4 ms·

What policy change could possibly be made to make people better drivers?

by jm__87 5y ago

JCharante 5y ago
Take care driving as serious as aviation. Mandatory dash cams to make it easier to assign blame, automatic sensors which alert police when they detect the driver is behaving erratically. Make it easy to report other drivers for bad behavior (sitting on someone else's bumper, brake checking them, cutting them off, jersey lane swapping) which results in mandatory training or points off their license.
- jm__87 5y ago
  This is the only response I have seen to my question that could maybe change things - specifically having automatic sensors in every vehicle that automatically alert police when you do something dangerous. I think this would be unrealistic to implement, but assuming you could, it would probably help (assuming sensor data could be used as proof of bad driving). As for reporting bad driving, you really need proof of a person's bad driving if you're going to penalize them for it. Having more traffic cameras helps a bit, but people just learn where the cameras are and drive carefully when they know they are being filmed.
lmm 5y ago
Stricter driving tests is the obvious one.
dagw 5y ago
Much stricter requirements for getting (and keeping) your drivers license. Policies focusing on reducing drunk driving (both focusing changing attitudes, increasing the risk of getting caught and increasing the punishments for people caught). More consistent and continuous enforcement of existing driving laws. You can probably do more to get unsafe cars off the roads. There is a lot you can do around designing roads and traffic flows in ways that reduce the risk of accidents.
bsanr2 5y ago
I imagine there are several. American driver education and testing are notoriously lax compared to much of the world; make driver testing more intensive and frequent. Traffic enforcement is geared more towards municipal income generation and the facilitating of searches and arrests for other crimes than toward ensuring safe driving; stop pulling over poor people to search for drugs and start photographing and billing middle class and rich people for speeding or for idling in the middle/passing lane. Car manufacturers jack up the price on critical safety features and make it difficult to retrofit them into existing vehicles; regulate them. Our roadways are often designed poorly, mixing use cases in ways that result in unnecessary injury (e.g., "stroads" and intersections with poor pedestrian design); regulate and fix those.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  What's a stroad?
  - krapp 5y ago
    A combination between a street and a road. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-07/defining-the-worst-type-of-street-design https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-07/defining-...
  - exsuicidalthrwy 5y ago
    I tried writing an answer, realized I suck at that, and so am providing a link that answers the question better than I can: https://www.bikede.org/2011/11/28/we-have-too-many-stroads/ https://www.bikede.org/2011/11/28/we-have-too-many-stroads/ The takeaway is that streets and roads have different goals, and when that's not acknowledged we wind up with the misery that is driving in US towns.
dTal 5y ago
Your tone suggests you can't imagine any, which is... surprising. There are a vast array of things you can do to make driving safer, at the cost of making it less accessible and/or more expensive. Different countries already set their threshold differently - in the US, a driving test takes 20 minutes and everyone passes, while in the UK it takes 40 minutes and most people fail the first time. And lo and behold, 4 times fewer accidents per capita in the UK - despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.
- jm__87 5y ago
  I guess I didn't ask the right question here. My issue is with the statement "the vast majority of accidents are due to bad policy". I would disagree with this statement. Some people occasionally make bad decisions when they drive or get distracted and cause accidents. How do you create a policy to keep people from occasionally getting distracted or making a risky choice. You can't. Most people who are driving in a risky manner know how to drive safely, know that their behavior is not appropriate and they do it anyway because they don't care or think they can get away with it. Almost every person I have met who is a bad driver says something like "it's a risk I'm willing to take" or "I know the risks" without any thought about the fact that their behavior is putting others at risk as well. The only thing that usually changes these people's behavior is getting in an accident, at which point you just hope they didn't injure someone else too badly. Even then, I know of people who have been in accidents who still drive horribly. I'm convinced the problems are more cultural than anything else.
  - username90 5y ago
    So you are saying Americans are just worse drivers? America has more car accidents per capita than similarly dense countries with different policies. One policy is to make public transit better, that reduces accidents a lot since it gets people off the roads. Another policy is stricter tests as talked about above. The end result is way less accidents entirely thanks to policies.
  - lmm 5y ago
    People are people everywhere, I'm sure plenty of drivers in e.g. Sweden get distracted or make bad choices - indeed Swedish road design policy is that road design should explicitly accommodate that. "Culture" is a lazy non-explanation, and wouldn't explain why e.g. the Netherlands had similarly high collision rates in the 1970s, but now doesn't - not because their culture is less American now (at least, I can't see how such a claim is at all defensible), but because of deliberate policy changes. You can't prevent all distraction or all bad choices, but you can reduce collision rates by at least a factor of 20 or so with the right policy choices - we know because these other countries have done it. So I think it's fair to say that the majority of collisions are caused by not making those policy choices.
jl6 5y ago
I do sometimes wonder why Americans learn how to drive before they learn how to drink.
kmeisthax 5y ago
Increase the testing requirements for new drivers to make it harder to get a license, for starters. Or make it easier to suspend people's licenses for acts of unsafe driving. America has extremely low requirements to get licensed as a driver; this is intentional. We wanted everyone out of public transit and into cars. In other countries it's far more difficult to get licensed to drive, you're expected to have more skills. Hell, most drivers in Europe drive stick because you're required to test on a manual transmission.
cutemonster 5y ago
Middle of the road separation barriers. Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads. Roundabouts instead of crossings and traffic lights. (Roundabouts force the drivers to slow down. And on average, saves time I think) More trains, buses, subways.
- u801e 5y ago
  > Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads. That actually leads to more collisions at intersections. The reason that sidewalks work for pedestrians is because they move at walking speed. That means its easy for drivers to see them approaching an intersection (since they're a short distance away). Cyclists, on the other hand, move far faster than a walking pedestrian and can be much further away from the intersection where a motorist isn't looking and still can end up in a collision. The best policy is to have cyclists integrate with vehicular traffic, because cyclists are vehicles, just like motorcyclists.
  - telchar 5y ago
    Cycles can't as a general rule keep up with cars, unlike motorcycles. There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway. Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've seen some designs that make sense - it's rather interesting actually what nuances go into safe intersection design. I don't have any links available offhand though.
    - u801e 5y ago
      > There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway. Roads can accommodate traffic moving at different speeds. For example, buses and trucks consistently move slower than passenger vehicles, especially up grades, but drivers of faster vehicles simply change lanes to pass them. This works on interstates where drivers of passenger vehicles are going 70 to 90 mph and commercial vehicles are going 40 to 60 mph. Similarly, on a surface street with traffic moving anywhere from 0 to 40 mph, cyclists moving 0 to 20 mph can similarly integrate with traffic with faster drivers changing lanes to pass them. > Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've read about the designs, but the assumptions that they make do not really hold. For example, the typical "protected" intersection with curb extensions and an offset assumes that a motorist will look down the bike path to check for cyclists before exiting an intersection while moving at 10 mph. In reality, drivers aren't going to do that. As I noted earlier, this principle works with pedestrians, because, while walking, they're moving around 5 feet per second, so seeing a pedestrian 10 feet away from the intersection is pretty easy for a driver making a turn since they really don't have to look down the sidewalk. In contrast, a cyclist is moving anywhere from 15 to 30 feet per second. A cyclist that's two seconds away from entering an intersection can be anywhere from 30 to 60 feet away. This requires a drivers to actually look down the bike path, which isn't always going to occur. The cyclist may assume that the turning driver has seen them, but that assumption is in correct, and the cyclist will have to slow rapidly to avoid a collision. Also, a lot of cyclists, when making use of such infrastructure, believe that they have pedestrian style right of way, meaning that they will do things like ride around the front of a turning vehicle believing that they'll stop to avoid a collision instead of just yielding. A typical person takes about a second or so to react to something unexpected. At 10 mph, the motorist has already covered 16 feet, meaning that they would collide with a cyclist before they have a chance to even press the brake pedal.
munificent 5y ago
Public transit and grade-separated bike lanes.

What policy change could possibly be made to make people better drivers?

by jm__87 5y ago

What policy change could possibly be made to make people better drivers?

Take care driving as serious as aviation. Mandatory dash cams to make it easier to assign blame, automatic sensors which alert police when they detect the driver is behaving erratically. Make it easy to report other drivers for bad behavior (sitting on someone else's bumper, brake checking them, cutting them off, jersey lane swapping) which results in mandatory training or points off their license.

jm__87 5y ago
This is the only response I have seen to my question that could maybe change things - specifically having automatic sensors in every vehicle that automatically alert police when you do something dangerous. I think this would be unrealistic to implement, but assuming you could, it would probably help (assuming sensor data could be used as proof of bad driving). As for reporting bad driving, you really need proof of a person's bad driving if you're going to penalize them for it. Having more traffic cameras helps a bit, but people just learn where the cameras are and drive carefully when they know they are being filmed.

lmm 5y ago

Stricter driving tests is the obvious one.

dagw 5y ago

Much stricter requirements for getting (and keeping) your drivers license. Policies focusing on reducing drunk driving (both focusing changing attitudes, increasing the risk of getting caught and increasing the punishments for people caught). More consistent and continuous enforcement of existing driving laws. You can probably do more to get unsafe cars off the roads. There is a lot you can do around designing roads and traffic flows in ways that reduce the risk of accidents.

bsanr2 5y ago

I imagine there are several. American driver education and testing are notoriously lax compared to much of the world; make driver testing more intensive and frequent. Traffic enforcement is geared more towards municipal income generation and the facilitating of searches and arrests for other crimes than toward ensuring safe driving; stop pulling over poor people to search for drugs and start photographing and billing middle class and rich people for speeding or for idling in the middle/passing lane. Car manufacturers jack up the price on critical safety features and make it difficult to retrofit them into existing vehicles; regulate them. Our roadways are often designed poorly, mixing use cases in ways that result in unnecessary injury (e.g., "stroads" and intersections with poor pedestrian design); regulate and fix those.

frosted-flakes 5y ago
What's a stroad?
- krapp 5y ago
  A combination between a street and a road. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-07/defining-the-worst-type-of-street-design https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-07/defining-...
- exsuicidalthrwy 5y ago
  I tried writing an answer, realized I suck at that, and so am providing a link that answers the question better than I can: https://www.bikede.org/2011/11/28/we-have-too-many-stroads/ https://www.bikede.org/2011/11/28/we-have-too-many-stroads/ The takeaway is that streets and roads have different goals, and when that's not acknowledged we wind up with the misery that is driving in US towns.

dTal 5y ago

Your tone suggests you can't imagine any, which is... surprising. There are a vast array of things you can do to make driving safer, at the cost of making it less accessible and/or more expensive. Different countries already set their threshold differently - in the US, a driving test takes 20 minutes and everyone passes, while in the UK it takes 40 minutes and most people fail the first time. And lo and behold, 4 times fewer accidents per capita in the UK - despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.

jm__87 5y ago
I guess I didn't ask the right question here. My issue is with the statement "the vast majority of accidents are due to bad policy". I would disagree with this statement. Some people occasionally make bad decisions when they drive or get distracted and cause accidents. How do you create a policy to keep people from occasionally getting distracted or making a risky choice. You can't. Most people who are driving in a risky manner know how to drive safely, know that their behavior is not appropriate and they do it anyway because they don't care or think they can get away with it. Almost every person I have met who is a bad driver says something like "it's a risk I'm willing to take" or "I know the risks" without any thought about the fact that their behavior is putting others at risk as well. The only thing that usually changes these people's behavior is getting in an accident, at which point you just hope they didn't injure someone else too badly. Even then, I know of people who have been in accidents who still drive horribly. I'm convinced the problems are more cultural than anything else.
- username90 5y ago
  So you are saying Americans are just worse drivers? America has more car accidents per capita than similarly dense countries with different policies. One policy is to make public transit better, that reduces accidents a lot since it gets people off the roads. Another policy is stricter tests as talked about above. The end result is way less accidents entirely thanks to policies.
- lmm 5y ago
  People are people everywhere, I'm sure plenty of drivers in e.g. Sweden get distracted or make bad choices - indeed Swedish road design policy is that road design should explicitly accommodate that. "Culture" is a lazy non-explanation, and wouldn't explain why e.g. the Netherlands had similarly high collision rates in the 1970s, but now doesn't - not because their culture is less American now (at least, I can't see how such a claim is at all defensible), but because of deliberate policy changes. You can't prevent all distraction or all bad choices, but you can reduce collision rates by at least a factor of 20 or so with the right policy choices - we know because these other countries have done it. So I think it's fair to say that the majority of collisions are caused by not making those policy choices.

jl6 5y ago

I do sometimes wonder why Americans learn how to drive before they learn how to drink.

kmeisthax 5y ago

Increase the testing requirements for new drivers to make it harder to get a license, for starters. Or make it easier to suspend people's licenses for acts of unsafe driving. America has extremely low requirements to get licensed as a driver; this is intentional. We wanted everyone out of public transit and into cars. In other countries it's far more difficult to get licensed to drive, you're expected to have more skills. Hell, most drivers in Europe drive stick because you're required to test on a manual transmission.

cutemonster 5y ago

Middle of the road separation barriers. Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads. Roundabouts instead of crossings and traffic lights. (Roundabouts force the drivers to slow down. And on average, saves time I think) More trains, buses, subways.

u801e 5y ago
> Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads. That actually leads to more collisions at intersections. The reason that sidewalks work for pedestrians is because they move at walking speed. That means its easy for drivers to see them approaching an intersection (since they're a short distance away). Cyclists, on the other hand, move far faster than a walking pedestrian and can be much further away from the intersection where a motorist isn't looking and still can end up in a collision. The best policy is to have cyclists integrate with vehicular traffic, because cyclists are vehicles, just like motorcyclists.
- telchar 5y ago
  Cycles can't as a general rule keep up with cars, unlike motorcycles. There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway. Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've seen some designs that make sense - it's rather interesting actually what nuances go into safe intersection design. I don't have any links available offhand though.
  - u801e 5y ago
    > There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway. Roads can accommodate traffic moving at different speeds. For example, buses and trucks consistently move slower than passenger vehicles, especially up grades, but drivers of faster vehicles simply change lanes to pass them. This works on interstates where drivers of passenger vehicles are going 70 to 90 mph and commercial vehicles are going 40 to 60 mph. Similarly, on a surface street with traffic moving anywhere from 0 to 40 mph, cyclists moving 0 to 20 mph can similarly integrate with traffic with faster drivers changing lanes to pass them. > Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've read about the designs, but the assumptions that they make do not really hold. For example, the typical "protected" intersection with curb extensions and an offset assumes that a motorist will look down the bike path to check for cyclists before exiting an intersection while moving at 10 mph. In reality, drivers aren't going to do that. As I noted earlier, this principle works with pedestrians, because, while walking, they're moving around 5 feet per second, so seeing a pedestrian 10 feet away from the intersection is pretty easy for a driver making a turn since they really don't have to look down the sidewalk. In contrast, a cyclist is moving anywhere from 15 to 30 feet per second. A cyclist that's two seconds away from entering an intersection can be anywhere from 30 to 60 feet away. This requires a drivers to actually look down the bike path, which isn't always going to occur. The cyclist may assume that the turning driver has seen them, but that assumption is in correct, and the cyclist will have to slow rapidly to avoid a collision. Also, a lot of cyclists, when making use of such infrastructure, believe that they have pedestrian style right of way, meaning that they will do things like ride around the front of a turning vehicle believing that they'll stop to avoid a collision instead of just yielding. A typical person takes about a second or so to react to something unexpected. At 10 mph, the motorist has already covered 16 feet, meaning that they would collide with a cyclist before they have a chance to even press the brake pedal.

munificent 5y ago

Public transit and grade-separated bike lanes.