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>"One reason might be a culture of toxic individualism that reduces almost any systemic problem, from sexual harassment to health care, to so-called isolated in

>"One reason might be a culture of toxic individualism that reduces almost any systemic problem, from sexual harassment to health care, to so-called isolated incidents. In the context of cars, we tend not to blame public infrastructure, but individual drivers, says Steve Davis, an assistant vice president of transportation strategy at Smart Growth America, an advocacy group for safe communities." Toxic individualism? Yes, I often do blame individual drivers. I blame those who text and drive, the lead-foots, the people who don't use their turn signals, et cetera. There are certainly poorly designed roadways and interchanges but let's not pretend the vast majority of our roads are literal deathtraps. >“It’s usually not reckless driving that causes accidents,” Davis says, “but everyday driving that we all do.” Citation needed, big time. Pretty sure a lot of "everyday driving" can be categorized as "reckless". The insinuation is that driving at all is dangerous.

kesselvon 5y ago
If every day driving is reckless, then it means the system is not designed for safety. Taking out systematic issues that cause bad driving is proving the point. Just like how the spike in pedestrian deaths is caused by an individualistic arms race between drivers as to who can have the biggest, heaviest vehicle.
- 8eye 5y ago
  you nailed it, i just got done posting a reply to this article and refreshed the page and saw the truth of the matter. we are as a collective society are not thinking about safety in the right light. a lot of it has to do with an old outdated ideology of “doggie dog world” which reeks of scarcity
  - cozzyd 5y ago
    Not that it takes anything from your point, but the idiom as I've heard is "dog-eat-dog world"
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    The US is stuck in a scarcity mindset in a lot of things IMO. It worked fantastically when materials/technology was actually scarce in the world. Now that mechanization and automation have made so many of these things not-scarce, the US is having a hard time removing the rent-seekers and individualist-affordances that cropped up during the times of scarcity. Car safety culture is just one aspect of that.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"If every day driving is reckless, then it means the system is not designed for safety." I don't think everyday driving is reckless. I just see a lot of drivers doing things they should not be doing - and this is not the fault of the civil engineers. These drivers are breaking the law by texting and driving, speeding, not using turn signals, and changing lanes when they shouldn't. I'm challenging the categorization that everyday driving is worse than reckless driving, as the article implies. Our roadways are designed for safety and for various degrees of safety. You could say a particular stretch of road is not safe enough, but it would be wrong to say civil engineers are blasé about safety. There is no way to make a totally safe road because there is no way to engineer a totally safe anything.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    ...Our roadways are designed for safety... They are designed for the safety of the cars that use them. There is often nothing safe about how they are designed with respect to pedestrians (who are frequently ignored completely). There are many things we could do to minimize accidents in specific circumstances. In residential zones, narrower, tree-lined roads tend to reduce average speed. Continuous sidewalks change the dynamic from "pedestrian crossing road" to "car crossing sidewalk".
  - kesselvon 5y ago
    You have to zoom out and see if there's a systematic trend, it means the system isn't working. Just like a huge student debt load is the responsibility of one person, but a national student debt load of $1.7t is a systemic failure. If one outcome is occurring across a large data set, it means the cause can be both systemic and individualistic.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
There's a misunderstanding here that's rooted in how we view "accidents". I think Sidney Dekker explains this well, so paraphrasing from the preface of his Field Guide to Understanding Human Error: > So you are faced with a human error problem. What do you do? * You can see human error as the cause of a mishap. In this case, "human error" is the end of your investigation and understanding. * You can see human error as the symptom of deeper troubles. You will look into how human error is systematically connected to people's tools, tasks, and environment. You're working under the former, the "old view" of human error. This article, and most of people working in safety nowadays, try to work in the latter, "new view" by understanding the entire systems that lead to human error.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
You're right that our streets are designed to encourage dangerous driving, and therefore the planners should bear at least as much blame as the individual drivers. But they are designed that way because of toxic individualism. This is a country run by people who heard Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" speech and agreed with it.
atoav 5y ago
I lived for a few years next to a big road in one of the bigger German cities as a student and suffered a lot from the noise and polution. In European cities you can get around pretty much without a car (in fact you will be often faster with the bicycle or public transport). One day I took the effort to just check who sat in the car. It was 95% one person in a 5 seater car. The few vehicles with more than one person were Vans with 2-3 workers in front. Driving alone with 2x5 meters into a city with limited space is — ultimately — a very egoistic act.

kesselvon 5y ago

If every day driving is reckless, then it means the system is not designed for safety. Taking out systematic issues that cause bad driving is proving the point. Just like how the spike in pedestrian deaths is caused by an individualistic arms race between drivers as to who can have the biggest, heaviest vehicle.

8eye 5y ago
you nailed it, i just got done posting a reply to this article and refreshed the page and saw the truth of the matter. we are as a collective society are not thinking about safety in the right light. a lot of it has to do with an old outdated ideology of “doggie dog world” which reeks of scarcity
- cozzyd 5y ago
  Not that it takes anything from your point, but the idiom as I've heard is "dog-eat-dog world"
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  The US is stuck in a scarcity mindset in a lot of things IMO. It worked fantastically when materials/technology was actually scarce in the world. Now that mechanization and automation have made so many of these things not-scarce, the US is having a hard time removing the rent-seekers and individualist-affordances that cropped up during the times of scarcity. Car safety culture is just one aspect of that.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"If every day driving is reckless, then it means the system is not designed for safety." I don't think everyday driving is reckless. I just see a lot of drivers doing things they should not be doing - and this is not the fault of the civil engineers. These drivers are breaking the law by texting and driving, speeding, not using turn signals, and changing lanes when they shouldn't. I'm challenging the categorization that everyday driving is worse than reckless driving, as the article implies. Our roadways are designed for safety and for various degrees of safety. You could say a particular stretch of road is not safe enough, but it would be wrong to say civil engineers are blasé about safety. There is no way to make a totally safe road because there is no way to engineer a totally safe anything.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  ...Our roadways are designed for safety... They are designed for the safety of the cars that use them. There is often nothing safe about how they are designed with respect to pedestrians (who are frequently ignored completely). There are many things we could do to minimize accidents in specific circumstances. In residential zones, narrower, tree-lined roads tend to reduce average speed. Continuous sidewalks change the dynamic from "pedestrian crossing road" to "car crossing sidewalk".
- kesselvon 5y ago
  You have to zoom out and see if there's a systematic trend, it means the system isn't working. Just like a huge student debt load is the responsibility of one person, but a national student debt load of $1.7t is a systemic failure. If one outcome is occurring across a large data set, it means the cause can be both systemic and individualistic.

AlotOfReading 5y ago

There's a misunderstanding here that's rooted in how we view "accidents". I think Sidney Dekker explains this well, so paraphrasing from the preface of his Field Guide to Understanding Human Error: > So you are faced with a human error problem. What do you do? * You can see human error as the cause of a mishap. In this case, "human error" is the end of your investigation and understanding. * You can see human error as the symptom of deeper troubles. You will look into how human error is systematically connected to people's tools, tasks, and environment. You're working under the former, the "old view" of human error. This article, and most of people working in safety nowadays, try to work in the latter, "new view" by understanding the entire systems that lead to human error.

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

You're right that our streets are designed to encourage dangerous driving, and therefore the planners should bear at least as much blame as the individual drivers. But they are designed that way because of toxic individualism. This is a country run by people who heard Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" speech and agreed with it.

atoav 5y ago

I lived for a few years next to a big road in one of the bigger German cities as a student and suffered a lot from the noise and polution. In European cities you can get around pretty much without a car (in fact you will be often faster with the bicycle or public transport). One day I took the effort to just check who sat in the car. It was 95% one person in a 5 seater car. The few vehicles with more than one person were Vans with 2-3 workers in front. Driving alone with 2x5 meters into a city with limited space is — ultimately — a very egoistic act.