4 ms·

The fix is simple. Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. The EU does, and their cars kill less pedestrians. (They do a

The fix is simple. Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. The EU does, and their cars kill less pedestrians. (They do a bunch of other things too, like redesign roads with reducing pedestrian collisions as a goal, which we also do a poor job of tracking.) We will not get the results we are looking for until we start actually looking for them.

chitowneats 4y ago
You're right. But our cars didn't suddenly get worse during the last 3 years. The behavioral changes we're seeing in drivers since the pandemic are very, very concerning to me. We need more understanding of this phenomenon.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  This is the full press release the article is citing: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Full-Report22 https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli... It's worth noting that the trend has accelerated in the last three years but we are actually up over a much longer period of time. From 2009-2019 we erased the entire decline in pedestrian deaths from 1990: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? That is an obvious difference with Europe. Both have much worse pedestrian safety, especially the truck. The default vehicle for someone who needs to move tools, materials etc in Europe is not a truck but a van like a Ford Transit or Mercedes Sprinter. The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. Changing either of these will take years.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      > Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? I wouldn't be surprised if increasing numbers of SUVs and pickup trucks in the US is at least partly to blame for this. If you're hit by a sedan, you're likely to get thrown onto the hood, windshield, or roof of the car. If you're hit by an SUV or truck, you're much more likely to get dragged underneath, where you can get run over by the wheels. While neither situation is particularly fun, the latter is much more likely to result in death. > The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. It would also be interesting to be able to classify what was happening when the pedestrian died in data like this. Were they crossing the street and a car going perpendicular ran into them? Were they crossing the street, and a car turning from the parallel street ran into them? Or were they walking along a road without a sidewalk, and a passing car hit them? Agreed that the US has a lot of wide, multi-lane roads, and poor sidewalk coverage on many roads, but I don't expect that situation has changed (for worse or better) all that much in the past few years, in a way that would explain the surge of fatalities. But anyway, to explain the increase in fatalities, my money would be on smartphones: more people driving distracted, and more pedestrians walking around buried in their phones, having no idea what's going on around them. Another posters somewhere here pointed out that pedestrian fatalities have been rising steadily since their all-time low back in 2009, which roughly coincides with the rise of smartphone adoption.
      - FreeFull 4y ago
        A huge SUV also has way worse visibility lines than a sedan. If there is a child standing in front of the SUV, you simply won't be able to see them from inside the vehicle.
        Gibbon1 4y ago
        Airbags in the A pillars results in blind spots in the exact field of vision pedestrians tend to be in.
        gorbachev 4y ago
        There's also the fact that when there are more SUVs on the road, the visibility from all the other cars is drastically worse. When you park an Escalade at a street corner, everyone who's trying to cross that intersection is screwed. I really hope parking too close to an intersection was made illegal everywhere in the US like it is in some European countries.
- squokko 4y ago
  My guess: people disappeared completely into their phones during the pandemic and are continuing to use them while driving
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    it's incredible to me how laxly we treat driving multi-ton vehicles at high speeds. you'd think operating such beasts would be something for which a real license and strict guidelines were put in place, instead it's just treated as a more complicated form of taking a stroll around. see what running the equivalent of a red light does to you as a train operator or airplane pilot. in a car? who gives a crap lol! and let's not even touch upon maintenance...
  - sundvor 4y ago
    And walking.
  - meltyness 4y ago
    Definitely the rule these days that any other driver doing something stupid is usually staring at their crotch, cupholder, or dashboard.
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  I agree, I don't know what you notice where you are but where I am it's a bizarre passive aggressiveness - passive almost to the point of aloof. Cars either go 20mph over the speed limit, or float exactly at or some degree under it. They can also change this behavior at any time making passing or generally being anywhere near them dangerous. People also seem to have no qualms stopping in the middle of the road to make an exit or turn. Anyway, driving feels more dangerous the last couple years. Also, I wonder if cars haven't changed but the number of beast-mobiles gone up? I drive a car and most trucks these days look like they'd kill me instantly and they drive like they wouldn't mind.
- fooblaster 4y ago
  I think there's a convincing argument that trucks are getting significantly more lethal in recent years. https://news.yahoo.com/americas-cars-trucks-getting-bigger-142023779.html https://news.yahoo.com/americas-cars-trucks-getting-bigger-1... https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-dangers-of-big-trucks/ https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-danger...
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  The reason for the behavioral change is that police stopped doing traffic stops during the pandemic and had already "quiet quit" in response to movements toward greater police accountability, and now people know they can now get away with almost anything. I cannot remember the last time I saw a police officer pulling someone over, either around town or on the highway. I was rear-ended by a guy who was clearly looking at his phone and the cop refused to write a ticket despite him rear-ending me at a stoplight that I had been waiting at for over half a minute. Cops are a legal gang and we cannot have police reform fast enough, starting with federal minimum standards for fitness, education, training, and on-the-job apprenticing/mentoring. In huge swaths of the US, all you need to be a cop is to pass a background check, have a pulse, and be young enough.
  - switch007 4y ago
    And at the same time if you fall in to a certain bubble on social media (eg TikTok) you could be convinced that there are police pulling someone over every 5 seconds in every city. We need good stats on the topic I do feel the same way as you though. Running red lights, for example, has, at least in my experience, increased massively the past few years (UK)
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > The reason for the behavioral change is that police stopped doing traffic stops during the pandemic I suspect there isn't just one cause, but I did see that several states have stopped requiring new drivers to take a road test. Teens who wouldn't have passed a drivers test, cell phones, higher than normal stress/anxiety/frustration, grief, and an increase in walkers may also have played a role .
- occz 4y ago
  U.S roads are designed in a fundamentally unsafe way (stroads in particular). In particular, the design speed of these roads are generally too high for their intended use, leading to high-speed collisions. However, on account of the inefficiency inherent in car-oriented infrastructure, these roads were often congested to the point of reducing the speed to less unsafe levels. The pandemic reduced the amount of vehicles on the road, leading to the vehicles left on the road being able to hit the unsafe design speeds again, leading to the worrying trend that we are seeing.
nradov 4y ago
The IIHS is looking for results. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-sedan/2023#front-crash-prevention-vehicle-to-pedestrian-day https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-se...
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  That is a test of collision avoidance. It does not test what actually happens in the event that a collision cannot be avoided, and the car hits the person anyways. It's also worth noting, the test only goes up to 37MPH, which is lower than common speed limits on arterial roads in suburban areas across the US. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-prevention-tests-2013-present https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-pre...
Retric 4y ago
That could help, but the article is ignores the obvious. US population growth rate 2019-2022 was quite low due to the pandemic the actual increase was 18% or ~500 people from 2019. Further, working from home changed the dynamics around driving presumably a great number of people got worse because they didn’t do it as much. The numbers of pedestrians may have also increased faster than population growth rate.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  500 additional people is a lot of people, considering that as recently as 2009 the annual death total was 4109 people. https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - Retric 4y ago
    That’s for the full year this is comparing six months worth of data, and 2009 was well outside the norms. I don’t mean to downplay deaths but looking at a few datapoints may not represent a trend. Economics, weather, etc vary from year to year.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      That chart shows a decline trend from 1990-2009, and then an increase every single year after that. It’s been 13 years, at which point do we call it a trend? Especially if you compare to peer nations which have not seen the upward trend: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...
      - 4y ago
bearmode 4y ago
Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses, and generally just having smaller cars helps a huge amount. A truck hits you, you're taking the impact to your chest or upper back. A small hatchback hits you, and it's hitting your legs.
- dncornholio 4y ago
  You know what helps a huge amount? Preventing trucks even hitting pedestrians. This is the EU strength. The core safety of EU traffic is the infra, not the cars. Lighter cars and better testing is just icing on the cake.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses Some states in the US stopped requiring new drivers to take a road test before being handed a license due to the pandemic. I imagine that meant a lot more people were driving who shouldn't be on the road.
fgededigo 4y ago
No, it's not simple. Changing most of a country car fleet, drastically reducing traffic, changing the infrastructure, changing the population mindset, overcome the cultural wars (this is the most important thing to change). From outside, it seems that this is part of the (new) US mythology. This is really difficult to change.
- eru 4y ago
  You don't need to do this overnight. You can change the rules for newly built (or refurbished) infrastructure only. Roads don't last forever, so if you change the rules now you'll have the pedestrian friendly infrastructure you want in 20 years, without need a big push. That's how the Dutch got (and are still getting) their infrastructure to be more human friendly.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Right - we're still building dangerous infrastructure today. Starting to do better now is better than the status quo. It's like that quote: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."
deleted 4y ago
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dncornholio 4y ago
Ha, if it only was this simple. The fact that EU has less traffic deaths is not because of testing, but because of the design of all the infrastructure and more importantly; culture. Yelling at pedestrians because they are walking a zebra crossing is something I cannot comprehend. Fix the infra! Get actual good designed roads that have dedicated lanes for pedestrians and cyclers. Ban cars in city centers.
- thanatos519 4y ago
  Absolutely this! Every time I visit North America, the car-centric everything strengthens my resolve to never move back there. In Canada, I once had a visitor from Denmark who was aghast at the amount of horn honking on the roads. In Denmark the horn is to be used only in an emergency, such as the imminent threat of collision. Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn (not sure about this, it was 30 years ago). Here in The Netherlands, as a pedestrian or as a cyclist, I am regularly politely annoyed with drivers who stop for me even though they have right-of-way! This has something to do with infrastructure design, but also with the fact that most everybody is a cyclist, and of course that in any accident involving a motor vehicle and a bicycle, the motorist is by law _at least_ 50% liable.
  - consp 4y ago
    > Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn Many countries have them either as part of the sound rules or separate rules (Since you live in NL, it's a separate offence a 95 euro). It used to be part of the rule standardization process but I'm not sure it still is. Somebody can correct me on that. The reason the cars stop is good since it provides more time for both drivers to get a grip of the situation and at worse limits the speed of an impact. Though due to cyclist speed increasing due to more electric bikes there is a discrepancy on older (as in more than 5 year old) cycling crossings, not all are designed for 20+kph speeds and it's hard for drivers to notice oncoming fast traffic which is in a bend (looking at you local roundabout with a hexagonal cycling path making it impossible to see cyclists further away than the section you can see due to sharp angles and larger distances created by the hexagon).
bob1029 4y ago
> Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. We should also look at the overall design of these damn things. Weight. Gigantic A-pillars (do we really need this many damn airbags?). Touch screens and horrible user interface design. Drive by wire removing all sense of physicality and risk (because you sure as hell don't want those new pickup truck drivers perceiving the true weight of their vehicles...). If it meant that my A-pillars could be 50% narrower, I would happily forego the protection afforded to me by those side impact airbags. In fact, if you could promise to reduce my vehicle's weight by 1000 lbs, I would forego all forms of driver-oriented protection. The tradeoffs we've made for the driver in the driver vs pedestrian game are extremely unfair in my estimation. I hate driving these "modern" vehicles.
- consp 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over and not airbags. My previous smaller car had the same airbags my new one (new ones a longer but just as narrow) has and had about half the width of the pillars, the new one is also twice as heavy (still light by US standards).
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - bob1029 4y ago
    > I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over Sounds like we are back to weight being the root evil here. Why do the cars need to weigh so much again? Are we dealing with circular reasoning at this point?
    - Retric 4y ago
      Batteries are really heavy as are high power ICE engines and drivetrain etc. The minimum weight for tires, suspension, exterior panels, frame, interior panels, seats etc isn’t that bad. But it gets worse the larger interior you want from simple scaling.
presentation 4y ago
Our cars kill people because our infrastructure is not made for human beings. The goal is not to make the cars soft and bouncy, it's to make them unnecessary.

chitowneats 4y ago

You're right. But our cars didn't suddenly get worse during the last 3 years. The behavioral changes we're seeing in drivers since the pandemic are very, very concerning to me. We need more understanding of this phenomenon.

bobthepanda 4y ago
This is the full press release the article is citing: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Full-Report22 https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli... It's worth noting that the trend has accelerated in the last three years but we are actually up over a much longer period of time. From 2009-2019 we erased the entire decline in pedestrian deaths from 1990: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
- Symbiote 4y ago
  Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? That is an obvious difference with Europe. Both have much worse pedestrian safety, especially the truck. The default vehicle for someone who needs to move tools, materials etc in Europe is not a truck but a van like a Ford Transit or Mercedes Sprinter. The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. Changing either of these will take years.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    > Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? I wouldn't be surprised if increasing numbers of SUVs and pickup trucks in the US is at least partly to blame for this. If you're hit by a sedan, you're likely to get thrown onto the hood, windshield, or roof of the car. If you're hit by an SUV or truck, you're much more likely to get dragged underneath, where you can get run over by the wheels. While neither situation is particularly fun, the latter is much more likely to result in death. > The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. It would also be interesting to be able to classify what was happening when the pedestrian died in data like this. Were they crossing the street and a car going perpendicular ran into them? Were they crossing the street, and a car turning from the parallel street ran into them? Or were they walking along a road without a sidewalk, and a passing car hit them? Agreed that the US has a lot of wide, multi-lane roads, and poor sidewalk coverage on many roads, but I don't expect that situation has changed (for worse or better) all that much in the past few years, in a way that would explain the surge of fatalities. But anyway, to explain the increase in fatalities, my money would be on smartphones: more people driving distracted, and more pedestrians walking around buried in their phones, having no idea what's going on around them. Another posters somewhere here pointed out that pedestrian fatalities have been rising steadily since their all-time low back in 2009, which roughly coincides with the rise of smartphone adoption.
    - FreeFull 4y ago
      A huge SUV also has way worse visibility lines than a sedan. If there is a child standing in front of the SUV, you simply won't be able to see them from inside the vehicle.
      - Gibbon1 4y ago
        Airbags in the A pillars results in blind spots in the exact field of vision pedestrians tend to be in.
      - gorbachev 4y ago
        There's also the fact that when there are more SUVs on the road, the visibility from all the other cars is drastically worse. When you park an Escalade at a street corner, everyone who's trying to cross that intersection is screwed. I really hope parking too close to an intersection was made illegal everywhere in the US like it is in some European countries.
squokko 4y ago
My guess: people disappeared completely into their phones during the pandemic and are continuing to use them while driving
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  it's incredible to me how laxly we treat driving multi-ton vehicles at high speeds. you'd think operating such beasts would be something for which a real license and strict guidelines were put in place, instead it's just treated as a more complicated form of taking a stroll around. see what running the equivalent of a red light does to you as a train operator or airplane pilot. in a car? who gives a crap lol! and let's not even touch upon maintenance...
- sundvor 4y ago
  And walking.
- meltyness 4y ago
  Definitely the rule these days that any other driver doing something stupid is usually staring at their crotch, cupholder, or dashboard.
libraryatnight 4y ago
I agree, I don't know what you notice where you are but where I am it's a bizarre passive aggressiveness - passive almost to the point of aloof. Cars either go 20mph over the speed limit, or float exactly at or some degree under it. They can also change this behavior at any time making passing or generally being anywhere near them dangerous. People also seem to have no qualms stopping in the middle of the road to make an exit or turn. Anyway, driving feels more dangerous the last couple years. Also, I wonder if cars haven't changed but the number of beast-mobiles gone up? I drive a car and most trucks these days look like they'd kill me instantly and they drive like they wouldn't mind.
fooblaster 4y ago
I think there's a convincing argument that trucks are getting significantly more lethal in recent years. https://news.yahoo.com/americas-cars-trucks-getting-bigger-142023779.html https://news.yahoo.com/americas-cars-trucks-getting-bigger-1... https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-dangers-of-big-trucks/ https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-danger...
KennyBlanken 4y ago
The reason for the behavioral change is that police stopped doing traffic stops during the pandemic and had already "quiet quit" in response to movements toward greater police accountability, and now people know they can now get away with almost anything. I cannot remember the last time I saw a police officer pulling someone over, either around town or on the highway. I was rear-ended by a guy who was clearly looking at his phone and the cop refused to write a ticket despite him rear-ending me at a stoplight that I had been waiting at for over half a minute. Cops are a legal gang and we cannot have police reform fast enough, starting with federal minimum standards for fitness, education, training, and on-the-job apprenticing/mentoring. In huge swaths of the US, all you need to be a cop is to pass a background check, have a pulse, and be young enough.
- switch007 4y ago
  And at the same time if you fall in to a certain bubble on social media (eg TikTok) you could be convinced that there are police pulling someone over every 5 seconds in every city. We need good stats on the topic I do feel the same way as you though. Running red lights, for example, has, at least in my experience, increased massively the past few years (UK)
- autoexec 4y ago
  > The reason for the behavioral change is that police stopped doing traffic stops during the pandemic I suspect there isn't just one cause, but I did see that several states have stopped requiring new drivers to take a road test. Teens who wouldn't have passed a drivers test, cell phones, higher than normal stress/anxiety/frustration, grief, and an increase in walkers may also have played a role .
occz 4y ago
U.S roads are designed in a fundamentally unsafe way (stroads in particular). In particular, the design speed of these roads are generally too high for their intended use, leading to high-speed collisions. However, on account of the inefficiency inherent in car-oriented infrastructure, these roads were often congested to the point of reducing the speed to less unsafe levels. The pandemic reduced the amount of vehicles on the road, leading to the vehicles left on the road being able to hit the unsafe design speeds again, leading to the worrying trend that we are seeing.

nradov 4y ago

The IIHS is looking for results. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-sedan/2023#front-crash-prevention-vehicle-to-pedestrian-day https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-se...

bobthepanda 4y ago
That is a test of collision avoidance. It does not test what actually happens in the event that a collision cannot be avoided, and the car hits the person anyways. It's also worth noting, the test only goes up to 37MPH, which is lower than common speed limits on arterial roads in suburban areas across the US. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-prevention-tests-2013-present https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-pre...

Retric 4y ago

That could help, but the article is ignores the obvious. US population growth rate 2019-2022 was quite low due to the pandemic the actual increase was 18% or ~500 people from 2019. Further, working from home changed the dynamics around driving presumably a great number of people got worse because they didn’t do it as much. The numbers of pedestrians may have also increased faster than population growth rate.

bobthepanda 4y ago
500 additional people is a lot of people, considering that as recently as 2009 the annual death total was 4109 people. https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- Retric 4y ago
  That’s for the full year this is comparing six months worth of data, and 2009 was well outside the norms. I don’t mean to downplay deaths but looking at a few datapoints may not represent a trend. Economics, weather, etc vary from year to year.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    That chart shows a decline trend from 1990-2009, and then an increase every single year after that. It’s been 13 years, at which point do we call it a trend? Especially if you compare to peer nations which have not seen the upward trend: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...
    - 4y ago

bearmode 4y ago

Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses, and generally just having smaller cars helps a huge amount. A truck hits you, you're taking the impact to your chest or upper back. A small hatchback hits you, and it's hitting your legs.

dncornholio 4y ago
You know what helps a huge amount? Preventing trucks even hitting pedestrians. This is the EU strength. The core safety of EU traffic is the infra, not the cars. Lighter cars and better testing is just icing on the cake.
autoexec 4y ago
> Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses Some states in the US stopped requiring new drivers to take a road test before being handed a license due to the pandemic. I imagine that meant a lot more people were driving who shouldn't be on the road.

fgededigo 4y ago

No, it's not simple. Changing most of a country car fleet, drastically reducing traffic, changing the infrastructure, changing the population mindset, overcome the cultural wars (this is the most important thing to change). From outside, it seems that this is part of the (new) US mythology. This is really difficult to change.

eru 4y ago
You don't need to do this overnight. You can change the rules for newly built (or refurbished) infrastructure only. Roads don't last forever, so if you change the rules now you'll have the pedestrian friendly infrastructure you want in 20 years, without need a big push. That's how the Dutch got (and are still getting) their infrastructure to be more human friendly.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  Right - we're still building dangerous infrastructure today. Starting to do better now is better than the status quo. It's like that quote: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dncornholio 4y ago

Ha, if it only was this simple. The fact that EU has less traffic deaths is not because of testing, but because of the design of all the infrastructure and more importantly; culture. Yelling at pedestrians because they are walking a zebra crossing is something I cannot comprehend. Fix the infra! Get actual good designed roads that have dedicated lanes for pedestrians and cyclers. Ban cars in city centers.

thanatos519 4y ago
Absolutely this! Every time I visit North America, the car-centric everything strengthens my resolve to never move back there. In Canada, I once had a visitor from Denmark who was aghast at the amount of horn honking on the roads. In Denmark the horn is to be used only in an emergency, such as the imminent threat of collision. Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn (not sure about this, it was 30 years ago). Here in The Netherlands, as a pedestrian or as a cyclist, I am regularly politely annoyed with drivers who stop for me even though they have right-of-way! This has something to do with infrastructure design, but also with the fact that most everybody is a cyclist, and of course that in any accident involving a motor vehicle and a bicycle, the motorist is by law _at least_ 50% liable.
- consp 4y ago
  > Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn Many countries have them either as part of the sound rules or separate rules (Since you live in NL, it's a separate offence a 95 euro). It used to be part of the rule standardization process but I'm not sure it still is. Somebody can correct me on that. The reason the cars stop is good since it provides more time for both drivers to get a grip of the situation and at worse limits the speed of an impact. Though due to cyclist speed increasing due to more electric bikes there is a discrepancy on older (as in more than 5 year old) cycling crossings, not all are designed for 20+kph speeds and it's hard for drivers to notice oncoming fast traffic which is in a bend (looking at you local roundabout with a hexagonal cycling path making it impossible to see cyclists further away than the section you can see due to sharp angles and larger distances created by the hexagon).

bob1029 4y ago

> Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. We should also look at the overall design of these damn things. Weight. Gigantic A-pillars (do we really need this many damn airbags?). Touch screens and horrible user interface design. Drive by wire removing all sense of physicality and risk (because you sure as hell don't want those new pickup truck drivers perceiving the true weight of their vehicles...). If it meant that my A-pillars could be 50% narrower, I would happily forego the protection afforded to me by those side impact airbags. In fact, if you could promise to reduce my vehicle's weight by 1000 lbs, I would forego all forms of driver-oriented protection. The tradeoffs we've made for the driver in the driver vs pedestrian game are extremely unfair in my estimation. I hate driving these "modern" vehicles.

consp 4y ago
I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over and not airbags. My previous smaller car had the same airbags my new one (new ones a longer but just as narrow) has and had about half the width of the pillars, the new one is also twice as heavy (still light by US standards).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bob1029 4y ago
  > I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over Sounds like we are back to weight being the root evil here. Why do the cars need to weigh so much again? Are we dealing with circular reasoning at this point?
  - Retric 4y ago
    Batteries are really heavy as are high power ICE engines and drivetrain etc. The minimum weight for tires, suspension, exterior panels, frame, interior panels, seats etc isn’t that bad. But it gets worse the larger interior you want from simple scaling.

presentation 4y ago

Our cars kill people because our infrastructure is not made for human beings. The goal is not to make the cars soft and bouncy, it's to make them unnecessary.