6 ms·

Unless the people in the other car are in a big car as well.

• woodruffw 4y ago
  Where does that leave pedestrians and cyclists?
  • jrockway 4y ago
    As a fine paste, and a footnote in the newspaper "he should have been wearing a helmet" or "he was found with a phone". You want victim blaming in the US? Be a pedestrian or cyclist.
    • WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
      This can be fixed easily... divide the safety rating by the number of (thousand) pounds a vehicle has. No more juicing your safety rating by adding more mass.
      • bobthepanda 4y ago
        I mean, we could just do what Europe does and also include a pedestrian safety test in the safety rating. The issue is that the US still hasn’t done it.
        • sidewndr46 4y ago
          The US is of the opinion that the safest place for pedestrians is in cars.
        • hedora 4y ago
          Well, Obama mandated pedestrian safety be included, then Trump blocked the change. Finally (hopefully) congress forced it through as part of the infrastructure spending bill: https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-soon-focus-on-pedestrian-safety-too https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-so...
        • jrockway 4y ago
          I'm not sure people care what the result of the test is, if it costs them money or a feature they want more. That's just how Americans are. I will say that people seem to put up with emissions standards, so it wouldn't be unthinkable to add some standards that improve the safety of other road users. But as the other comments mention, it's a hard sell; most Americans think the people on the sidewalk or on bikes should be driving instead.
          • bobthepanda 4y ago
            I mean, if people didn’t care, car commercials wouldn’t tout “5-star safety ratings” as a feature.
            • jrockway 4y ago
              Well, the safety features are for the purchaser in that case. If you let your cat drive and he goes off a cliff, you survive. That's worth an extra $1000! We're talking about a new thing; safety for people other than the people in the car. That's what the original article is about; people buy heavy cars so that they are more likely to survive the accident than whoever they hit.
              • iggldiggl 4y ago
                Probably the idea is to somewhat sneak that in through the back door, i.e. hope that car manufacturers would be too embarrassed to advertise with a bad crash test result, even if the bad result was "only" due to lack of pedestrian safety.
                • bobthepanda 4y ago
                  Right. If even one car model gets changed as a result of this, that would already represent a possible decrease in deaths. It doesn't have to be a total, dominating success to be a net positive. I wouldn’t even really call it a backdoor. The equivalent European and Australian tests already have this, and they have not seen our recent uptick in deaths.
      • jrockway 4y ago
        A lot of danger to pedestrians and cyclists actually comes from the design of the car. It's currently cool to have like some sort of livestock-rammer over your front bumper that just crushes pedestrians instead of sending them up over the hood. People don't have those for safety, they just think it looks cool. We should really make those illegal on city streets. (If you drive a pickup truck out on your farm, this doesn't apply, I can see the legitimacy of that sort of vehicle choice and that sort of mod. It's for actual productivity, not style.) Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car. The big problem is that driving isn't just for rich people. It's a lifeline for the poorest Americans that have no choice but to trade free time for commuting time to be able to afford to live. So if we mandate expensive safety features, it's just a tax on the poor. People might be willing to pay the tax to save their own bacon, but they certainly aren't going to do it to save some random person riding their bike to work. That's why we have to dramatically rethink how we build our cities and suburbs. Things like electric cars to combat climate change are a distraction from the real issues. Fossil fuels aren't smashing pedestrians, dividing our cities into unliveable neighborhoods with 20 lane freeways, or mandating 1 parking space for every person in a 10,000 person office building. That's just cars, and electric cars fix none of it. The good news is, it looks like all the suburbs built in the 50s are due for things like water main replacement, street replacement, sewer replacement, etc. and nobody can afford it. So we'll have a chance to densify and cut cars out of our culture for good. Until then, hide your children and hide your wives, so that people can freely rampage through your neighborhood on their way to a meeting they're already 20 minutes late for. In a carbon-sensitive way, of course.
        • Swizec 4y ago
          > Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car The Euro NCAP rating has been evaluating pedestrian safety for some 20 years now. That’s why all modern cars have tall fat noses – it distributes load across more of a person’s body and reduces injury rates. Fifth Gear did a great segment about this in the early 2000’s where they found it’s better to be hit by a 4x4 (term SUV didnt’ exist yet) than by a sedan. https://www.euroncap.com/en/for-engineers/protocols/vulnerable-road-user-vru-protection/ https://www.euroncap.com/en/for-engineers/protocols/vulnerab... The American NHTSA is starting to add pedestrian safety ratings as well. https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-soon-focus-on-pedestrian-safety-too https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-so...
      • rtpg 4y ago
        Other fun fixes: tax by the weight of a car. Disallow individual purchases of vehicles where the dashboard is over 6 feet off the ground (yes, some people would make an LLC just to buy the giant car. It would stop a lot of it). Place a price cap on cars! My favorite pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing: force cars to be ugly as sin. Would help with the huge cars, but also has a nice side effect of getting rid of sports car drivers as well.
        • catiopatio 4y ago
          Comments like this make me think we should have a “speech tax”, online comment licensing requirements, and a real-name mandate. My favorite “pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing”: force anyone advocating for this kind of petty authoritarianism (my sardonic comment included) to wear a neon pink t-shirt in public, labeled, front and back, with “I tried to be a little dictator on the internet and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”
          • rtpg 4y ago
            Yeah, clearly my comment about making all cars ugly is a serious policy proposal that I have any power to enact, instead of me just venting about driving skills and safety. Sports car driver isn't a protected class Everyone can act like piloting a multi-ton machine through city centers is their god given right, but I like thinking about the alternate universe (and hell, the _actually existing universe_ in many places in the world) where people can feel safe, even if it means that city driving is a slog.
      • hedora 4y ago
        They already effectively do this by having laxer standards for passenger safety ratings for smaller cars.
  • adolph 4y ago
    Depends on if you’d rather death over disfunctionally maimed or comatose. Even a without a vehicle, human bodies interacting with a velocity difference of 35 or so is not pleasant.
    • jrockway 4y ago
      Yup, and approximately 0 people would die if we made the speed limit on city streets 15mph. Give the bikes going 18mph a speeding ticket too, that doesn't even make me mad. Remember that the average speed in Manhattan is less than 5 mph. There is little to be gained in travel time by careening down neighborhood streets.
      • adolph 4y ago
        I'd be less sanguine about the potential reduction in death. It'd be interesting to see the stats in terms of distance from home to freeway, and freeway to destination and get the change in commute time compared to deaths occurring between those segments. If you live 10m from a freeway, then at 35mph just over 15m is ok. At 5mph 2 hours seems less than acceptable. I can be math-dumb, so it wouldn't be surprising if I'm way off. (10/35)*60 = 17 (10/5)*60 = 120 Even at just 2m away the difference in commute is substantial. (2/35)*60 = 3.4 (2/5)*60 = 24.0
        • jrockway 4y ago
          Just as a sample, I used to have a 3.5 mile commute in NYC. It's about 45 minutes by walking, 25 minutes by bike (google maps says 15 minutes, I never did it that fast), 12 minutes by subway, or 19 minutes by driving. That's with current speed limits. New York City is so clogged with traffic that walking is actually competitive with driving, and biking would be faster than driving currently if the traffic lights weren't timed for an imaginary 25-35mph speed limit (that is never achieved). Out in the suburbs, the distances are long and speed does matter. That makes the situation very tough; 15mph speed limits are going to severely devalue your real estate investment. I really have no answer for a sane transition here, and that's a big problem American society faces. (On the other hand, the ocean consuming New York City is going to severely devalue real estate investments, too.)
  • catiopatio 4y ago
  • starkd 4y ago
    Is it any better for a pedestrian or cyclist to get hit by a Ford 150 or a volkswagon? The outcome is bad either way. Collision avoidance would be better than the lesser of two outcomes.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      > Collision avoidance would be better than the lesser of two outcomes. We could ensure collision avoidance by banning cars from cities! But that's presumably not what you meant. Yes, it is much better (although certainly not good) to be hit by a small VW than it is to be hit by a pickup truck. European safety standards reflect this fact; the US's standards should as well.
• pshc 4y ago
  In that case we’ll have to get an even bigger car to be safe. And now we all live in monster truck land.