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The NTSB actually does investigate car crashes. Typically police do the actual footwork but if the cause is unknown NTSB agents will put boots on the ground. Un
by elil17 4y ago
The NTSB actually does investigate car crashes. Typically police do the actual footwork but if the cause is unknown NTSB agents will put boots on the ground. Unfortunately most of the causes are shared across many cases (speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving), so the cases end up getting lumped together into reports which can include tens of thousands of cases.
However, they are performing root cause analysis. For distracted driving, for example, they break it down into distractions by other occupants, distractions by moving object inside vehicle (such as a fly), cell phone use (with hands), cell phone use (no hands), using component integral to vehicle (climate or audio), using component integral to vehicle (other), smoking, and many more.
The problem is that decision makers don't do anything about it.
- kiba 4y agoThere's just more opportunities for things to go wrong when you give million of people across all walk of life the ability to control deadly vehicles and forced them to do it as a matter of daily routine. In contrast, public mass transit just have less things that can go home. Trains can be really safe if we wanted it to be.
- chociej 4y agoI think Strong Towns would suggest they should include the infrastructure involved as a point to analyze when determining root cause. For example, if a driver was speeding, could the street or road have been built in a way that better discouraged speeding?
- flaque 4y agoHuman error isn’t a root cause. Why were they able to speed on that road? Why did they feel safe being on their phone? Every software engineer understands intrinsically that blaming the user does not improve outcomes. You cannot get folks to click the right button by putting “you must click the right button” into the terms of service, and then suing the users who click the wrong one.
- kortilla 4y agoYes it is. In many scenarios outside of software, things have already been optimized to a point where the human cannot be removed much further or the safety can’t be improved without violating some other constraint. > Why were they able to speed on that road? Every road can be sped on, especially if you’re going to crash. > Why did they feel safe being on their phone? They didn’t, but it was “an urgent reply”.
- elil17 4y agoThere is a lot the US could be doing to make roads psychologically harder to speed on. Narrow, winding roads, for instance, make people uncomfortable with speeding. Other countries use this for traffic calming. The NTSB does advocate for design that prioritizes traffic calming.