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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

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 a lot of it has to do with an old outdated ideology of “doggie dog world” which reeks of scarcity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.

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.