance with traffic laws is woeful. Traffic engineers invest untold millions in efforts to automate traffic lights to provide motorists with a green wave, but spend little effort to promote greater compliance with red lights and speed limits. For example, despite its official policy of trying to achieve Vision Zero, for example, the City of Portland has just eight fixed speed cameras. Several states, including Texas have banned automated red-light cameras. Automated traffic enforcement is a technology that’s been shown to reduce speeding and red-light running and save lives. We’re all enamored of the prospects of technology to make life better, but in one of the few instances in which we have a proven technology that’s been shown to save lives, we’ve limited or actually prohibited its deployment, with predictable results, in the form of an increasing death toll.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Spooky23 7y agoDon’t forget pedestrian behaviors that make bad driver behavior more deadly. I started keeping score of pedestrians walking into a poorly placed pole on a corner outside of my office. Since June we are up to 48. We convinced our landlord to put a potted tree in front of it, which helped, but the local SeeClickFix community reported it and had it removed as potted plants are code violations. Watch a busy street sometime. People do funny shit, like walk into traffic without looking or wandering into buildings while using the phone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- post_break 7y agoDrive a stick shift in america and you'll very quickly see how many people are zombies behind the wheel. Red light means head down phone time. People run red lights way more often because they either didn't make the green because someone was on their phone at the start of the line and people are too scared to use their horn and risk road rage, or they themselves were head down. The police do not enforce the laws on the books about distracted driving or driving while texting, hell the police don't respond to much any more in our city unless you say active shooter. It's just so frustrating to try to drive any more in the past 10 years because of phones.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- workerIbe 7y agoCompounded by ~1:4 on mood altering drugs...
- bob1029 7y agoI have an easy solution to this problem. Make it a felony to use your phone (e.g. looking down at it) while in the driver seat of a vehicle in motion. This is the only way you will get people to pay any attention. You only have to enforce something like this occasionally. The fear of harsh consequences will take care of the rest. Drunk driving seems to be far less of an epidemic than distracted phone driving these days...
- jdnenej 7y agoIt seems like insanity that that is not already illegal. It is in Australia and people still do it, most drivers would just rather risk killing someone if it means 5 more minutes on Instagram
- P_I_Staker 7y agoIt's absolutely illegal in the usa, and frequently targeted for enforcement.
- fnord77 7y agoI noticed a ton more red light cameras recently installed in my city. Hope that keeps drivers on their toes.
- casefields 7y agoYes. So much so, rear end collisions will skyrocket: https://time.com/3643077/red-light-cams-rear-end-collisions-chicago/ https://time.com/3643077/red-light-cams-rear-end-collisions-... https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15135851/rear-end-crashes-go-up-after-red-light-cameras-go-in/ https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15135851/rear-end-cra... https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/ https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
- fnord77 7y agoI think for this city, more rear end accidents in exchange for fewer pedestrian deaths is acceptable
- sliken 7y agoI'd watch the yellow light times. Often they get reduced to increase revenue, even past the legal limits.
- cmcaine 7y agoCars aren't killing people. Car drivers are killing people, usually because they are careless. Compare the language used when pedestrians are killed by cyclists.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago> ...pedestrians are killed by cyclists Is this very common? I've been hit by cyclists before (apparently red lights are a suggestion if you're pedaling?) but killing seems like it would be difficult.
- paulcole 7y agoIt is not common. In Britain, well over 99% of pedestrian deaths are caused by motor vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/killer-cyclists-roads-bikes-pedestrian-collision-deaths-britain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/killer...
- tommoor 7y agoIt's not, but that doesn't stop sensationalist articles being written… https://nypost.com/2019/08/31/nyc-bicyclists-are-killing-pedestrians-and-the-city-wont-stop-it/ https://nypost.com/2019/08/31/nyc-bicyclists-are-killing-ped...
- baroffoos 7y agoIts extraordinarily rare to the point of not even worth counting. But when it happens once somewhere in the world it gets reposted on every single clickbait news website and spread all over social media.
- cbanek 7y agoI work on a college campus, and now the students are back. They are the worst pedestrians to deal with. Many of them are distracted on their phones, and many will just start walking into the road in any random place, never even looking if a car is coming. I would say the intersections are very pedestrian friendly - stop signs where they can cross any time (and I don't fault them for that), but please stop walking out into the middle of the street, or using the street as a sidewalk.