4 ms·
Even being a responsible driver you are still open to the edge case that you are going 45mph on a road that has a 45mph speed limit, doing nothing wrong, and a
by asdff 4y ago
Even being a responsible driver you are still open to the edge case that you are going 45mph on a road that has a 45mph speed limit, doing nothing wrong, and a child steps out into your lane. Larger, heavier vehicles basically guarantee a fatality at that speed. The event was entirely out of your hands, well within the random risks of these events while driving, but your choice of vehicle has now made it a much more dangerous situation when it didn't have to be so dangerous. Pedestrians are involved in a minority of auto accidents but a majority of fatal ones, so if your goals are to decrease the risk of death in the general sense every time you go out on the road, you'd do well to choose the lightest and most sloping faced vehicle available to you.
- frumper 4y agoTheir goal is to decrease the risk to their family.
- asdff 4y agoAnd by optimizing for the direct risk they are increasing the indirect risk by signalling to automakers and their government representatives that these are the vehicles they want to spend money on
- cdash 4y agoYeah, such is life. Solving this is the role government is supposed to play in a society.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hwntw 4y agoIt's basically a guaranteed fatality at 45mph in any weight of car - lots of towns/cities are even reducing their 30mph speed limits to 20mph for that reason. If anything, I'd suggest doing 45mph on a road where there's the possibility of a child walking into the road faster than you could respond is irresponsible. If you're going that fast in a built-up area, you should either have a good enough view of the sides of the road that you can see the hazard developing in good time to react/break (ie, you're tracking the pedestrians alongside the road a hundred metres ahead of you), or you should be slowing down to a more appropriate speed for when you're lacking situational awareness. I suspect this is a large part of the reasons that some countries (eg, the UK) have a hazard perception element to the driving test.