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How quickly we forget history. Horses were also lethal. Look at the number of people killed by horses, either being thrown from them, trampled by them, or run

How quickly we forget history. Horses were also lethal. Look at the number of people killed by horses, either being thrown from them, trampled by them, or run over by carts pulled by horses. Streets were not some utopic garden of pedestrian safety prior to cars. There were no jaywalking rules because society had evolved over thousands of years being rather acceptive of horse-related dangers. When the new device came around, no matter its relative danger, then new regulations were needed. There were once almost zero regs regarding candles, objects that killed thousands almost daily by fire. But soon after electricity came along then we suddenly needed rules to manage the new "dangerous" thing despite its use preventing untold thousands of deaths.

swatcoder 3y ago
Actually, it wasn’t new technology — the 20th century saw a massive shift in expectations around health and safety and it reverberated through every part of life, regardless of whether new technology was involved. It had more to do with secular humanism almost fully supplanting diverse traditional value systems at the government level, and with capitalism’s insatiable hunger for living bodies that can produce and consume widgets.
akira2501 3y ago
Rephrasing the headline for honesty: "Automakers accept the responsibility for the thing they've created and attempt to improve safety outcomes in a patchwork regulatory environment dominated by gridlock and disagreement."
- Fricken 3y ago
  Quite the opposite. Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    Except for the speeding laws. And the red light/intersection/right-of-way laws. And the drunk driving laws. Those laws placed plenty of the responsibility on drivers.
    - _aavaa_ 3y ago
      But they did not make the cars inherently safer. A red light does not stop a driver from driving through a pedestrian crossing when people are there. Speeding laws do little for the bikers in unsegregated bike lanes, mere inches away from an inattentive driver.
      - wredue 3y ago
        Maybe I’m just thinking outside of the box here, but how exactly do 3,000 lbs pieces of metal and glass become safer for people crossing the street in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles? On segregated bike lanes, I’m afraid to tell you, cyclists don’t use them anyway, so why on earth should anyone focus on putting them in?
        alexanderchr 3y ago
        Oh cyclists do use segregated lanes, they just have to be done properly. Primarily they need to be safer than sharing the road with heavy vehicles, something that most bike lines spectacularly fail at.
        maest 3y ago
        > cyclists don’t use them anyway This claim is so ridiculous is invalidates everything else you might be trying to argue, come on.
        wredue 3y ago
        My dash cam filled with video of cyclists riding in a car lane beside a protected bike lane, and otherwise ignoring signage (stop and yield signs, signs stating road exceptions where bikes must use and share the sidewalk with pedestrians instead of the road) is definitely not ridiculous. Also hilariously “why do cyclists not use the bike lanes” is a top alternative question result when searching bike lanes. Clearly this is not some random anecdote. Cyclists frequently do not use the bike lanes, and I am absolutely not anywhere near the only person to observe this frequently. Never mind that: -Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself. -in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints -some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem.
  - drunner 3y ago
    Same with the oil industry and `reduce, reuse, recycle` nonsense. Like I wouldn't need to be concerned with that if your product didn't individually wrap every item I can purchase in a store.
    - talideon 3y ago
      Reduce, reuse, recycle isn't nonsense, but good sense. What is nonsense is how the fossil fuel industry uses it as a shield to avoid taking responsibility for the damage they do to the world.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    > Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive. We have roads. They are shared by all users and taxpayers for common purposes. The responsibilities are likewise shared. The available technology changed. We can't expect to force the prior status quo to continue to exist in the face of available technological changes. This article points out that attitudes like your similarly existed at the time and contributed to the apparent delay in creating a reasonable solution.
    - Fricken 3y ago
      Going whole hog with an unsustainable technology is not reasonable, never was.
      - akira2501 3y ago
        Okay.. so what if they skipped gasoline and built electric from the start? That's "sustainable" according to some modern definition. What should we have done then? Meanwhile.. take a look at the way life was 120 years ago. Are you eager to go back to the rural life of farm labor that implied for the majority of Americans?
        Fricken 3y ago
        Sounds better than going forward 120 years into the future at the rate we're going.
  - zelon88 3y ago
    I've noticed that people who don't drive usually don't have frame of reference of what cars are capable of, and usually don't understand all of the simultaneous requirements that must be fulfilled by drivers. So you get pedestrians who don't understand what the stopping distance of a car is, or pedestrians who don't recognize dangerous situations that they create. In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      > In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians. A great example of this is pedestrians in San Francisco. I've never seen more entitled oblivious assholes that pedestrians there. They seem to have no situational awareness and blithely jump out in front of cars. One of my favorite stupid pedestrian tricks is them jumping out from between parked cars crossing without so much as turning their heads to look for cars. Thankfully I don't have to deal with SF pedestrians very often. The city very obviously hates cars but is decidedly dependent on them existing. The pedestrians there act dumber than a deer in the rut.
      - zelon88 3y ago
        Cambridge/Boston is the same. Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed. These are not environmentally friendly alternatives. They are Chinesium E-waste with low quality batteries. They will be driven for one or two years then put in a closet and forgotten about. When they do get used they typically cause more greenhouse gasses from regular cars that have to yield to them, or stop busy intersections so they can cross. As an avid dirt bike rider it is especially frustrating because these are usually the same people (yuppies) who would call the police on me if I took my 17 year old 200cc dirt bike down the same trails.
        UtopiaPunk 3y ago
        "Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed." Wait, where is the place e-bikes should be in your opinion, then? At least where I live, the laws are quite clear which type of vehicles are allowed where. The laws here generally allow a pedal-assisted ebike to ride whereever a non-electric bicycle may ride. The pedal-assist is important. So yeah, you probably can't ride your motorbike down a pedestrian path ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tim333 3y ago
The UK has no jaywalking laws (apart from full motorways) and about 1/3 the pedestrian deaths of the US (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/10/exactly-how-far-u-s-street-safety-has-fallen-behind-europe-in-four-bombshell-charts https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/10/exactly-how-far-u-s-s...). There are other ways to do things.
- seanr88 3y ago
  No other country has anything to teach the USA. The USA is unique and special for a large number of reasons and so foreign methods won't work here. If I recall they even drive on the other side of the road in the UK, that will never catch on here.
  - alexfoo 3y ago
    You could phase it in slowly like Ireland did. Cars on a Monday. Lorries and HGVs switch on Wednesday. All remaining traffic on the Friday. Done!
    - talideon 3y ago
      Citation, please?
      - alexfoo 3y ago
        https://www.engineersireland.ie/Engineers-Journal/Civil/could-ireland-emulate-sweden-and-switch-to-driving-on-the-right https://www.engineersireland.ie/Engineers-Journal/Civil/coul... (Note that it was a follow up to patently satirical parent comment, but it does remind me that Sweden made the change on 3rd Sep 1967)
  - cfstras 3y ago
    is this satire? I honestly can’t tell.
    - talideon 3y ago
moritzwarhier 3y ago
I immediately thought of this as well (horse sleigh scene in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment comes to mind, I mean, neither of us has experience with horse-first transportation, I assume). I just arrived at a different conclusion. To compare the number of people killed by automobiles and their infrastructure, compared to the numbers for people killed by horses (I can't give precise numbers for either, I'll admit that) - that comparison seems absurd to me. In other words, relative to the population in urban areas, I'd be very surprised if horses causes as many deaths as cars+roads.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  You surely have to compare the rates per horse not per unit population.
  - moritzwarhier 3y ago
    depends, I don't think it's even possible to have as many horses on earth as there are automobiles :)
- Tade0 3y ago
  Well, the "village idiot" was usually one not because he was born this way and his parents cared for him until adulthood, but because he got kicked by a horse/cow and survived, albeit with brain damage.
turtlesdown11 3y ago
> There were once almost zero regs regarding candles, objects that killed thousands almost daily by fire. "killed thousands almost daily"...source for this?
- Tade0 3y ago
  A modern equivalent of this is the death toll from kerosene heaters/lamps, which are considerably safer than candles: https://www.hindustantimes.com/kolkata/two-west-bengal-toddlers-charred-to-death-in-fire-started-by-kerosene-lamp/story-ATGBkfTwSyN60nv6IVmY4M.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/kolkata/two-west-bengal-toddl...
inglor_cz 3y ago
One famous person who was killed by a horse cart was the Nobelist Pierre Curie. In 1906 no less, at the twilight of the long horse cart era.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

swatcoder 3y ago

Actually, it wasn’t new technology — the 20th century saw a massive shift in expectations around health and safety and it reverberated through every part of life, regardless of whether new technology was involved. It had more to do with secular humanism almost fully supplanting diverse traditional value systems at the government level, and with capitalism’s insatiable hunger for living bodies that can produce and consume widgets.

akira2501 3y ago

Rephrasing the headline for honesty: "Automakers accept the responsibility for the thing they've created and attempt to improve safety outcomes in a patchwork regulatory environment dominated by gridlock and disagreement."

Fricken 3y ago
Quite the opposite. Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Except for the speeding laws. And the red light/intersection/right-of-way laws. And the drunk driving laws. Those laws placed plenty of the responsibility on drivers.
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    But they did not make the cars inherently safer. A red light does not stop a driver from driving through a pedestrian crossing when people are there. Speeding laws do little for the bikers in unsegregated bike lanes, mere inches away from an inattentive driver.
    - wredue 3y ago
      Maybe I’m just thinking outside of the box here, but how exactly do 3,000 lbs pieces of metal and glass become safer for people crossing the street in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles? On segregated bike lanes, I’m afraid to tell you, cyclists don’t use them anyway, so why on earth should anyone focus on putting them in?
      - alexanderchr 3y ago
        Oh cyclists do use segregated lanes, they just have to be done properly. Primarily they need to be safer than sharing the road with heavy vehicles, something that most bike lines spectacularly fail at.
      - maest 3y ago
        > cyclists don’t use them anyway This claim is so ridiculous is invalidates everything else you might be trying to argue, come on.
        wredue 3y ago
        My dash cam filled with video of cyclists riding in a car lane beside a protected bike lane, and otherwise ignoring signage (stop and yield signs, signs stating road exceptions where bikes must use and share the sidewalk with pedestrians instead of the road) is definitely not ridiculous. Also hilariously “why do cyclists not use the bike lanes” is a top alternative question result when searching bike lanes. Clearly this is not some random anecdote. Cyclists frequently do not use the bike lanes, and I am absolutely not anywhere near the only person to observe this frequently. Never mind that: -Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself. -in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints -some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem.
- drunner 3y ago
  Same with the oil industry and `reduce, reuse, recycle` nonsense. Like I wouldn't need to be concerned with that if your product didn't individually wrap every item I can purchase in a store.
  - talideon 3y ago
    Reduce, reuse, recycle isn't nonsense, but good sense. What is nonsense is how the fossil fuel industry uses it as a shield to avoid taking responsibility for the damage they do to the world.
- akira2501 3y ago
  > Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive. We have roads. They are shared by all users and taxpayers for common purposes. The responsibilities are likewise shared. The available technology changed. We can't expect to force the prior status quo to continue to exist in the face of available technological changes. This article points out that attitudes like your similarly existed at the time and contributed to the apparent delay in creating a reasonable solution.
  - Fricken 3y ago
    Going whole hog with an unsustainable technology is not reasonable, never was.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      Okay.. so what if they skipped gasoline and built electric from the start? That's "sustainable" according to some modern definition. What should we have done then? Meanwhile.. take a look at the way life was 120 years ago. Are you eager to go back to the rural life of farm labor that implied for the majority of Americans?
      - Fricken 3y ago
        Sounds better than going forward 120 years into the future at the rate we're going.
- zelon88 3y ago
  I've noticed that people who don't drive usually don't have frame of reference of what cars are capable of, and usually don't understand all of the simultaneous requirements that must be fulfilled by drivers. So you get pedestrians who don't understand what the stopping distance of a car is, or pedestrians who don't recognize dangerous situations that they create. In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    > In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians. A great example of this is pedestrians in San Francisco. I've never seen more entitled oblivious assholes that pedestrians there. They seem to have no situational awareness and blithely jump out in front of cars. One of my favorite stupid pedestrian tricks is them jumping out from between parked cars crossing without so much as turning their heads to look for cars. Thankfully I don't have to deal with SF pedestrians very often. The city very obviously hates cars but is decidedly dependent on them existing. The pedestrians there act dumber than a deer in the rut.
    - zelon88 3y ago
      Cambridge/Boston is the same. Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed. These are not environmentally friendly alternatives. They are Chinesium E-waste with low quality batteries. They will be driven for one or two years then put in a closet and forgotten about. When they do get used they typically cause more greenhouse gasses from regular cars that have to yield to them, or stop busy intersections so they can cross. As an avid dirt bike rider it is especially frustrating because these are usually the same people (yuppies) who would call the police on me if I took my 17 year old 200cc dirt bike down the same trails.
      - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
        "Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed." Wait, where is the place e-bikes should be in your opinion, then? At least where I live, the laws are quite clear which type of vehicles are allowed where. The laws here generally allow a pedal-assisted ebike to ride whereever a non-electric bicycle may ride. The pedal-assist is important. So yeah, you probably can't ride your motorbike down a pedestrian path ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

tim333 3y ago

The UK has no jaywalking laws (apart from full motorways) and about 1/3 the pedestrian deaths of the US (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/10/exactly-how-far-u-s-street-safety-has-fallen-behind-europe-in-four-bombshell-charts https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/10/exactly-how-far-u-s-s...). There are other ways to do things.

seanr88 3y ago
No other country has anything to teach the USA. The USA is unique and special for a large number of reasons and so foreign methods won't work here. If I recall they even drive on the other side of the road in the UK, that will never catch on here.
- alexfoo 3y ago
  You could phase it in slowly like Ireland did. Cars on a Monday. Lorries and HGVs switch on Wednesday. All remaining traffic on the Friday. Done!
  - talideon 3y ago
    Citation, please?
    - alexfoo 3y ago
      https://www.engineersireland.ie/Engineers-Journal/Civil/could-ireland-emulate-sweden-and-switch-to-driving-on-the-right https://www.engineersireland.ie/Engineers-Journal/Civil/coul... (Note that it was a follow up to patently satirical parent comment, but it does remind me that Sweden made the change on 3rd Sep 1967)
- cfstras 3y ago
  is this satire? I honestly can’t tell.
  - talideon 3y ago

moritzwarhier 3y ago

I immediately thought of this as well (horse sleigh scene in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment comes to mind, I mean, neither of us has experience with horse-first transportation, I assume). I just arrived at a different conclusion. To compare the number of people killed by automobiles and their infrastructure, compared to the numbers for people killed by horses (I can't give precise numbers for either, I'll admit that) - that comparison seems absurd to me. In other words, relative to the population in urban areas, I'd be very surprised if horses causes as many deaths as cars+roads.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
You surely have to compare the rates per horse not per unit population.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  depends, I don't think it's even possible to have as many horses on earth as there are automobiles :)
Tade0 3y ago
Well, the "village idiot" was usually one not because he was born this way and his parents cared for him until adulthood, but because he got kicked by a horse/cow and survived, albeit with brain damage.

turtlesdown11 3y ago

> There were once almost zero regs regarding candles, objects that killed thousands almost daily by fire. "killed thousands almost daily"...source for this?

Tade0 3y ago
A modern equivalent of this is the death toll from kerosene heaters/lamps, which are considerably safer than candles: https://www.hindustantimes.com/kolkata/two-west-bengal-toddlers-charred-to-death-in-fire-started-by-kerosene-lamp/story-ATGBkfTwSyN60nv6IVmY4M.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/kolkata/two-west-bengal-toddl...

inglor_cz 3y ago

One famous person who was killed by a horse cart was the Nobelist Pierre Curie. In 1906 no less, at the twilight of the long horse cart era.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]